Ignatius Sancho described his Letters as the product of an “African sensibility.” This chapter explores what he meant by this, locating the term “sensibility,” and its cognate “sentiment,” in the context of Scottish Enlightenment science of man (David Hume, Lord Kames, Adam Smith). Through close reading, it examines how Sancho, as a sentimental epistolary writer, used his sensibility to affirm his humanity, reinforce friendships, and make political observation. Sancho’s sentimental epistolary practice, shaped by his correspondence with Laurence Sterne in 1766, was notable for his use of the dash to punctuate his writing. The chapter argues that although both writers use the dash for rhetorical effect, Sancho’s “dashing style” is distinct from Sterne’s punctuational practice. The chapter argues also that Sancho’s mode of sensibility was important in his assessment as a sentimental man of letters in the debate on African arts and letters in the 1770s and early 1780s.

This chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book. It opens by introducing the Church of God (Seventh Day) and its offshoots in the frontierlands of Gambella, and the preoccupation of Nuer Messianics with truth and biblical authenticity. It then discusses why and how exploring the ideas and practices of Nuer Messianics in the Ethiopia-South Sudan borderlands contributes to the study of religious mediation and to the literatures on African born-again Christianity, African Judaising movements, and spiritual life in Ethiopia and South Sudan.

This chapter puts geography center-stage and recreates a fuller spatial picture of the multiracial character of Sancho’s eighteenth-century London, from the granular level of buildings and streets, to neighborhoods and regions in the city, to the capital’s myriad international connections. The portrait that emerges shows that, despite the fact Sancho was distinctive and remarkable, he was no island. He lived a London life intimately connected to numerous overlapping worlds. He was a shopkeeper in a consumer-orientated city economy; a participant in the “proto-democracy” pioneered in the heart of the Westminster “court” where urban development and political citizenship were newly entangled; a figure whose social connections were enabled by physically traversing the city’s spaces as well as corresponding from distance; and a husband and father whose familial ties shed light on the depth, diversity, and geographic range of the Black urban presence.

Ignatius Sancho had a rich artistic life, from music to literary criticism to engagement with the theater. Unfortunately, little is known about the latter – Joseph Jekyll’s 1782 short biography of Sancho offers only a few sentences about what appears to have been a failed attempt at playing the titular leads of William Shakespeare’s Othello and Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko. However, Jekyll’s biography offers an important window into eighteenth-century thinking about race and performance, in spite of (and, in part, because of) its limited and compromised nature. Crucial to Jekyll’s explanation for Sancho’s theatrical failure is a supposedly “defective and incorrigible articulation,” most often read along the lines of disability. This chapter examines how vocal and linguistic performance in the eighteenth-century created and disrupted popular narratives about race.

This chapter situates the study within a broader historical, political, and scholarly context, and presents the methodology upon which it draws. First, the chapter sketches the history of Gambella as a site of encounter between the Ethiopian state and Nuer society and examines the historical and anthropological scholarships on Ethiopia’s peripheries and on the eastern frontier of Nuerland. It then discusses my own encounter with Gambella, the context and political environment in which research took place, the local religious landscape and the place of Messianic Jews in it, and the ‘data collection’ methods and research approach deployed. The final sections of the chapter explore my positionality in Gambella, as a Jewish Israeli researcher among Messianic Jews, and the sort of intersubjective encounters that informed this study.

Although everything we know about Ignatius Sancho’s early life comes to us from a short biographical sketch written by the lawyer Joseph Jekyll (1754–1837) as a preface to Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho: An African (1782), much of this is unsubstantiated and some appears improbable, exaggerated, or even invented. This chapter accordingly offers a critical reassessment and attempts a historical reconstruction of Jekyll’s “Life of Ignatius Sancho.” It offers a possible version of events that may explain Jekyll’s account of Sancho’s childhood journey from Cartagena to London. It argues, however, that the challenge of verifying much of “The Life” remains insurmountable at present and we can better understand “The Life” as a rhetorical intervention in the early phase of the British abolition campaign rather than as an unproblematic record of historical events. Jekyll’s “Life” may offer the reader, this chapter concludes, a moral rather than a literal truth.

This chapter speaks of Sancho’s meaning to me as a Black Briton. It is also about his general place in the pantheon of Black British figures. I write about belonging and Sancho because it is at the heart of the reason to study a life such as his. Knowing about this Black Briton and his eighteenth-century world can impact on Black lives lived in the UK today. Sancho’s legacy is his engagement with the world of his time and the mirror of that engagement in ours. Artistic, political, and domestic history is interwoven with personal views on a figure who made his compromises and his accommodations in a world not designed for him or people like him. My chapter seeks to unearth a little talked about and less known subject, which is Britain’s deep and exceptionally involved participation in the human trafficking of millions of Black people from the continent of Africa. I conclude with highlighting the positive, contemporary manifestations of interest in Sancho and his world.

This chapter provides an examination of the documentary evidence for Charles Ignatius Sancho’s life and career as a servant in the household of the Dukes of Montagu. It is based on archive sources, with particular focus on the archive of the Duke of Buccleuch and the papers of his ancestors, John 2nd Duke of Montagu (1690–1749) and George Duke of Montagu (1712–1790).

This chapter considers the comic dimensions of Sancho’s correspondence. Sancho’s humor draws on British national culture to interrogate divisions within the community and to prompt readers to notice lines separating insiders from outsiders. Sancho uses farce to create internal tiers of closeness within his group of affiliates, parody to forge pathways for bonding with strangers, and satire to criticize society while also promoting recognition of commonalities.

This chapter explores how Messianics in Gambella understood their own Nuer ‘ethnic’ identity in relation to biblical genealogies. Some Messianics argued that Nuer are descendants of the biblical Cushite nation, while others insisted that they are descendants of one of the ‘lost tribes’ of Israel. The chapter explores this debate in light of longer processes of change in the conceptualisation of Nuer identity. The chapter shows how Nuer Zionists reinterpreted Nuer identity, known for its permeability and constructivist nature, in light of contemporary premillennialist Zionist notions of peoplehood, which emphasise ethnic fixity and focus on lineages, exclusive bloodlines and biological descent. The chapter shows how these processes impacted the way Nuer Messianics imagined their own ‘true’ identity and place in history and in relation to nation states, as both Nuer and Christian. The chapter offers a new perspective on Israelite identities in Africa and on the influence of born-again Christianity on the construction of ethnic identities.