More untold stories: Julia Bush extends our series on Bristol Quakers and transatlantic chattel slavery

‘The rest is silence.’

by Julia Bush 26th July 2024

Africans in eighteenth-century Bristol were not a large community, and Bristol was never the home of black abolitionist leaders such as Ottabah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and Ignatius Sancho. But, after work done by some Bristol Friends, it has been possible to recover the names and something of the life stories of a few young Africans whose presence in Bristol was the result of Quaker involvement in transatlantic chattel slavery. These stories provide significant evidence of Bristol’s evolving African diaspora in its earliest years. They also offer a glimpse of varied relationships between African servants and their white Quaker masters and mistresses.