Sarah Bond, historian, lecturer at the University of Iowa and contributor to the American Forbes, has written a short piece on the Black classicist of the eighteenth century Francis Williams

​​Sarah Bond, historian, lecturer at the University of Iowa and contributor to the American Forbes, has written a short piece on the Black classicist of the eighteenth century Francis Williams. According to her, this scholar, a native of Jamaica, was known for his knowledge of mathematics and his mastery of versification in Latin.

Williams was indeed a remarkable man for his time, or at any rate a man with a very interesting fate; his portrait survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The Governor of the West Indian islands of Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent, the 2nd Duke of Montagu, resolved to conduct a social experiment: to educate an ordinary Jamaican youth at a grammar school and a university and, in the end, to compare whether his level of knowledge would match that of a white man with the same education. That is how Williams came to Cambridge, where he studied mathematics and Latin. There is, however, no evidence that he eventually took a degree.

In the end, when Francis Williams returned to his homeland, he showed towards his own people an internalised racism and even greater impatience than the whites. With this he fitted organically into the colonial administration and even managed to build a career. As for his poetic talent and the grounds for ranking him among the Black classicists, a single poem of his has survived to this day: ONE! What do you think, does such a dizzying creative career make a man a classic?