Gannibal: the Moor of Petersburg sounds like an absolutely fascinating character:
The extraordinary Gannibal was the African great-grandfather of Aleksandr Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet, who spoke proudly of his own inherited ‘blackamoor profile’. In his elegantly written new biography, Hugh Barnes suggests Gannibal was born in Chad, taken as a slave to Constantinople, and purchased in 1704, aged seven or eight, by Tsar Peter the Great of Russia. While still a teenager, Gannibal was writing the tsar’s letters, working on encryption for secret messages, and helping to plan military campaigns. As an adult he rose to the top of the Russian army. Gannibal also read Racine, Corneille and Moliere, and was, in Paris, the friend of Montesquieu, Diderot and Voltaire, who called him ‘the dark star of the Enlightenment’. Yet this was less than a century after France had established its slave colonies in the West Indies, and Voltaire also said that the intelligence of black people was ‘far inferior’, while Montesquieu, equivocating about slavery, said it was sometimes ‘founded on natural reason’. How did Gannibal manage to surmount 18th-century attitudes to slavery and to Africans?