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He persuaded the powerful Montagu family to employ him as their butler, an important position, before retiring to run a grocery shop in Westminster. He composed music, appeared on the stage, and entertained many famous figures of literary and artistic London. The first African we know of to vote in a British election, he wrote a large number of letters which were collected and published in 1782, two years after his death.
He was thought of in his age as "the
extraordinary Negro", and to
eighteenth-century British opponents of the
slave trade he became a symbol of the humanity
of Africans, then disputed by many.
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