Ottobah Cugoano was a pioneer of the Black radical tradition, becoming a prominent leader in the British abolitionist movement in 1787 with the publication of his book Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species. Born a Fante in West Africa, Cugoano was around thirty years old when he became the first English‑speaking African historian of the Maafa (Atlantic slavery).
Unlike other African writers before him, Cugoano, it seems, found it “impossible to emphasize the personal at the expense of the political.” He did not write merely to tell the story of his “bondage and freedom” or to “fashion a public persona.” Instead, he mastered the English language to articulate an alternative stream of thought in confronting racist discourses about Africans and the human trafficking of Africa’s people.
From Fante Child to Enslaved Youth
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was born around 1757 on the coast of present‑day Ghana, in the Fante village of Agimaque or Ajumako. He wrote that he was kidnapped and sold into the Maafa in 1770 for “a gun, a piece of cloth and some lead.” Cugoano was transported to Grenada and enslaved there for nine months before he was “delivered” by Alexander Campbell, a Grenadian plantation enslaver. Campbell took Cugoano to “various other parts of the West Indies” before bringing him to Britain in late 1772.
Cugoano arrived just after the Somerset case, in which William Murray made his landmark ruling that James Somerset could not be removed from Britain by his enslaver. This effectively declared that it was illegal for a British enslaver to forcibly remove a person in bondage from the country, and therefore, Cugoano could not be forced back to the West Indies. To ensure that he would never be sold into the Maafa again, he was baptised on 20 August 1773 as John Stuart at St James Church, Piccadilly. Baptism was one of the freedom pathways used by Africans in Britain to establish that they were not heathens and therefore could not be legally enslaved.
Freedom, Literacy and the London World
After securing this fragile form of freedom, Cugoano set his mind to learning to read and write. When Campbell perceived that he could write, he sent him “to a proper school for that purpose to learn.” By 1784, Cugoano was free and working as a domestic servant to the painters Richard and Maria Cosway, who were well connected to leading figures of British and American society. Through the Cosways, Cugoano is believed to have come to the attention of the poet William Blake, who may have referenced him in his work.
In this London world of art, politics, and empire, Cugoano honed both his literacy and his political consciousness. His journey from Fante child to enslaved youth, to literate Black Londoner, created the conditions for one of the most radical African voices of the eighteenth century to emerge.
Mapping Black Leadership in the Maafa
According to Vincent Bakpetu Thompson, author of Africans of the Diaspora: The Evolution of African Consciousness & Leadership in the Americas, there are three types of leadership developed by Africans during the Maafa: “the physical force leader,” “the moral suasionist,” and “the activist.” The physical force leader was the man or woman who challenged bondage with armed uprisings. The moral suasionist assumed that the rulers of society could be persuaded by reason and argument to modify, change, or abandon harmful policies; such leaders were concerned with the debasement of social values and were motivated by religious principles and their perception of right and wrong. The activist was a leader who established organisations to quicken the pace of change.
Cugoano’s radical examination of systems of enslavement is the reason Thompson argues that he exemplified the overlap among these three forms of leadership. He can be read simultaneously as moral suasionist, activist, and theorist of physical resistance.
Moral Suasionist and Activist in the Abolition Struggle
Cugoano is first identifiable as a moral suasionist who wrote “one of the most thorough criticisms of the Maafa and empire in the eighteenth century,” while appealing to the Christian beliefs of his readers. His writing complemented antislavery protests by British abolitionists through his role as “the innocent but angry eye of the participant observer.” His polemic “was the first piece of [African] writing published in Britain which can be considered as both unequivocally political and unequivocally abolitionist.”
Yet Cugoano began his leadership in abolitionism as an activist. In July 1786, he and his friend William Green went to Granville Sharp to appeal for Harry Demane. Sharp, who had defended James Somerset in 1772, was a leading abolitionist. Cugoano and Green informed him that Demane had been tricked into boarding a slaver’s ship, where he was held against his will. Sharp obtained a writ of habeas corpus to remove Demane from the ship before it sailed.
A year before this joint political action, Cugoano and his friend Olaudah Equiano had co‑founded the Sons of Africa. The Sons of Africa was the first African political organisation in Britain, focusing on abolition, formed even before the British anti‑Maafa London Committee led by Granville Sharp. The organisation worked closely with the London Committee in raising public awareness about Africa and the horrors of bondage and human trafficking. Its members attended meetings in Parliament, took part in public debates on slavery, and monitored the progress of the Abolition Bill. The Sons of Africa appealed to all sections of British society and also wrote to Queen Charlotte Sophia, seeking her compassion “for millions of African countrymen who groan under the lash of tyranny in the West Indies.”
