The year is 1827. It is a chilly summer morning, and in the edge of Northwestern Russia, a
dim light shines from within Mikhaylovskoye house. In the candlelit study of this humble
estate sits a swarthy, curly-haired man, putting ink to paper. He is Alexander Pushkin, the
greatest poet in the history of Russia. The novel he writes is full of intrigue and
adventure. But, there is a twist. His story, titled “The Moor of Peter the Great”,
is based on his own family history. For Pushkin was in fact the Great Grandson of an African
Slave. But who exactly was this mysterious dark-skinned ancestor of his? And why did
the father of Russian literature take such pride in being descended from him? To find
that out, we must travel back another 130 years, to the steamy wetlands of central Africa.
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The ancestor of the Pushkins was born in 1698, and known to us by the name of Abram. The
location of his homeland is the subject of much scholarly debate. Having been abducted
at only eight years old, Abram himself was able to provide only a few details about his
origins during his lifetime. In a letter to Empress Catherine in 1742, he wrote the following:
“I am a native of Africa, of the high nobility there. I was born in the land ruled by my
father, in the city of Lagone”. The exact location of ‘Lagone’ remains
uncertain. Pushkin asserted that his ancestor was an Abyssinian Prince from Ethiopia, a
romantic land with Biblical ties. However, the modern day field-work of one Hugh Barnes
has linked Abram’s cryptic ‘Lagone’ to the city of Logone-Birni, in modern day
Cameroon. If Abram’s claim to nobility is true, then he was most likely one of the many
sons of Prince Bruha, a Kotoko chieftain who founded the city of Logone in the year 1700.
Bruha’s domain lay on the doorstep of the Bornu Empire, an Islamic power whose wealth
came largely from engaging in the lucrative Slave Trade with the Barbary Pirate States
of to the North. African Slaves were in high demand across the Islamic world, yet religious
law forbade the indenturement of fellow Muslims. This made Logone, a pagan city ruled by a
pagan Chieftain, a target of war. In this geopolitical context, we can easily see how
an eight year old boy, the son of an African Prince, could be taken as a valuable captive
amidst constant border warfare, and shipped off to be a prized pet of a status-seeking
ruler across the sea. Given his status as a Chieftain’s son, young
Abram was considered valuable, and eventually sold to the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople.
He arrived at the Sublime Porte in the Spring of 1703, and was quickly assigned to be a
page to Prince Ahmed, the younger brother of Sultan Mustafa II. Here, the slave boy
laboured within the gilded walls of the Topkapi palace, fluffing cushions, sweeping carpets,
serving his master, and feeding his exotic pets.
Ottoman politics was a perfidious affair, full of secrets and court intrigue. In 1703,
Mustafa was deposed, and Ahmed became the new Ottoman Sultan. As his personal page,
Abram was now closer to the Sultan than most, and as a result became a link in a chain of
informants feeding secret and sensitive information about the Imperial monarch. On one end of
this chain was the Sultan’s treacherous Grand Vizier, on the other, Pyotr Tolstoy,
an Ambassador of the Empire of Russia, and great grandfather of the famed author Leo
Tolstoy. Soon, the Grand Vizier was the victim of his
own court intrigue, and was murdered by agents of the Sultan. With his main connection to
the Topkapi palace severed, Tolstoy lamented his loss of contact with the ‘clever Africans’
spying on his behalf. One story claims that when Tsar Peter the Great heard of this, he
ordered that these Africans be smuggled out of Constantinople and brought to him.
It was a fairly inconspicuous request; African slaves were in vogue at the time, an exotic
status symbol that the Monarchs of Europe kept in the palaces as a symbol of their wealth
and influence. As such, Russian agents in Constantinople set to fulfilling the Tsar’s
will. How exactly young Abram was delivered from the Ottoman Sultan is unknown. Through
purchase or illicit smuggling, he came into the hands of the Bosnian diplomat Sava Vladislavich-Raguzinsky,
who spirited him out of the Sublime Porte, and on his way Northwards.
Abram arrived in Moscow in the heart of Winter. Never before had the boy experienced the frigid
weather of northern Europe, and the Russian snows chilled him to the bone. While he was
ferried by sleigh through the frozen city, observing the imposing red walls of the Kremlin
and iconically onion-domed Cathedrals, he surely felt as if he had been transported
into another world entirely. Abram first met his new master on Christmas
Day of 1704, when he was presented to Peter, Tsar of Russia, amidst a sea of yuletide revelry.
