The Boy Who Wrote Back

The Boy Who Wrote Back

He was about thirteen. He was playing in a field with other children near the coast, in the country of the Fante, and men came and took them.

He was held at a fort on that coast — Cape Coast, by his own account — and put on a ship, and sold in Grenada, and worked in the cane. He was bought and taken to England around 1772, and there he was baptised, and there he learned to read and write, and there he took the name John Stuart while keeping his own: Quobna Ottobah Cugoano.

And in 1787 he published a book.

Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species did not ask for the trade to be reformed, or phased, or made humane. It demanded the total and immediate abolition of slavery itself, everywhere, and the emancipation of every enslaved person alive — a position almost no white abolitionist in Britain would take for another forty years. He argued that the enslaved had a right to resist by force. He argued that a nation that profited had a debt.

He was writing sixteen years before Britain abolished the trade and forty-six before it abolished slavery in its colonies.

He worked with Olaudah Equiano and the Sons of Africa. He wrote directly to the King. And then, sometime after 1791, the record simply stops, and nobody knows where or when he died.

If you visit Ghana. Cape Coast; Assin Manso; and any library.