A new biography of Àìná, the Yoruba woman later known as Sarah Forbes Bonetta, is challenging some of the most persistent stories surrounding her relationship with Queen Victoria and restoring greater complexity to a life shaped by war, displacement, empire and personal resilience.
Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta: A Yorùbá Woman in Queen Victoria’s Court, by historian Henry B. Lovejoy, draws on letters, a travel diary, portraits, newspapers, missionary reports and royal archives to reconstruct her journeys between West Africa and Britain.
The University of Toronto Press book arrives amid renewed interest in Africans whose lives were absorbed into European imperial narratives. Bonetta’s great-great-grandson, London barrister Bayo Randle, has welcomed research that looks beyond the familiar account of a rescued African princess favoured by the British monarch.
Randle told The Guardian that learning from the past mattered more than whether every finding was comfortable for the family. He described his ancestor as “very capable, courageous and dignified through adversity”.
From Àìná to Sarah Forbes Bonetta
Àìná was born in 1843 in Òkè-Òdàn, in present-day south-western Nigeria. According to the biography and contemporary reporting on its publication, her family was killed when forces of King Ghezo of Dahomey attacked the town in 1848. She was captured at about five years old and taken to Ghezo’s court.
Two years later, British naval officer Frederick Forbes travelled to Dahomey on a mission connected with efforts to secure an anti-slavery treaty. The mission did not achieve that treaty, but Forbes asked to take the child to England. She was renamed Sarah Forbes Bonetta, combining his surname with the name of his ship.
She was subsequently presented to Queen Victoria and became a royal protege. The monarch paid for aspects of her education, remained interested in her welfare and later approved her marriage to James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy West African merchant and philanthropist.
That outline has often been told as a simple passage from captivity to royal protection. Lovejoy’s research argues that the reality was more troubling. He says Forbes petitioned for Àìná to become the property of the Crown and that she was effectively indentured to Victoria until the age of 19 under post-abolition arrangements.
Challenging the princess story
The biography challenges three widely repeated claims: that Bonetta was a Yoruba princess, that she herself was Queen Victoria’s goddaughter, and that she spent most of her life in England.
These corrections do not diminish her importance. Instead, they expose how Victorian institutions, newspapers and later popular accounts shaped her image to serve different political and cultural purposes.
The publisher describes the book as an examination of the ways race, gender and empire affected one of the most visible African women of the Victorian era. Lovejoy also considers how Bonetta’s public image was used to support claims about British benevolence at a time when many Africans described as liberated from slavery remained subject to coercive labour and restrictive legal systems.
Her life therefore sits within a difficult historical contradiction. Queen Victoria took a personal interest in her, but that relationship existed inside an imperial system that limited African freedom and frequently spoke about Africans without preserving their own voices.
A life beyond the royal connection
Bonetta was more than the child presented at Windsor Castle. She became a linguist, musician, educator and travel writer. After her marriage, she occupied a prominent position within the elite Saro community and became an important figure in nineteenth-century Lagos.
Her surviving writings and photographs offer unusual evidence of an African woman navigating Britain and West Africa during a period when people like her were commonly recorded through the observations of missionaries, officials and European writers.
The book’s use of her correspondence and travel diary is especially significant. Those materials help move Bonetta from the margins of somebody else’s imperial story and place her choices, feelings and relationships closer to the centre.
She died from tuberculosis in Madeira in 1880, aged 37. Her descendants retained connections with Òkè-Òdàn, while family objects and royal gifts preserved parts of a history that continued to be interpreted through British monarchy, abolition and colonialism.
Why the reassessment matters
For Yoruba and African diaspora readers, the biography raises questions about who has the authority to name, describe and remember people displaced by violence and empire. Àìná’s African identity did not disappear when she was renamed, photographed and presented within Victorian society.
It also demonstrates the importance of returning to archives rather than accepting attractive legends. The princess narrative gave her story glamour, but it could also obscure the conditions under which a child lost her family, was moved across continents and became a symbol for institutions more powerful than she was.
At the same time, reducing her life to victimhood would create another distortion. Her learning, adaptability, family life and public presence show a woman exercising intelligence and dignity within severe constraints.
Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta gives scholars, families and cultural institutions a new basis for discussing Àìná as a Yoruba woman, an early figure in Black British history and an active participant in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
Readers and heritage organisations with documented connections to Àìná, Òkè-Òdàn or the Davies and Randle families are encouraged to share verified archival material with Podium News for future cultural-history coverage.
