The Rest Is History - 279: Cameroon: The Slave General of Peter the Great

Episode Date: December 11, 2022

In today’s World Cup special on Cameroon, Tom and Dominic tell the fascinating story of “probably the most famous Cameroonian to become a Russian General”. Learn about the extraordinary life of Major-General Abram Petrovich Gannibal, the great-grandfather of Russia’s most famous poet, Alexander Pushkin. Join The Rest Is History Club (www.restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to the Rest Is History World Cup special. We're going through all the various countries that are competing in this year's World Cup. And a couple of days ago, I very much focused on Dido, the legendary founder of the city of Carthage. And Dominic, today you have someone with the name Gannibal, which is, I gather, the Russian, the way the Russians pronounce Hannibal, the great military hero, conqueror of the Carthaginians. But this person is, he's not a Carthaginian, is he? He is from today's country, which is Cameroon.

He is from Cameroon. So I don't know how au fait you are. Or is he? Well, we should come to this. How au fait are you with Cameroonian history generally, Tom? Probably not as au fait as I could be. Well, I think it's fair to say that a lot of Cameroonian history is terra incognita for many Britishish and indeed

english-speaking listeners so i mean cameroon historically was never obviously a single nation state it was a place of competing kingdoms and chieftains do you know where the name cameroon comes from i didn't know this actually until i looked it up no it comes from our friends the portuguese i guess probably most, that would make sense. So there's a river. I think the only thing I know about Cameroon is Roger Miller. Right, 1990. Yeah, 1990.

We got to the quarterfinals, I think, in the World Cup. They did get to the quarterfinals and lost to Gary Lineker's England. I don't really know anything else beyond that. So I'm looking forward to being educated. There's a river called the Wurri. And the Portuguese, when they sailed up that in the 16th century, it was full of shrimps. And they called it the Rio dos Camarões.

Okay. And that became Cameroon. So it could have been Langostino or something if the Spanish had got there. Yes, very good. Very good. Well, anyway, what's now cameroon was colonized by the germans and then it was divided up between um britain and france at the end of the first world war and then obviously became independent but although this is a podcast

about the history of cameroon and about one of cameroon's most famous um sons we're not going to start in Cameroon, Tom. We're going to start somewhere completely unexpected and completely different. So we're going to start on a place called the Black River in St. Petersburg, then the capital of Russia. We're going to start in February 1837. So there are two men on the bank of this river. And one of them is a French officer and sort of man about town and Lothario called Georges Charles Dantes, very sort of Three Musketeers-ish character. And the other is Russia's most beloved poet, Alexander Pushkin. So the man who is seen by many people as the most beautiful of all Russian writers, the man who kind of invented the Russian literary language, an icon of Russia.

And they are fighting a duel. They've been leading up to this for weeks. There's been a lot of hostility between them, sort of romantic hostility and so on to do with jealousy and so on, which I won't go into. So it's a duel to the death. Dantes fires first and he hits Pushkin in the stomach and Pushkin falls and he manages to rise and shoot back at Dantes, but he only lightly wounds him and then he falls back and Pushkin is mortally wounded and he dies. So this is the end of Russia's greatest poet. Now there's great mourning for Pushkin. And later that year, a magazine or newspaper that he

founded, a journal that he founded called Sovremenik, publishes one of Pushkin's unfinished works. And this is a novel, not a poem. And it's called the more of peter the great and pushkin had worked on it 10 years or so before and it's the story of this hero ibrahim the more who comes from somewhere in africa we don't really know where and he comes to st petersburg and uh to paris spends time in paris has a love affair with a French countess. He eventually ends up back in St. Petersburg. There's a ball at the Winter Palace. There are dinners of noblemen. It's very kind of war and peace. Pushkin didn't finish it and it's published, but it means an awful lot to Pushkin because actually this is a portrait of his great

grandfather, the moor of St. Petersburg. And this is what's going to link it back to Cameroon. Because Pushkin's great-grandfather was an African who had come to St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 18th century. And this mattered enormously to Pushkin. He wasn't embarrassed by it at all. He would often draw self-portraits of himself with exaggerated kind of artwork. He saw his African features. He had an inkwell on his desk in the shape of an African page boy. In his most famous poem, Evgeny Onegin, there is a line

where the narrator imagines himself under the sky of my Africa, sighing for gloomy Russia. So to Pushkin himself, his African ancestry was a sort of, it was a claim to a kind of romanticism. You know, it gave him an exoticism that nobody else in Russia had. And the man from whom Pushkin traced his ancestry, was a man called Avram Petrovich Ganebel. Ganebel. Yeah, Ganebel. But Dominic, presumably, not originally his name. No, not originally his name. We shall come to how he got his name.

Now, Avram, but basically Ibrahim. Yeah, Ibrahim. So that's the link with the Moor in the story. Now, Pushkin, what did he think about this great-grandfather? He did not think he came from Cameroon. He actually thought that he came from Abyssinia, from Ethiopia. And lots of Russians believed this at the time. There had been this character called Gannibal who had come from Abyssinia. And this seems almost certainly wrong. So if Ethiopia is a Christian country. Yes. So is that a part of, but Ibrahim is obviously the Muslim name.

