The Diary of Sarah Forbes Bonetta
1860, Kent, England, and Sarah Forbes Bonetta, African, orphan, protégé of Queen Victoria, and seventeen years old, begins writing a diary. At the opening, Sarah awaits a carriage to take her to tea with the queen. Tea at the palace, it seems, is a regular occurrence, despite Sarah living in a clergyman’s household.
Sarah occupies a strange space. She is an African princess but cannot remember her birth family. They, and their kingdom, were destroyed by a rival king when she was an infant. She’d have been killed herself, had she not been rescued by Captain Forbes, who baptised her Sarah and presented her, as a gift, to his Queen, Victoria. A gift of a person.
Herein lies Sarah’s predicament. Given as a gift. Likened to a precious jewel – but still, an object, not a person, with autonomy of her own. What is the queen to do with a gift of a child? Boarded with families, sent away to school, poor Sarah has nowhere to call home or family. And so begins a teen diary filled with longing, subtle and not so subtle slights, and lengthy ruminating on what she wished she had said.
Because, of course, Sarah may actually say very little. Served with the double whammy – nay, triple – of being female, African, and orphaned, Victorian England expects her to be submissive, and grateful. No matter how painful the insults. While Sarah broods – at great length – on the desire for her own agency, she assumes that those around her have that autonomy. After attracting two suitors, she begins to realise that, in Victorian England, she is not the only one denied her own choices. Author’s notes review the facts of Sarah’s life and the Britain-Africa slave trade.
