icythaw.pages.dev

Ignatius sancho children

    •

Biography

We don't have a wiki for this artist. Do you know any background info about this artist?

Start the wiki

Similar Artists

  1. Lil Cuete

    34,984 listeners

  2. Mr. Shadow

    32,862 listeners

  3. Brown Boy

    44,552 listeners

  4. Califa Thugs

    18,615 listeners

  5. Mr. Lil One

    29,816 listeners

  6. Knightowl

    16,399 listeners

  7. Lil Menace

    15,210 listeners

  8. Mr. Capone-e

    72,359 listeners

  9. Brownside

    37,441 listeners

  10. Dyablo

    27,406 listeners

  11. Big Lokote

    11,410 listeners

  12. New Ridaz

    9,267 listeners

View all similar artists

    •

9 Ignatius Sancho (1729-1780)

 

According to his contemporary biographer, Joseph Jekyll, Sancho was born circa 1729 aboard a slave ship crossing the Middle Passage.  His mother died of disease, and his father committed suicide so that he would not have to endure slavery.  Sancho was purchased by three sisters living in Greenwich, who, as he wrote in a 1766 letter, “judged ignorance the best and only security for obedience”; however, their neighbor, the Duke of Montagu, took a fancy to the boy and saw that he learned reading, writing, and music.  He ran away from the sisters and joined the Montagu household, where he was a trusted valet.  When the Duchess of Montagu died, she bequeathed him a year’s salary and an annuity of about thirty pounds.

 

Sancho had a wild spell during his youth.  His biographer claims he spent his last shilling so that he could watch a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III, starring David Garrick. (Remember the figurine of David Garrick as Richard III in Bundle 1, “Gallery of Readers”?)

 

    •

Homepage

Ignatius Sancho was a Black British writer and musician who was deeply engaged with the visual and performing arts as a means for calling attention to the inhumanity and hypocrisy of discrimination, racism, and the enslavement of Black people in London and across the British empire.

In 1766, Sancho read the Sermons of Mr Yorick by the famed white novelist Laurence Sterne (1713–1768). A passage in the Sermons decried the slave trade as a “poison,” and it inspired Sancho to write to Sterne and implore him to “give half an hour’s attention to slavery” in the next installment of his novel Tristram Shandy. In doing so, Sancho argued, Sterne might “ease the yoke” of his “miserable black brethren” by “touching” and “amending” the hearts of Sterne’s readers.

The need could not have been more urgent: by the end of the eighteenth century, Britain had become the leading slave-trading nation in the world. In the 1760s, when Sancho wrote to Sterne, British traders enslaved over 300,000 African people—more than double the number from the first decade of the eighteenth century—yi

Copyright ©icythaw.pages.dev 2025