Sara Forbes Bonetta
*Sara Forbes Bonetta's birth is celebrated on this date in c. 1843. She was Queen Victoria's Black African goddaughter.
Originally named Aina (or Ina), she was born in a Yoruba village in West Africa Nigeria, after its collapse to the Kingdom of Dahomey. In 1848, Oke-Odan was invaded and captured by the army of Dahomey. Aina's parents died during the attack, and other residents were either killed or sold into the Atlantic slave trade. Aina ended up in the court of King Ghezo of Dahomey as a young child slave. After the British abolition of slavery, Britain curtailed Dahomey's exportation of slaves.
Queen Victoria was impressed by the young princess's "exceptional intelligence" and had her baptized as Sara and raised as her goddaughter in the British middle class. In 1851, guardians sent her to the Annie Walsh Memorial School (AWMS) in Freetown, Sierra Leone. She returned to England in 1855 when she was 12. She was cared for by Rev. Frederick Scheon and his wife, Elizabeth. The Queen later commanded her to marry Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies at St Nicholas' Church in Brighton, East Sussex. In August 1862, preparing for the wedding, she lived at 17 Clifton Hill in the Montpelier area.
Captain Davies was a Yoruba businessman; after their wedding, the couple moved back to Africa, where they had three children. Sara Forbes Bonetta continued to enjoy such a close relationship with Queen Victoria that she and Bishop Samuel Ajayi Crowther were the only Africans the Royal Navy had standing orders to evacuate in the event of an uprising in Lagos.
Sara Forbes Bonetta died on August 15, 1880, on a Portuguese island in the Atlantic Ocean. In her memory, her husband erected an over-eight-foot granite obelisk-shaped monument in Western Lagos. Many of Forbes Bonnetta's other descendants now live in Britain or Sierra Leone; a separate branch, the Randle family of Lagos, remains prominent in Nigeria.
