Sara Forbes Bonetta, otherwise known as Sally Forbes Bonetta,, was ward and goddaughter of Queen Victoria. She was believed to have been a titled member of the Egbado clan of the Yoruba people in West Africa, who was orphaned during a war with the nearby Kingdom of Dahomey as a child, and was later enslaved by King Ghezo of Dahomey. She was given as a "gift" to Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the British Royal Navy and became a goddaughter of Queen Victoria. She married Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy Lagos philanthropist.
Sara Forbes Bonetta photographed by Camille Silvy in 1862
Lithograph of Forbes Bonetta, after a drawing by Frederick E. Forbes, from his 1851 book Dahomey and the Dahomans; being the journals of two missions to the king of Dahomey, and residence at his capital, in the year 1849 and 1850
A portrait of James Pinson Labulo Davies and Sara Forbes Bonetta, photographed in London in 1862 by Camille Silvy
Sara Forbes Bonetta by Camille Silvy
The Kingdom of Dahomey was a West African kingdom located within present-day Benin that existed from approximately 1600 until 1904. It developed on the Abomey Plateau amongst the Fon people in the early 17th century and became a regional power in the 18th century by expanding south to conquer key cities like Whydah belonging to the Kingdom of Whydah on the Atlantic coast which granted it unhindered access to the tricontinental Atlantic Slave Trade.
"Victims for sacrifice" – from The history of Dahomy, an inland Kingdom of Africa, 1793
King Ghezo displayed with a royal umbrella
The reception of the Ah-Haussoo-Noh-Beh in Abomey drawn by Frederick E. Forbes in 1851
In 1894, the last King of Dahomey, Béhanzin, surrendered his person to Alfred-Amédée Dodds