Diplomatic Gifts by Paul Brummell

Author:Paul Brummell [Brummell, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hurst
Published: 2022-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

1850

SARAH FORBES BONETTA

A GIFT FROM GHEZO, KING OF DAHOMEY, TO LIEUTENANT

COMMANDER FREDERICK E. FORBES, ROYAL NAVY

Palm Cottage, Gillingham, home from 1855 to 1861 of Sarah Forbes Bonetta.

This is the story of a diplomatic gift accepted to save a life. It is a story that highlights the zeal of mid-Victorian Britain to counter the slave trade and the compassion and solicitous care of the British queen for a Yoruba girl from West Africa. It also highlights mid-Victorian attitudes around cultural superiority and women’s rights that jar today.

It starts with Frederick Forbes, the youthful captain of HMS Bonetta, which in the late 1840s was carrying out anti-slavery duties in West Africa. Forbes recorded in the account of his African adventures the capture of six slavers in the course of just six months in 1848.1 In 1849, he jumped at the chance to accompany John Duncan, the new vice-consul at Ouidah, the main port of the Kingdom of Dahomey, to meet King Ghezo in his capital, Abomey.

In his account, Dahomey and the Dahomans, Forbes describes Ghezo as ‘the dreaded oppressor of neighbouring nations’,2 the leader of a military kingdom whose economy was based on the slave trade. Slaves were secured through an annual cycle of wars each November or December.3 Ghezo had secured power by overthrowing his brother in a coup supported by Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Sousa. Forbes’ mission took place shortly after the death of de Sousa, when the British hoped Ghezo would be more open to pressure to end the slave trade.

Forbes found kitting out the expedition to be challenging. The local currency was cowrie shells. He purchased 50 dollars’ worth, which proved such a large quantity that he needed to hire five female porters to carry them. Another ten porters were required to convey the 50 gallons of rum purchased for the trip.4 Forbes’ first sight of Ghezo’s palace reinforced his views of the king, as its walls were topped with human skulls. The mission nonetheless proceeded cordially, if unproductively in the matter of securing Ghezo’s commitment to end the slave trade. The giving and receiving of gifts was a major feature of the mission, and one that Forbes found burdensome, complaining that it was ‘a terrible nuisance: the whole system is in donations, expecting more, at least an equivalent, and never satisfied’.5 Duncan sadly fell ill during the trip and died shortly afterwards.

The following year, Forbes received an invitation from the king to attend the Annual Customs of Dahomey, a series of celebrations lasting several weeks, involving the provision of gifts to the king and their redistribution to the people, military parades and the offering of thanks to the royal ancestors. The latter component of the customs involved human sacrifice: luckless slaves, who were despatched by decapitation. Forbes accompanied John Beecroft, consul to the Bights of Benin and Biafra, already a well-known figure in the region before his appointment as consul the previous year.6

Forbes’ account of the customs dwells on his attempts to ascertain through the

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