Guyanese Online

Every year, in early December, Jesus College, Cambridge, hosts the Rustat Feast. The tables in hall are lit with candles. There is wine, and music from the college choir. The assembled diners raise a glass to Tobias Rustat, whose generosity three centuries ago allowed generations of orphans to go to Cambridge and be ordained as Church of England clergymen. Then, last November, just before the latest feast, Rustat’s name was quietly dropped from the jollities.

Rustat was a courtier to King Charles ii. John Evelyn, a contemporary diarist, described him as “a very simple, ignorant, but honest and loyal creature”. Rustat was also a big investor in the Royal African Company (rac), which trafficked more African men, women and children to the Americas than any other British institution. According to one historian, in the half-century after it was founded in 1672 the racshipped close to 150,000 enslaved Africans, mostly to the Caribbean.          Continue reading →