Cugoano’s earliest known writing is a letter he sent to the Prince of Wales in 1786, urging him to “consider the Case of the poor Africans who are most barbarously captured and unlawfully carried away from their own Country and cruelly enslaved by many under the British Government…” This first act of moral suasion served as an introduction to his book, published the following year in July 1787. An abridged version appeared in 1791, addressed explicitly to his “Countrymen and brother Sufferers.”
Thoughts and Sentiments: A Literary Uprising
In The Site of Memory, Toni Morrison writes that narratives about bondage were composed “to say principally two things: One: ‘This is my historical life – my singular, special example that is personal, but also represents the race.’ Two: ‘I write this text to persuade other people – you, the reader, who is probably not [African] – that we are human beings worthy of God’s grace and the immediate abandonment of [the Maafa].’” Although Thoughts and Sentiments shares some aspects of Cugoano’s life, it was not written as a biography, and he had to be persuaded “by some friends to add” biographical information.
Anthony Bogues, author of Black Heretics and Black Prophets, observes that Thoughts and Sentiments differed from other writings of the time that styled themselves “narratives,” “memoirs,” “the life of,” or “confession of.” Cugoano’s book extends beyond the narratives of John Marrant and James Gronniosaw, whose life stories had been written for them, to include his conceptions of evil and his views on the relationship between natural liberty and natural rights. Both Gronniosaw’s and Marrant’s narratives had been published before Thoughts and Sentiments, yet they said very little about the injustices of bondage and focused primarily on spiritual deliverance, whereas Cugoano used his narrative “as a pretext for an uncompromising critique of [the Maafa].”
Morrison’s second point is emphasised in Thoughts and Sentiments. While the book directly critiques the Maafa and colonial conquest, and refutes the justifications for captivity offered by its supporters, it also seeks to evoke sympathy and respect. Morrison argues that narratives written by Africans were often dismissed as “biased,” “inflammatory,” and “improbable.” Consequently, African authors during the Maafa felt compelled to avoid overt anger or accusatory language. In this context, Cugoano can be seen as a literary revolutionary: Thoughts and Sentiments is indeed inflammatory and does not hesitate to confront the reader, declaring that the blood of Africans “crieth for vengeance on their persecutors and murderers.” Therefore, one can argue that the book represents a literary uprising or revolt.
Revolutionary Language Against the Maafa
Within Thoughts and Sentiments, Cugoano deploys a language that rejects polite restraint and makes the violence of the Maafa visible. His prose moves beyond the conventions of moral suasion that sought to appease white readers’ sensibilities. Instead, he insists on naming atrocity and calling down judgement.
The declaration that African blood “crieth for vengeance on their persecutors and murderers” is emblematic of this stance. Here Cugoano is not simply asking for compassion; he is invoking divine justice and placing enslavers under moral indictment. This rhetorical strategy pushes his work into the realm of the radical, upsetting the expectation that African writers must remain measured and deferential in their appeals.
Physical Force, Natural Rights and the Duty to Resist
Within its pages, Cugoano’s physical‑force leadership is clearly articulated. He directly addressed the immense physical and psychological violence and “wickedness” that Africans faced, both in captivity and in pursuit of freedom. He demonstrated that enslavement, imperialism, and colonialism were systems of domination that invoked the dehumanisation and animalisation of Africans. Of this dehumanisation, he wrote: “Our lives are accounted of no value, we are hunted after as the prey in the desert and doomed to destruction as the beasts that perish.” Even as a free African, he was not spared from being viewed as non‑human or subhuman, especially as the humanity of African people was questioned in eighteenth‑century religious debates in Europe. Africans were often classified as property, real estate, or chattel.
For Cugoano, bondage was rooted in stealing, kidnapping, and selling human beings, acts that violated the common rights of nature and contradicted notions of justice, reason, and humanity. He thus advocated resistance against enslavement. According to Peter Fryer, author of Staying Power, Cugoano was the first writer in English to do so. He asserted that all Africans in bondage had not only a moral right but a moral duty to resist: “If any man should buy another man…and compel him to his service and slavery without any agreement of that man to serve him, the enslaver is a robber, and a defrauder of that man every day. Wherefore it is as much the duty of a man who is robbed in that manner to get out of the hands of his enslaver, as it is for any honest community of men to get out of the hands of rogues and villains.”
