Sarah Forbes Bonetta, a West African girl presented to Queen Victoria as a “diplomatic gift” in the mid-19th century, has become the subject of a new biography that explores her complex life within the British royal court. Born Aina in 1843 in Okè-Òdàn, present-day Nigeria, Bonetta’s early life was marked by tragedy when her family was killed during an attack by forces under King Ghezo of Dahomey in 1848. Captured at the age of five, she was brought to the Dahomey court before being taken to England in 1850 by Frederick Forbes, an officer of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron tasked with suppressing the transatlantic slave trade.

Forbes petitioned King Ghezo to allow Bonetta to travel to England, where she was taken under the guardianship of Queen Victoria. Despite the queen’s personal interest in her education and welfare, the arrangement was far from a simple act of kindness. Academic Henry Lovejoy, whose recent book “Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta: A Yorùbá Woman in Queen Victoria’s Court” documents this history, notes that before arriving in England, Bonetta was declared “the property of the crown” under the laws governing liberated Africans. This status effectively made her an indentured servant to the queen until she reached the age of 19.

Bonetta was given the surname of her ship, the Bonetta, and raised with the intention of becoming a Christian missionary to Africa. She later married James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy merchant and philanthropist, though sources suggest that the marriage lacked affection. During her lifetime, Bonetta was widely depicted in art and media, serving as a symbol of British imperial benevolence and the so-called “civilizing mission” in Africa. Lovejoy argues that her image was exploited as imperial propaganda while she remained bound by the constraints of her indenture and the pervasive racial attitudes of the time.

The biography also challenges long-standing myths surrounding Bonetta’s story, including the claims that she was a Yoruba princess or that she was Queen Victoria’s official goddaughter. While the queen did act as godmother to Bonetta’s eldest daughter, Victoria — who herself received a privileged education with royal support — Bonetta’s own relationship with Victoria was more nuanced and marked by limitations tied to colonial power dynamics.

For descendants like Bayo Randle, a British-Nigerian barrister, the legacy of Bonetta is both treasured and complicated. Randle highlights the tension between familial pride and the unsettling realities of Bonetta’s “gifted” status, describing the plaster bust of Bonetta sculpted in 1851 by Royal Mint engraver Benedetto Pistrucci as emblematic of this duality. The bust, preserved in a private collection, captures Bonetta’s likeness but also represents a product of phrenological study framed by racist ideology.

Bonetta’s story is part of a broader history documented by Lovejoy and colleagues, which reveals how tens of thousands of Africans freed from enslavement were subjected to forced indentures to cover the costs of their liberation under British and European colonial policies. Though Bonetta found a unique place within Victorian society, her life reflects the complexities of freedom, agency, and representation during the era of abolition and empire.