Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, from Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787)

Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (usually known as Ottobah Cugoano) was born around 1757 on the coast of what is now Ghana. He was kidnapped into slavery at about the age of thirteen and taken to Grenada. Eventually he was brought to England in 1772 and set free. He was advised to be baptised in order not to be re-enslaved and took the name John Stuart. Cugoano wrote Thoughts and Sentiments while working in London as a servant to the artist Richard Cosway, and it was there that he also became friends with the ex-slave Olaudah Equiano (who would rise to fame with his autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in 1789). After this, we have no record of Cugoano’s subsequent life, or when or how he died. Cuguano’s Thoughts and Sentiments was the first work by an African that explicitly called for the outright abolition of the slave trade and for the freeing of the slaves. In the extracts below, his re-appropriation of the key tropes of cultural difference in the eighteenth century — liberty, complexion, commerce — reveal an attempt to undermine racialised identity and to synthesise Christianity and imperialism.1