Cugoano Against Slavery
By
Martin Hoyles
216pp
paperback
Hansib
2015
Martin
Hoyles is that relatively rare thing, someone who produces solidly researched
books with appropriate academic apparatus but ones that can be read with profit
by a general reader too. References are included in the text rather than foot
or end noted and there is a comprehensive bibliography.
His
latest book is about one of the leading but also one of the least well known
black figures in eighteenth century England. It looks further into work he
focused on with his last volume on the black Chartist leader William Cuffay,
around the history of black Britons, the fight against slavery and for
equality.
Ottobah
Cugoano was born in 1757, sold into slavery when he was 13 in 1770 and gained
his freedom when he came to England in 1772. We know of Cugoano primarly
because he wrote and published an anti-slavery book, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery
and Commerce of the Human Species in 1787. He produced an edited version in
1791 after which nothing further is known of his life.
Hoyles
has an important take on the fight
against slavery and the slave trade. He argues that ‘it is important to remove
Wilberforce from centre stage’. He suggests that two other men, Granville Sharp
and Thomas Clarkson, were more important but the key was the mass movement
which led to a national campaign against slavery.
The
campaign organised a boycott of sugar, a key element of the slave trade, which
Hoyles notes was
supported
by hundreds of thousands of people.
However,
Hoyles emphasises that black resistance to the slave trade, both in places like
Grenada, where Cugoano was set to work after being kidnapped and on slave ships
themselves, where poor conditions often led the deaths of slaves, and indeed
ordinary sailors too, was central to motivating the campaign.
While William Cuffay’s father had come to Britain as a
cook on a British Navy ship, Cugoano found a different route to freedom. In
Grenada he came to ‘work’ for an English bourgeois, Alexander Campbell, as his
personal slave. Campbell took Cugoano to England as his personal servant. A legal victory (the Mansfield ruling) won by
Sharp meant that, in effect, Cugoano was not a slave once on English soil.
Cugoano’s
book is based partly on his own personal experiences in Grenada and partly on
the arguments then current in the anti-slavery movement. Hoyles suggests that
Equiano helped in the editing of the book.
Cugoano
was a Christian. He had been baptised at St James’s Church, Piccadilly by the
Rev. Thomas Skinner. The arguments of
the Bible influenced his thought but along with Equiano he was also an activist
in London dealing with practical issues of the slave trade and the anti-slavery
campaign.
Hoyles
writes of Cuguano’s involvement in an attempt, partially successful, to set up
a settlement for former slaves, Freetown in Sierra Leone. It was far from
unproblematic but there is some evidence that it did work to some extent.
It
was perhaps however the strength of Cuguano’s anti-slavery writing that had the
most impact. As Hoyles notes he was almost alone in calling not just for action
on the slave trade but also for the total abolition of slavery. That of course
is something that still has to be campaigned for now.
The
book concludes that Cuguano has remained very largely hidden from British
history. When Lambeth Council named some buildings after prominent black
figures in 1985 it provoked the Daily
Mail to question who exactly Cuguano might be.
As
Hoyles notes both Cuguano’s writings and the cause he fought for remain very
much current questions in 2015. The book contains many interesting pictures and
maps and is an important volume for anyone seeking to find out the realities of
British history, beyond what ‘great and good’ white men did or often, did not,
do.
Keith Flett
From LSHG Newsletter #54 (January 2015)
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