Ignatius Sancho

Ignatius Sancho, who described himself as 'a coal-black, jolly African', was born a slave on a ship crossing the Atlantic from Africa to the West Indies. At the age of two, he was sent to England, where he went into service in Greenwich. Around 1749-50, the unhappy Sancho fled to the Duchess of Montagu, who had a residence at Blackheath, and was quickly admitted into her household. He rose to an important position - serving as butler - and was provided with the opportunities of pursuing an education. On the Duchess's death in 1751, Sancho was left a substantial legacy, and for a time hoped to enter the stage. However, a speech impediment proved a major obstacle, and by 1758 he was back in service with the Montagu family, whose patronage was to last throughout his lifetime. Sancho's taste for art, literature and music was encouraged, and he was even able to publish whilst still a servant; one set of songs and three sets of dances appeared in the years 1767-79. In 1768, Gainsborough, while at Bath, painted his portrait; this, now in The National Gallery of Canada, has been described as 'perhaps the most accomplished of British eighteenth-century portraits of black people'. Around 1773, Sancho's health began to fail, and he retired from domestic service. He decided to set up as a grocer and, with his wife and children, moved into a shop in Charles Street, Mayfair. There, Sancho was called on by aristocrats and men of the arts, including the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, and became intimate with figures such as David Garrick and artists Daniel Gardner and John Hamilton Mortimer. It was from Charles Street that Sancho wrote the majority of his famous correspondence, and he became widely known as a man of letters following the 1775 publication of his letter to Laurence Sterne, originally sent in 1766. However, Sancho did not forget his own people, and regularly spoke about, and for, his fellow Africans. Sancho wrote his last letter on 7 December 1780 and died a week later, receiving a short obituary in the Gentleman's Magazine. His Letters were published in 1782, along with a memoir by Joseph Jekyll, and attracted an almost unprecedented 1,181 subscribers, including the Prime Minister, Lord North.

King Cetshwayo

Cetewayo (or Cetshwayo kaMPande, as he is now called) was the son of Panda, king of Zululand. His uncle Shaka (assassinated in 1828), an outstandingly able commander, had led the Zulus, a clan of the Bantu tribe, to a position of regional dominance in south-east Africa. Cetewayo defeated his brother in a battle for the succession in 1856, and came to the throne in 1873. By this time the Scramble for Africa had reached northern Natal. Boer farmers were eager to occupy the Zulus' fertile territory, and Cetewayo had difficulty in restraining his martial subjects from attacking them. As the most powerful native ruler in the area, Cetewayo was regarded with grave suspicion by Sir Bartle Frere, Governor of the Cape, and his envoy Sir Theophilus Shepstone. Missionary fervour also whipped up a climate of fear and disapproval, and he became subject to increasing British intereference. A flimsy pretext of a territorial incursion led to war, and a substantial British force under Lord Chelmsford entered Zululand in January 1879. The ensuing campaign saw Britain's worst defeat at the hands of an indigenous opponent when the camp at Isandhlwana was overrun by Cetewayo's formidable regiments. The gallant stand at Rorke's Drift helped to salvage Chelmsford's fortunes. Cetewayo was finally captured in July 1879 and held captive in the Cape. Gladstone saw Cetewayo's restoration as the key to resolving the balance of power: he was duly brought to London in 1883 for 'negotiations' (which were more like harsh dictated terms) about his reinstatement. He was here for three months, with a small retinue, and had an audience with Queen Victoria at Osborne before returning to Natal. Greatly weakened in authority, he was unable to prevent factional fighting turning into a gory civil war: within two months he was forced to flee to British-held Natal and died in February 1884. Some suspected poisoning. Ira Aldridge: Ira Frederick Aldridge was born in New York, and attended the city's African Free School. His interest in acting developed at a young age, and he gained experience with the African Theatre. However, it soon became obvious that Aldridge - as an African-American - would be unable to obtain major roles in his native country, and at the age of seventeen he left for Britain. Aldridge made his London debut in 1825 at the Royal Coburg Theatre, where he was met with a mixed reception; some members of the audience were openly hostile. Without any body or organisation to support him, Aldridge was left to carve his own way in the theatrical world. This he did with enormous success. He made extensive tours of the provinces, playing - at first - characters such as Othello, Oroonoko and Mungo. But Aldridge soon donned wigs and white make-up and moved on to non-black parts such as Macbeth, Shylock and King Lear. A vital moment in Aldridge's career came in 1833, when he was chosen to replace the mortally ill Edmund Kean, who had collapsed whilst playing Othello at the Covent Garden Theatre. For the next nineteen years, Aldridge toured the provinces, adding to his repertoire such plays as Titus Andronicus and Richard III. In 1852, he made the first of many continental tours. Aldridge was to become well-known in Germany and Russia - he was the first actor to perform Shakespeare in the Russian provinces - and for the rest of his life alternated between the Continent and Britain. He died on tour in Lodz, Poland, in 1867, having never returned to the country of his birth.

CLR James

Cyril Lionel Robert James was born in Trinidad, the son of a schoolteacher. He was a precocious student, but he preferred his own voracious reading programme and playing cricket to a university career. In 1932 James came to England with the cricketer Learie Constantine. It was as a cricket writer that James became known to a wide audience, writingperiodically for the Manchester Guardian between the 1930s and 1960s in an immaculate prose style often compared with that of his colleague Neville Cardus. In his autobiography Beyond a Boundary (1963), cricket becomes a metaphor for life. For it is only one aspect of this complex personality, who so impressed Edith Sitwell with his breadth and depth of understanding of western culture, but who dedicated much of his life to revolutionary politics. James's particular concerns were Shakespeare, Melville, Beethoven, Marx and Lenin. He met Leon Trotsky in 1939, but his pantheist approach to western culture and non-doctrinaire attitude made him ill-suited to any party line. His history of Haitian independence, The Black Jacobins (1937), is admired as an early exemplar of social and black history writing. James spent the years 1938 to 1952 in the United States, attempting through pamphlets and lectures to distill a form of Marxism relevant to the American situation and to rouse the black community to political consciousness. He rejected the Black Power movement of the 1960s as essentially nationalistic, although he held a lectureship at Howard University until 1974 and his work continues to be widely studied in the United States. James returned to Trinidad in 1958 to edit The Nation, and led the campaign for Frank Worrell to be appointed the West Indies' first black cricket captain. He advocated an alliance of independent West Indian states and later broke with Eric Williams, independent Trinidad's first President and a former pupil; he was expelled and his books banned. James was also critical of other independence leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, with whom he corresponded, and he rejected the only revolution carried out in his name, in Grenada in 1979. But in the 1980s James enjoyed a wide influence as an elder statesman, and his Channel 4 lectures in 1983 on Pan-Africanism, Shakespeare, Solidarnosc, American politics, the West Indies, and cricket, are an indication of the range of subjects on which he held profound views.

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