Reception, Public Speaking and the Shadow of History
Thoughts and Sentiments was successful, although there seems to have been no official review of the book. It was reprinted three times in 1787 and translated into French in 1788. It was sold by various London booksellers and could also be purchased from the Cosways’ Pall Mall home, where Cugoano worked. He sent a copy of the book to the Prince of Wales, who was hostile to abolition, perhaps because Cugoano believed that “kings and rulers” had the power to prevent trafficking and end enslavement.
At the end of the 1791 edition, Cugoano announced his intention to “open a school, for all such of his Complexion as are desirous of being acquainted with the Knowledge of the Christian Religion and the Laws of Civilization.” He also wrote a letter to Granville Sharp in 1791, mentioning that he had travelled to upwards of fifty places and had experienced racial prejudice. This suggests that he had “toured the country” and had been “speaking out strongly against [the Maafa] and focusing attention on black people throughout the world.” This is the last known writing of Cugoano.
Cugoano also requested that British ships of war be sent to the West African coast to conduct anti‑slavery patrols. Yet history did not give him the accolade he deserved when, from 1808, the Royal Navy formed the West Africa Squadron to police the African coast. His radicalism may be one reason he remains in the shadow of history and is not celebrated in the dominant story of British abolitionism.
At the Beginning of the Black Radical Tradition
Ottobah Cugoano stands at the beginning of the Black radical tradition. Although there were other voices before his, he was the first to write a book documenting radical thought on the Maafa, colonialism, and imperialism. Influenced by the political ideas and anti‑Maafa writings of other abolitionists, “he developed his own radical perspectives on the issues confronting Africans in Britain, the West Indies, and Africa.” He challenged arguments about African inferiority, examined the damaging effects of the Maafa and colonialism, and corrected distortions of Africa’s history. His commitment to examine “all forms of what he considers evil” places his thought at the forefront of abolitionist writing of the 1780s.
He was unwavering in his insistence that the British should immediately end the Maafa. He proposed that they set aside days of mourning and fasting for being responsible for two‑thirds of the forced migration of Africa’s people at the time of his writing. Between 1662 and 1807 the British captured an estimated 3,415,500 Africans, who were taken from their homeland to the Americas primarily to develop and sustain a plantation system; only 2,964,800 captives survived the journey.
Meserette’s Note
Claiming “Radical” and Meeting Cugoano
I was only thirteen when I was given a new name: “Radical.” I had been engaged in a ferocious discussion with my friends and would not be swayed when an older youth decided to bestow the title on me. I immediately went to look up the meaning of the word in my dictionary, because it was the first time I had heard it. However, I still could not grasp its meaning.
Later, I learned what radicalism really was through the lives of Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X – and then I met Ottobah Cugoano. I first learned about him in Staying Power by Peter Fryer. For me, Cugoano was the first radical of the Atlantic world: a literary revolutionary and a powerful symbol of courage against oppression. He became the subject of my 6,000‑word essay for the MRes History of Africa and the African Diaspora, created and taught by Professor Hakim Adi, and I have drawn on that work in writing Cugoano’s story for Kentake Page.
Naming the Catastrophe: Maafa and Maangamizi
The Maafa is how I prefer to name the 400 years of enslavement of Africa’s people, rather than using the terms Atlantic slavery, slavery, or Black holocaust. Maafa, coined by Marimba Ani, is a Ki‑Swahili word that means “disaster,” “terrible occurrence,” or “great tragedy.” It refers to the trafficking and enslavement of Africa’s people and the sustained attempt to dehumanise us. The term Maangamizi, coined by Maulana Karenga, is also used. I have also found in my readings that our ancestors refer to this dark chapter of our history as the “Time of Sorrow.”
For ease of reading, I have not given exact references in this article. Whenever another writer is quoted, I use single quotation marks. Whenever I quote Cugoano, I use double quotation marks.
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Acknowledgement: Image created with AI assistance (ChatGPT / OpenAI), under the author’s direction, as a visual tribute to Ottobah Cugoano and the Black radical abolitionist tradition, based on the only known historical portrait of Cugoano.”
