A permanent artwork to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the baptism of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, one of Britain’s most important abolitionists, has been unveiled at a church in central London.
The paintings by the Trinidad-based artist Che Lovelace, displayed at St James’s church, Piccadilly, are the first permanent art commission to commemorate Cugoano, a significant but largely forgotten figure in the history of Black Britain.
Cugoano was born near the coast of present-day Ghana, where he was kidnapped in 1770 by slave traders at the age of 13.
He later wrote of the incident: “I was early snatched away from my native country, with about 18 or 20 more boys and girls, as we were playing in a field. Some of us attempted, in vain, to run away, but pistols and cutlasses were soon introduced, threatening, that if we offered to stir, we should all lie dead on the spot.”
He was forced on to a ship headed for the West Indies, where he was sold to plantation owners in Grenada. After two years, he became a servant to a prominent enslaver and was taken to England, where he was baptised as “John Stuart – a Black, aged 16 years”.
At some point he gained his freedom and by the mid-1780s he was employed as a servant to the fashionable painters Richard and Maria Cosway, working at their grand residence of Schomberg House, where a blue plaque celebrating Cugoano was placed in 2020.
It was while living at Schomberg House that Cugoano wrote one of the first Black-authored anti-slavery books to be published in Britain, in 1787. The book, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great Britain, is regarded as the most radical in its arguments.
Cugoano’s writing called for the abolition of slavery and immediate emancipation of all enslaved people. It argued that an enslaved person’s duty was to escape from slavery, and that force should be used to prevent further enslavement.
He advanced the view that “the difference of colour and complexion, which it hath pleased God to appoint among men, are no more unbecoming than the different shades of the rainbow are unseemly to the whole”.
Cugoano did not live long enough to see slavery abolished by the UK parliament. With his exact dates of birth and death unknown, his baptism on 20 August 1773 at St James’s is the only place and date that is clearly and verifiably part of his story.
The Rev Lucy Winkett, St James’s rector and chaplain to the Royal Academy, said it was a duty and honour to mark the anniversary. “More importantly, in learning from the complicities of the past, to work for the change that Cugoano could see so clearly, which is still needed today,” she said.
Lovelace’s work is infused with rich colours and bold shapes and straddles the boundary between magical realism, abstraction and the beauty of the natural world.
He said: “Having the opportunity to be part of the legacy of Ottobah Cugoano is truly significant and meaningful. To see St James’s church, Piccadilly, honour his name and what he stood for is also to bear witness to an evolving story; one where our societies acknowledge and account for not only the traumatic episodes of our shared histories but also find spaces and moments where the human potential for renewal, growth and transcendence is given importance and is truly celebrated.”
