Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta: A Yorubá Woman in Queen Victoria's Court - Hardcover

by Henry B. Lovejoy (Author)

Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta tells the extraordinary life story of a girl born Àìná in Òkè-Òdàn, captured during a Dahomey raid, and presented to a British naval officer in 1850. Renamed Sarah Forbes Bonetta, she apprenticed with Queen Victoria, educated by missionaries, and later married into Lagos's elite Saro community.

Drawing on an unusually rich body of evidence, including letters, a travel diary, portraits, newspapers, missionary reports, and royal archives, this book reconstructs a transatlantic life across West Africa and Britain. It reveals how her image as an "African Princess" was fashioned by the press and embedded in imperial mythologies, even as her own writings show her balancing duty, family, and faith. Thematically organized, the book explores her shifting identities through the lenses of race, gender, and empire. It situates her within broader histories of slavery, abolition, missionary education, and colonialism, while also confronting archival silences that obscured her voice.

Ultimately, Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta offers both a vivid study and a critical intervention in Atlantic history. It restores this Yorùbá woman as an active historical subject who navigated profound cultural dislocation and constraint, while leaving behind an archive that made her one of the most visible African women of the Victorian world.

Author Biography

Henry B. Lovejoy is director of the Digital Slavery Research Lab and associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Colorado Boulder.