Kidnapped from Ajumako on the Gold Coast, enslaved in Grenada, he wrote the boldest attack on slavery of his age from a house on Pall Mall.
In 1787 a book appeared in London with a title as long as its argument was sharp: Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Its author had been born a free boy in a Fante town on the Gold Coast, kidnapped, sold for a gun, a piece of cloth and some lead, and worked in a slave gang in the Caribbean. Now he lived in a grand house on Pall Mall and was telling the British, in their own language, that the whole system was a crime and must end at once.
His name was Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. Few people in Britain have heard of him, and fewer in Ghana. Yet he was the first African to demand in print the complete abolition of the slave trade and the freedom of every enslaved person, years before most British abolitionists dared to ask for either.
Cugoano wrote that he was born at Agimaque, a few days' journey from the coast, in the Fante country. Today Ajumako is a town in Ghana's Central Region, inland from Cape Coast and Mankessim. His family, he said, were friends of the local chief, and as a boy he was sent to stay with relatives in another town. It was a free childhood in a society that was itself caught up in the Atlantic trade: Fante towns and traders sat between the inland states and the European forts on the coast, and they dealt in gold, goods and people.
That is why his story matters so much on the Ghanaian side as well. He did not hide that the children were seized by Africans. He named the trade honestly, and he still laid the greatest guilt on the Europeans who created the demand, financed the ships and wrote the laws.
In 1770, by his own account, he was playing in a field with other children when they were seized. When some of them tried to run, they were threatened with pistols and cutlasses. He was marched to the coast and sold to Europeans, he wrote, for "a gun, a piece of cloth, and some lead".
He was held at the coast and shipped across the Atlantic from Cape Coast, the headquarters of British power on the Gold Coast. On board, he wrote, the captives planned to set fire to the ship and die together rather than be carried away, but they were betrayed. In Grenada and the other islands he worked in a plantation gang for nearly two years and saw people whipped and mutilated for the smallest offence. At the end of 1772 his owner, Alexander Campbell, took him to England.
How Cape Coast Castle became the centre of Britain's slave trade.
Cugoano arrived just after the Somerset judgment of 1772, which most Black Londoners understood to mean they could not be forced back to the colonies. He was advised, he said, to get himself baptised so that he "might not be carried away and sold again". On 20 August 1773 he was baptised at St James's Church, Piccadilly, as John Stuart, at the same font where the poet William Blake had been baptised. Later he wrote that he had simply added his African name to the English one.
By 1784 he was working as a servant for Richard and Maria Cosway, two of the most fashionable painters in London, in Schomberg House on Pall Mall. Their house was full of artists, musicians and politicians, and Thomas Gainsborough lived next door. An etching by Richard Cosway from 1784 shows the couple in their garden with Cugoano offering Maria fruit. It is the only image of him we know. Through the Cosways he met people of influence, and they backed his work: Schomberg House was printed in his book as one of the places it could be bought.
Earlier African writers in English had mostly told stories of their own lives and their faith. Cugoano did something different. His book is an argument. Drawing on the Bible, history and natural law, he attacked every excuse the slave owners made, and he insisted that Africans were the equals of Europeans in every way. He demanded three things: that the slave trade be abolished at once, that every enslaved person be freed, and that Britain send ships to the West African coast to stop other nations' slave ships.
No major British abolitionist went that far in 1787. Even the newly founded abolition society carefully asked only for an end to the trade, not to slavery itself. The book was reprinted three times in its first year and published in French in 1788. In 1791 a shorter edition appeared, whose subscribers included the painters Joshua Reynolds, Richard Cosway and James Northcote and the sculptor Joseph Nollekens.
Cugoano did not only write. In 1786 he heard that Harry Demane, a Black servant in London, had been seized and put on board a ship to be sold in the Caribbean. With another Black Londoner, William Green, he went to Granville Sharp, who obtained a legal order, and Demane was taken off the ship before it sailed.
With Olaudah Equiano and other educated Africans in London he formed the Sons of Africa, often signing his letters as John Stuart. They wrote to newspapers and to MPs, and they spoke out for London's Black poor. Cugoano was sharply critical of the government scheme of 1787 to ship the Black poor to Sierra Leone, which he feared would deliver them back into danger. In 1791 he wrote to Granville Sharp that he was thinking of going to the new Sierra Leone colony himself. After that, the records fall silent.
For two centuries Cugoano was almost forgotten. That is slowly changing. In November 2020 English Heritage unveiled a blue plaque on Schomberg House, 80–82 Pall Mall, which reads that he lived and worked there from 1785 to 1791; it makes him the earliest Black person with an official blue plaque. On 20 August 2023, exactly 250 years after his baptism, St James's Church, Piccadilly, dedicated a plaque of its own.
In Ghana he is still barely known outside academic circles. A man from Ajumako who argued Britain out of its excuses deserves a place beside the other Gold Coast figures who shaped the eighteenth-century world, from Philip Quaque, the first African Anglican priest, to Anton Wilhelm Amo, the first West African professor in Europe.
Both of Cugoano's London sites are a few minutes apart, between Piccadilly Circus and Green Park stations. Start at St James's Church, Piccadilly, Christopher Wren's church, where he was baptised and where the 2023 plaque is. Then walk down to Schomberg House, 80–82 Pall Mall, to see his blue plaque; you will find it on the left-hand side wall, so that it does not spoil the symmetry of the listed front. Gainsborough's plaque is on the same building. From there, Riding House Street, where Equiano lived, is a short bus or Tube ride north.
Entrance fees for the sights on a tour are always included in the price. Tips for your guide are not included, but they are welcome.
Most visitors fly into Accra International Airport. Cape Coast, where Cugoano was shipped from, is about three to four hours west of Accra by road; Ajumako lies inland from the coast road between Accra and Cape Coast. A day at Cape Coast Castle and nearby Elmina Castle shows you the dungeons where children like him were held before the crossing.
Equiano, the Sons of Africa, the rebels and the sugar boycott.
The Sierra Leone scheme Cugoano warned against.
The city where he lived, and the money behind the trade.
From trading forts to the colony that became Ghana.
Another Gold Coast man who argued with Britain from inside London.
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