Remembering Ottobah Cugoano

Today, 20^th August, is the anniversary of the baptism of Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. This young man worked at the time of his baptism for the Cosway family in Pall Mall in our parish. That year, 1773, was a Friday and it is quite possible that the 15 year old came to St James’s up from Pall Mall through the South Door that had not yet been blocked up.  Quobna Ottobah Cugoano had suffered terrible trauma in his young life, trafficked and enslaved, kidnapped while he was playing with friends in the fields close to his home in modern day Ghana.  His was, by common consent, the most radical voice of the ‘Sons of Africa’, a group of formerly enslaved Londoners, who campaigned with MPs for the abolition of the transatlantic chattel slave trade here in Westminster, an abolition that Cugoano was not to live to see.

You can see here how St James’s marked the 250^th anniversary of his baptism in 2023 with commissions, prayer services and events.  And you can read here an essay published for the anniversary co-authored by clergy and congregation.  We were privileged to work with the eminent curator Ekow Eshun on the programme, and the paintings of Che Lovelace in our narthex are a permanent testimony to the witness of Cugoano, the first formerly enslaved African to call for the total abolition of slavery everywhere for ever.

It is shocking to think that this simple call was, then and now, called ‘radical’. One distinctive aspect of Cugoano’s writings, which I urge you to buy and read if you haven’t yet done so; “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, by Ottobah Cugoano” was that it was based fundamentally in his Christian faith.

His radical call for equality is needed today just as it was then. And, writing as a white church leader, serving this white majority church of St James’s, I want to submit myself to this call in penitence, with lament and with renewed determination to change.   It’s not just that there are currently an estimated 50 million people enslaved around the world today or that around 25% of them, like Cugoano, are children. It is not a simple ‘read across’ that slavery is wrong but somehow still exists. To inhabit this baptism anniversary is to ask God for the will, speaking and reflecting as a white person in the world,  to confront the pernicious and persistent lie that lighter skin is somehow superior to darker skin. To confront this wicked deception that underpins behaviours and systemic assumptions that I as a white person benefit from today. And acknowledge that, even inadvertently or because of my ignorance, I maintain and strengthen this inequality by my inattention, discomfort or refusal to see that I need to change.

I have had a number of conversations in the past months both within and outside our church, which have left me ashamed and convicted, because of the continuing inequality both here and elsewhere based on the colour of a person’s skin.  But shame is not a place to stay; it is to allow this to be a motivation for action together.

St James’s applied for and is grateful to have received notification of a grant from the Racial Justice Unit of the Church of England to be allocated to a number of actions in the name of our former congregation member Cugoano,  one of which will be a congregation-wide invitation open to everyone – for intersectional racial justice training.  Great thanks to Ayla for spearheading this application with our Development Team.  If I may, on this anniversary, in the light of this training that will come later in the year,  I want to address especially the white members of our diverse congregation. When the programme is put in place, please join me in facing the complicity that is ours to own, because as white Christians we continue to benefit from the systems that Cugoano fought so hard to abolish. White Christians are asked to make a commitment to pray to God for the will to want to change our behaviour,  language and assumptions, and play an active part in building just relationships and a just society. It is metanoia (change of heart and mind) that is needed. And, listening to Cugoano is like encountering one of Jesus’s parables: if you or I are reading this, thinking ‘yes but this doesn’t apply to me’ then we are simply not listening.  We remain part of the problem, not yet committing to be part of the solution.

Cugoano wrote strongly about the goodness of God, and the potential for change for every human being, whatever their background or experience. This is extraordinary, bearing in mind his lived experience. But it is how he looked at the world, rooted in the faith that he found and declared at the font here at St James’s.  On this anniversary, let us hear his words for all of us today:

The whole law of God is founded upon love, and the two grand branches of it are these; thou shalt love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all thy soul; and thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.  The taking away of the natural liberties of men, and compelling them to any involuntary slavery or compulsory service, is an injury and robbery contrary to all law, civilisation, reason, justice, equity, and humanity.