![]() The illustrations on this page are all the visual records we have left of Sancho's life. To find out more, follow the links on this page. This website aims to reflect the work being done by Sancho scholars around the world. In recent years there has been a great deal of interest in his life and works. Sancho was thought of in his age as "the extraordinary Negro", and to eighteenth-century opponents of the slave trade he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans. A prolific writer, he wrote a large number of letters which were collected and published in 1782, two years after his death. He was the first African we know of to vote in a British election and the first published Black British composer. Sancho composed music, appeared on the stage, entertained many famous figures of literary and artistic London, and his portrait was painted by Thomas Gainsborough. He persuaded the powerful Montagu family who lived nearby to employ him as their butler, before retiring to run a grocery shop in Westminster, where he died in 1780. ![]() ![]() His earliest personal memories were of Greenwich, near London, where as a child in the 1730s he was forced to work for three wealthy sisters. ![]() Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780) was said to have been born into slavery on a ship crossing the Atlantic from Africa to the West Indies in 1729. ![]()
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