Scipio Africanus (slave)

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Scipio Africanus was a slave born in 1702 to unknown parents from West Africa.

Very little is known of his life. He was the servant of Charles William Howard, seventh Earl of Suffolk, who in 1715 married Arabella Morse and lived in the "Great House" in Henbury, Gloucestershire near Bristol. It is not known how he was acquired, but he died there on 21 December 1720. His Master and Mistress would die two years later.

He is remembered because of an elaborate gravestone in the churchyard of St Mary’s in Henbury. His gravestone sports black cherubs and has the unusual epitaph:

"I who was Born a PAGAN and a SLAVE now sweetly sleep a CHRISTIAN in my Grave".

It is thought that 10,000 black slaves and servants were in Britain in the early 18th century, but this is one of the very few memorials to them.

Source: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

The author Eugene Byrne featured Scipio Africanus in his alternate history novel, "Things Unborn". In this novel people who had suffered an untimely death were 'reincarnated' in an England recovering from an atomic war; Scipio Africanus was a famous war hero and a Detective Inspector in the Metropolitan Police. During the course of the novel he twice saves the life of the King, the reincarnated Richard III).