Kobina (“Quobna”) Ottobah Cugoano, a leader in the black community in 18th-century London, is the first known African to demand the total abolition of the slave trade.
Cugoano was born in about 1757 in the village that British settlers and slavers of the time called “Agimaque” (Ajumako), today a town in the Central Region of Ghana.
In 1770, at the age of 13, he was kidnapped by African slavers, sold to Europeans for “a gun, a piece of cloth and some lead”, and forced on to a ship that set sail for the West Indies.
Cugoano survived the Middle Passage, which he later described in vivid detail, and ended up in Grenada, where the slave traders sold him to plantation owners. After working in slave gangs for two years, he became a servant to a leading slave-owner, Alexander Campbell, who took him to England.
In 1773, at St James’s Piccadilly in London, and now aged 16, he was baptised and renamed “John Stuart”.
Flurry of letters
Cugoano began to teach himself to read. When Campbell discovered this, he encouraged him, sending him to school.
By 1784 he had managed to win his freedom and was employed by an English “society” couple – Richard and Maria Cosway, both artists – to work as a servant at Schomberg House, their residence on Pall Mall, still one of the most exclusive locations in central London.
In 1786, he campaigned with another formerly enslaved black Briton and a white abolitionist to save a man called Harry Demane from being forced into slavery in the Caribbean. Encouraged by their success in stopping slavers from putting Harry on a boat, Cugoano began a letters campaign, writing to King George III, the Prince of Wales (a friend of the Cosways), the philosopher Edmund Burke, newspaper editors and a host of others about the facts of the slave trade.
Of his capture in Ajumako, he wrote: “I was early snatched away from my native country, with about 18 or 20 more boys and girls, as we were playing in a field … Some of us attempted, in vain, to run away, but pistols and cutlasses were soon introduced, threatening that if we offered to stir, we should all lie dead on the spot.”
While still living with the Cosways, Cugoano wrote Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, under his own name, The book, published in 1787, argued for the eradication of slavery, and that people of all races shared the same feelings and reactions to violence.
It caused a sensation. “It does not alter the nature or quality of a man,” Cugoano wrote, “whether he wears a black or white coat – whether he puts it on or strips it off, he is still the same man.”
He proposed that a colony be established in Sierra Leone for freed black Britons.
There is no trace of Ottobah Cugoano after 1791; it is not known what became of him.
Cugoano is the earliest black person in the British Isles to be recognised with a blue plaque by English Heritage. The charity, which preserves and marks sites of historical interest in Britain, recognised Schomberg House on Pall Mall, where he lived with Richard and Maria Cosway, in 2020.
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