Abram caused quite a scene in the Kremlin. Most Russians had no knowledge of Africa,
and to them, black-skinned men and women were a mysterious, potentially sinister ‘other’,
depicted often as bogeymen and devils in their literature and plays.
It was Abram’s status as an outsider that had landed him before the great Tsar. Peter
was a modernizer, a ruler who wished to transform his country from what he saw as an isolated
backwater into a European powerhouse. He was famous for inviting foreigners into the highest
rungs of his social strata, allowing them to disseminate their ideas into Russian Society.
With his new African acquisition, he hoped to make a point to the traditionally xenophobic
Russian nobility: young Abram was of a race that many Europeans considered fit only for
slavery. If even he could be transformed into a bright-minded asset to Russia, then there
could be no argument that the future of the nation lay in openness, and not isolation.
Over the next few months, Tsar Peter kept Abram close to his side, delighting in the
boy’s natural cleverness and gift for languages, for in addition to Turkish, the African child
had also picked up fluency in Russian fairly quickly. In 1705, Peter went back on the campaign
trail, and took Abram with him to the Baltics, where war was raging against the Swedes. The
African boy was baptized in Vilnius in 1705, where he earned the name Petrovich - son of
Peter. Indeed, spending these formative years amongst
kings and generals made Abram a fierce admirer of science and military engineering, and the
Tsar quickly began to see Abram as his own adopted son. The African’s natural cleverness
and passion of the battlefield made him preferable to his own biological child, the bookish Prince
Alexei. For the next ten years, Abram stayed with
his godfather on the campaign trail. He was a quick learner, and by his mid-teens had
become adept in the art of war, developing a written code system to protect sensitive
information, and becoming a trusted member of the Tsar’s inner circle of advisors.
Abram essentially grew up on the battlefield, and over a decade of impromptu field education
had turned him into an exceedingly intelligent young man. In 1716, he accompanied Peter as
he went on a grand tour of Western Europe in one of the Tsar’s many efforts to connect
Russia to the West. Naturally, one of these stops was Paris, and here Abram stayed behind
at the behest of his godfather, to continue his education in the heart of the European
Enlightenment. The sheer novelty of a classically educated
black man captured the imagination of the French people, and Abram became something
of a minor celebrity in the city. He became friends with some big names, including the
famous philosopher Voltaire, who called him the “Dark star of the Russian Enlightenment”.
On top of a traditional education in sciences and mathematics, Abram enrolled in a Military
Engineering Academy. The skills he acquired there were put to the
test a year later, when the war of the Quadruple Alliance broke out, and France declared war
on Spain. Abram enrolled in the French army, was quickly promoted to Lieutenant-Engineer,
and was given a unit of Artillery to command. Deployed to fight the Spaniards in the Pyrenees,
he proved to be an exceedingly competent military strategist, helping to seize a number of Spanish
controlled towns in the Basque country. He played a key role in orchestrating the fall
of the Fortress San Sebastien, but there he also suffered a head injury from a faulty
discharge of a buckshot cannon of his own making.
Honourably discharged, Abram returned to Paris to a war hero’s welcome, more famous and
admired than he’d ever been by the French aristocracy. He had also acquired a new moniker:
Hannibal. His comrades admired his military genius, and drew parallels between him and
his fellow African, the Carthaginian general of old. The Russians would later adapt this
title into their own language- and the name Gannibal was born.
In 1723, Abram Petrovich Gannibal journeyed home to St. Petersburg where his Imperial
Godfather lavished him with honours and gifts. His thorough education was put to good use,
and he spent the next few years serving his new nation in the way Tsar Peter had intended.
