October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

Sara Forbes Bonetta, originally named Omoba Aina, was born in 1843 as an Egbado princess of the Yoruba people in West Africa. She was orphaned during a war with the nearby Kingdom of Dahomey, and at the age of five she became the slave of King Ghezo of Dahomey.

Two years later she was liberated from slavery by Captain Forbes of the British Royal Navy, who had arrived on a diplomatic mission to try to end Dahomey’s participation in the Atlantic slave trade. King Ghezo refused this request, and offered Aina as a gift. Forbes feared that she might end up as a human sacrifice, so he accepted her on behalf of the Queen and returned to Britain.  

Captain Forbes renamed her Sara Forbes Bonetta, after his ship the HMS Bonetta. In 1850 she met Queen Victoria who had her raised as her goddaughter. In 1851 she was sent to school in Sierra Leone. She returned to England in 1855, when she was 12 and was entrusted to the care of a clergyman and his wife in Gillingham.

In 1862, Sara attended the wedding of Queen Victoria’s daughter Princess Alice, and in August of that year she married Yoruba businessman Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies. After their wedding the couple moved back to Africa, where they had three children. Many of Sara’s descendants now live in either England or Sierra Leone, with a separate family branch remaining prominent in Nigeria.

Sara Forbes Bonetta died of tuberculosis in 1880 in Funchal, Madeira, and is buried there.

More about Sara Forbes Bonetta at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Forbes_Bonetta

(With thanks to Bill Prenzlau for suggesting Sara Forbes Bonetta as a subject for this series.)