At Her Majesty's Request
From AwardAnnals
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| Author(s) | Walter Dean Myers |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | An African Princess in Victorian England |
| Publisher | Scholastic Press |
| One terrifying night in 1848, a young African princess's village is raided by warriors. The invaders kill her mother and father, the King and Queen, and take her captive. Two years later, a British naval captain rescues her and takes her to England where she is presented to Queen Victoria, and becomes a loved and respected member of the royal court. | |
Illustrated with historical photographs and drawings, this is an extraordinary story of royalty on two continents, colonialism, race, class, and identity.
In 1849, a young African girl came within moments of being sacrificed in the bloody Dahomian ritual called the “watering of the graves.” But Commander Frederick E. Forbes, the young British captain of the HMS Bonetta, intervened, provoking Dahomian King Gezo to offer the girl as a gift to Queen Victoria instead. Forbes named the girl Sarah Forbes Bonetta and took her back to England, where she became Queen Victoria’s protege.
Walter Dean Myers discovered the kernel of Sarah’s story in a bundle of original letters he purchased from a London book dealer. From these letters, along with excerpts from Queen Victoria’s diary, newspapers, and Forbes’s published account of the Dahomans, Myers pieced together Sarah’s life. In his unembellished narrative we learn about Sarah’s capture by the slave-trading Dahomans; her rescue by Forbes; her life in England under the Forbes’ care; her regular visits to the Queen; her stay at a missionary school in Sierra Leone and abrupt return to England; her marriage and early death.
Yet, as horrific and miraculous as the events of Sarah’s life are, Myers can only pose questions about who Sarah really was (“What were her dreams for her own future…? What images came to her as she rode in the pony cart with the royal children? How often did she think of Dahomey? Of King Gezo?”). Sarah’s chatty, unprovocative letters, which hint at the upperclass Englishwoman she became, reveal nothing about her African heritage or about the traumatized girl she must have been (Myers could not even discover her African name). Ironically, this seeming weakness proves the ultimate testimony to Sarah’s life - the very absence of her voice bears undeniable witness to her story.
Reviews
Amazon.com
Once there was a little girl—an orphaned African princess — who narrowly escaped death by human sacrifice in a West African village in 1850. A British sea captain named Frederick E. Forbes saved her life by talking King Gezo of Dahomey into giving the girl to Queen Victoria of England as a gift; “She would be a present from the King of the Blacks to the Queen of the Whites.” As impossible as this tale sounds, it is a true one. Award-winning author Walter Dean Myers—piecing together her story from letters he found in a rare-book and ephemera shop in London—paints a hauntingly detached portrait of the small African princess, whom the heroic captain named Sarah Forbes Bonetta.
We follow her charmed but unlucky life as the Queen’s protégée through a succession of British middle-class households, beginning with the Forbes home. Because of her celebrated association and frequent visits with the Queen, Sarah grows up in an unusual position of privilege, education, and celebrity. On the flip side, she is keenly aware that her decisions are not her own, and as a rescued orphan under the Queen’s protection, her life’s path is dictated by those acting in what they perceive to be her best interests. It is hard not to feel that it was cruel of her protectors to wrench her from the adopted family she adores (more than once in her life), and eventually to encourage her to marry a man, a West African businessman, whom she clearly stated she could never love and who would even take her away from her adopted country. As the epilogue states, “She was both unfortunate in her losses, and fortunate that those losses were not greater…She seemed to find a measure of comfort wherever she was, but was destined to be apart from the world in which she lived…” This story, rich with historic prints, photographs, newspaper clips, excerpts from Queen Victoria’s diary, and Sarah’s letters, is both fascinating and tragic. We have Myers to thank for rescuing this fine woman again—this time from the forgotten shelf of a London bookstore. (Ages 11 and older).—Amazon.com