He built the redoubtable Fortress of Kronstadt on Kotlin Island, which guarded the northern
pass to St. Petersburg. He oversaw the completion of a massive canal around Lake Ladoga, a perilous
project that was considered impossible until his triumph. These projects and more had made
Gannibal one of the premier authorities on civil and military engineering in the whole
of Russia. Yet this dreamy life was not to last, for
in 1725, Peter the Great passed away. Abram had already lost one father when he was abducted
as a child, and now once more, he was an orphan. To make matters worse, the African had also
lost his most powerful benefactor. Abram’s success in court also made him the subject
of dangerous envy from various powerful people, not least of whom was Alexander Menshikov,
an influential statesman, who saw Abram as a foreign interloper too close to the Tsar
for comfort. In the wake of Peter’s death, Menshikov
quickly took control of the nation as a military regent, and in 1727 banished Abram to a remote
posting in Siberia, to toil out of sight and out of mind, perhaps hoping the bitter Siberian
cold would kill the young African for him. Once more, Abram was forced to move a world
away from the land he called his home. His new station was in Seleginsk, deep in the
territory of the Mongolic Buryats, and a stone's throw away from Lake Baikal, along the border
with Qing China. Even in exile, Gannibal never gave up his
enterprising spirit. Despite his dour pseudo-imprisonment, he continued to serve his nation in the hopes
that one day he could return home. He directed the construction of a fortress designed to
fend off any invasions levied by the Chinese Emperor. Lost on him perhaps, but not on us,
was the novelty of an ethnic African, deep in the heart of Mongolic territory, fortifying
the borders of the Russian Empire on the edge of the known world.
In an event of poetic justice, Menshikov was overthrown two years into his reign and himself
exiled to Siberia. While Gannibal, one of the nation’s foremost practical geniuses,
was soon recalled back to the heart of the nation. In 1741, Elizabeth, daughter of Peter
the Great, ascended to the throne. The new Empress was keen to bestow upon Abram the
same favour that her father had, and appointed him the commander of the Russian Army Garrison
in Reval, now Tallinn, Estonia. The predominantly German aristocracy of Reval were ultra-conservative,
and treated the black foreigner with cold shouldered suspicion.
Nevertheless, Abram endeared himself to the locals using his engineering genius to fashion
a spectacular fireworks’ performance that even the most snobbish of connoisseurs declared
was equal to the pageantries of Moscow or St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, he improved the
city’s coastal fortifications, and quickly became one of the most politically influential
people in the Baltics. In 1742, Empress Elizabeth awarded Abram with
the Mikhaylovskoye Estate, with 100 Serfs upon it to command. Serfdom was an institution
that bound Russian peasants to the land of their master. Thus in an ironic twist, the
man who was enslaved as a boy, was now himself something of a slave owner.
The twilight of Empress Elizabeth’s reign saw Russia plunged into the seminal Seven
Years War against Frederick the Great’s Prussia. As one of the Empire’s foremost
military minds, Gannibal was naturally placed in a position of high command. He did not
favour the war, but nonetheless helped to rapidly transform the Russian military from
a motley militia into a professional army. Foremost among his martial projects were his
beloved fireworks; far from being a frivolous hobby, they were in fact part of the master
engineer’s scheme to develop weaponized rockets for the war effort.
Nevertheless, bureaucracy would once more drag Abram down, as just like clockwork, more
and more of Russia’s top brass showed their resentment towards him, a man they still considered
to be an outsider of lesser stock. A smear campaign against him saw him demoted from
Russian military command, and he would spend the rest of the war building canals and fortifying
coastal batteries. In 1762, Elizabeth died, and was succeeded
by her nephew, Peter III, who famously pulled Russia out of the Seven Years War out of admiration
for his enemy, Frederick the Great. The young Tsar was soon ousted in a coup by his wife,
Catherine the Great, the Empress who would bookend the career of Russia’s most prominent
black man. On the 9th of June, 1762, the African performed
his last duty for the Romanov rulers of Russia, organizing a magnificent fireworks display
to cap off a lavish royal dinner outside the Winter Palace. By now, Abram was considered
a relic to most. A holdover from an era of a long dead Tsar. He was wise enough to realize
his career had run its course. He retired to his estate in Mikhaylovskoye, where he
lived in comfortable retirement for another twenty years, passing away in the year 1782
at the ripe old age of 82. Abram Petrovich Gannibal had several wives
during his long life, and was succeeded by 11 children, most of whom went on to be members
of the Russian nobility. The most prominent of these bloodlines would birth Alexander
Pushkin. The famed father of modern Russian literature idolized his African great grandfather,
and immortalized a grand, albeit fictionalized story of his life.
Nevertheless, Gannibal is more than a peculiar foreign link in a noble genealogy. His legacy
is one of struggle and perseverance. His genius shook the foundations of anti-abolitionist
rhetoric throughout Europe, for how could slave owners claim Africans were fit only
for servitude while such a brilliant mind walked among their finest philosophers? From
Spain to the border of Mongolia, Gannibal worked among colleagues who saw only the colour
of his skin, yet he rose above them, and defied the odds to become one of the greatest military
and civil engineers in Russian history, and cement himself as the first and most prominent
Black Intellectual of Europe.
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