She is usually introduced as an "African princess" who charmed a queen. The real story is harder: a Yoruba girl captured in war, held as a slave at the court of Dahomey, handed to a Royal Navy captain as a diplomatic "gift", and then raised, educated, married off and moved between continents by people who decided what was good for her. She lived only about 37 years.
Every few years a newspaper rediscovers Sarah Forbes Bonetta and tells her story as a Victorian fairy tale: the orphaned princess rescued from death, adopted by a kind queen, married in a grand wedding by the sea. Parts of that are true. But it leaves out who did the rescuing and why, what being a "gift" meant, and how little say Sarah had over her own life.
Her story runs through four places on this site's map: the Yoruba lands of today's Nigeria and Benin, Freetown in Sierra Leone, Victorian England from Windsor to Brighton, and colonial Lagos. Told honestly, it is one of the clearest windows we have onto how Britain looked at Africa in the generation after it abolished slavery.
The girl later called Sarah was born around 1843, most accounts say at Oke-Odan in the Egbado area of Yorubaland. Her family is described as of chiefly or royal rank, which is where the later label "princess" comes from, although nineteenth-century British writers were quick to call any well-born African child a princess. What is certain is that she was born into a region torn apart by war. After the collapse of the Oyo empire, the kingdom of Dahomey (in today's Benin) raided its Yoruba neighbours for captives, both for sale to the Atlantic slave trade and for its own court.
Around 1848 a Dahomean raid destroyed her town. Her parents were killed, and the child was carried off to Abomey, the Dahomean capital.
Captain Frederick Forbes was a Royal Navy officer of the West Africa Squadron, which patrolled the coast for slave ships. He visited King Ghezo of Dahomey in 1849 and again in 1850 to persuade him to give up the slave trade. He failed: the trade was too important to Dahomey's wealth. But at the end of the 1850 visit the king offered him a captive girl, by then about two years in Abomey.
Forbes later wrote that she had been destined for death in the annual royal ceremonies. That claim has been repeated ever since, and it may be true, but it suited a British officer's story of rescue. What we know for certain is that Forbes accepted her as a present for Queen Victoria, in his words a present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites. He named her after himself and his ship: Sarah Forbes Bonetta. She sailed to England on HMS Bonetta.
Forbes presented the child at Windsor Castle on 9 November 1850, to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Queen wrote about her in her journal that day, describing a sharp, intelligent seven-year-old who already spoke English. The Queen called her Sally. She agreed to pay for her upkeep and education, and Sarah became one of several children of colour whom Victoria sponsored in her long reign.
She stayed at first with the Forbes family. When Captain Forbes died in 1851, the Church Missionary Society took over her care, with the Queen's money behind it. She was clever and musical, and Victoria saw her many times over the years: at Windsor, at St James's Palace and at Osborne, the royal family's house on the Isle of Wight. She was invited to royal weddings, including that of Princess Alice in 1862.
Victoria was not her godmother. She was her guardian and patron. The famous "goddaughter" was Sarah's own daughter, Victoria, born in 1863, for whom the Queen stood as godmother.
In 1851, after a persistent cough was blamed on the English climate, Sarah was sent to Freetown in Sierra Leone. There she attended the CMS Female Institution, a mission school for girls founded to train the daughters of the colony's Christian elite. By most accounts she was unhappy, and in 1855, aged about twelve, she was brought back to England.
She was placed with the Reverend James Frederick Schön and his wife Elizabeth, a missionary family who lived at Palm Cottage in Gillingham, Kent. In 2016 the house received a plaque in her memory through the BBC series Black and British: A Forgotten History. Sarah later spent time in Brighton, where Victorian society both admired and gawped at her.
Her husband was chosen for her. James Pinson Labulo Davies was born on 14 August 1828 in Bathurst, Sierra Leone, to Yoruba parents who had been freed from a slave ship by the Royal Navy. He had served as a naval officer and had become a wealthy merchant and shipowner in Lagos. He was a widower and some fifteen years her senior. Sarah reportedly turned him down at first. Accounts differ on how much pressure was applied, but her guardians made clear that refusing would cost her the support she depended on, and she accepted.
The wedding took place at St Nicholas Church on Dyke Road in Brighton, the town's medieval parish church and its oldest surviving building, on 14 August 1862, Davies's 34th birthday. It was a sensation. The wedding party travelled from West Hill Lodge in ten carriages, with sixteen bridesmaids. The Brighton Gazette described the guests as white ladies with African gentlemen and African ladies with white gentlemen, and the Illustrated London News reported on the event. The Bishop of Sierra Leone conducted the service. Afterwards the couple lived for a short time at 17 Clifton Hill, in the Montpelier area of Brighton.
That September, the society photographer Camille Silvy took a series of portraits of the couple in London. They are now in the National Portrait Gallery and are the images of Sarah you see most often.
The Davies family settled in Lagos, which Britain had annexed as a colony in 1861. Sarah taught at mission schools, and the couple were at the heart of the city's Christian Saro (Sierra Leonean returnee) elite. Their first daughter was born in 1863 and named Victoria with the Queen's permission. The Queen became her godmother and later gave her an annuity. More children followed, including Arthur (1871) and Stella (1873).
Her husband's fortunes went up and down. He went bankrupt in the 1870s and recovered, and around 1879–80 he obtained cocoa seedlings and pods, reportedly from Fernando Po, and planted them on his farm at Ijon, north-west of Lagos. He is widely credited as one of the pioneers of cocoa farming in Nigeria, the crop that would later make the region rich. On that farm he raised a granite obelisk more than eight feet high in Sarah's memory.
For the Ghanaian side of the cocoa story, see Ghana-Net's page on Tetteh Quarshie, the blacksmith who brought cocoa to Ghana.
The cough that had been blamed on the English climate thirty years earlier was probably tuberculosis. Sarah went to Madeira, then a favourite place for Europeans with lung disease, in the hope that the climate would help. She died in Funchal on 15 August 1880, aged about 37, and was buried there. Her daughter Victoria, then a teenager at school in England, heard the news while travelling to Osborne and turned to the Queen for comfort.
Her husband remarried in 1889 and died in Lagos in 1906. He is buried in Ajele Cemetery.
For most of the twentieth century Sarah survived in Britain as a curiosity, a romantic footnote to Victoria's reign. In Nigeria she is remembered differently: as a member of one of the founding families of modern Lagos. Her daughter Victoria married the Lagos physician Dr John Randle. Among Sarah's descendants is Dr Ameyo Adadevoh, the Lagos doctor who in 2014 identified Nigeria's first Ebola patient and held him in hospital against official pressure. She died of the disease, and by containing it she is credited with saving her country from a far worse outbreak.
In October 2020 English Heritage unveiled a new portrait of Sarah by the British-Zambian artist Hannah Uzor at Osborne, Victoria's house on the Isle of Wight. It is based on the 1862 Silvy photograph of Sarah in her wedding dress. It was the first of a series of commissioned portraits of overlooked Black figures linked to English Heritage sites.
The honest version of her story keeps both truths in view: she was a highly educated, accomplished Victorian woman who moved in the highest circles, and she was a child taken in war and given away. Neither cancels the other out.
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Another West African taken as a child, who answered back in print.
What else Britain brought home from West Africa, and why it is still there.
How the city where Sarah went to school began.
The West African families who came after her.
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