Of course. So why do they think he might come from Ethiopia? Because if you're Russian, and your Orthodox Christianity means a lot to you, but also if you're aspiring to join the nobility and to make your way up in society, it's important to you to have an ancestor who has come from the preeminent Christian kingdom, this mysterious, exotic Christian land called Abyssinia. That's why- Prestigion. Exactly, the land of Prestigion. Now, many years later, we'll get into Gannibal's story in a second. Many years later, another great Russian writer, Vladimir Nabokov, he was really the first to say, I don't think Gannibal did come from Ethiopia at all. And he thought Gannibal might have come from

Cameroon, from the sort of northeastern fringes of Cameroon. A Beninese historian called Judone Grimanku studied the pattern of the slave trade. Now you'll see in a second why that's important. And he also said, I think Cameroon is the most likely place. And finally, there was a British writer about 15 years ago called Hugh Barnes, who also studied Gannibal. They found that Pushkin's great-grandfather had applied at one point for a coat of arms from the Tsarina, and that Gannibal had asked for a particular mysterious word, Tom, to be put on the coat of arms. And that word was F-U-M-M-O. And in the local Kotoko language of that part of Cameroon, that word means homeland. Goodness.

Goodness. Well, Dominic, just before you move on to that, i just ask is so is he does cameroon today claim him is he he's not as big a figure in cameroon i think as he is in russia interesting interestingly um but yes cameroon does claim him actually funny enough ethiopia and eritrea sort of squabbled over who who um yanibal belonged to and the truth is he didn't belong to either he belonged to cameroon so there's a little bit of a sort of African tug of war, but I think it matters more to Russians than it does to anybody else. So let's start by looking at what we know of Gannibal's life. So he probably is born Ibrahim, probably. And he grows up south of Lake Chad in equatorial Africa in what's now Cameroon. And what seems likely is that he was the son of a chief.

I mean, that might have been self-publicity. It might have been making a romantic story for himself. A chief with more than a dozen children. And in about 1703, when young Ibrahim was six, probably, he was kidnapped by slavers. Because there's a lot of slaving going on from the Arab world, isn't there? Oh, absolutely. So the slaving is not just European. The slave trade from Central Africa and East Africa up to the Mediterranean or into the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean is colossal in the early 18th century

and the late 17th century. So I mean, in total, over the centuries, there are millions of people being enslaved and shipped across the sea. And he is one of them. And roughly 1703, 1704, let's call him Avram, he ends up in Constantinople. So he's sold into slavery and he ends up at the court of the Ottoman Emperor, Sultan Ahmed III. And he's there, we think, for about a year. Okay, another question. So if there are millions and millions of slaves going from Africa up to the Middle East, to end up not just in Constantinople but in the the sultan's palace i mean you have to what is it about him that gets him there because that's very kind of high-end destination isn't it he's a page boy but i think there would have been many such slaves tom i don't think he's an unusual

figure so just luck basically i think it's pure luck right because and it's and it's good luck for him as it will turn out because his prominence there means that he catches the eye of visiting ambassadors and diplomats and so on. And one of these people is a man called Count Sava Lukic Vladislavic Raguzinski. And this man, great name, crazy name, crazy guy. He was a fur merchant and adventurer who had been hanging around with Peter the Great a couple couple of years earlier and is he a massive lad like peter the great was i think he is a huge party in the rest of history smashing up john evelyn's house in deptford didn't he yes he did that's right yeah and going on wheelbarrow races around his garden exactly peter the great is now the Tsar of Russia And He said

Peter the Great collects Curiosities Like a lot of European monarchs At the turn of the 18th century He has a cabinet of curiosities Wow, I've seen it Have you? Yeah, it's in St. Petersburg

But not with the living specimens in it No, not with the living specimens But no, it's in St. Petersburg Opposite the Hermitage Right It's very, very Is it good? Yeah, but Creepy Living specimens. But no, it's in St. Petersburg opposite the Hermitage. Right. It's very, very... Is it good? Yeah, but creepy.

Creepy, I was going to say. Very, very creepy. He apparently had... I mean, we know that Peter the Great was a great fan of dwarves and throwing dwarves around at banquets and things. It's kind of two-headed dwarves preserved in formaldehyde. I mean, there's a lot of that. He supposedly had a baby with two heads and a lamb with eight legs exactly they are still there as i remember so what peter the great says to uh count sarva

his palace who he has appointed ambassador to the sublime ambassador to the sublime port in constantinople exactly to the sultan peter the great says i would like a black child to be part of my cabinet of curastis procure me a black boy and um this guy he procures our friend the future ganabel who is only seven he basically by we don't know whether he buys him whether he does a deal with the sultan it's this is a mystery so much of, Tom, is a bit of a mystery. But he's brought back for the auspices of the Russian diplomatic service to St. Petersburg. Interestingly, one of the people whose path he crosses, who is sort of one of the orchestrators of this mission, is a man called Pyotr Andreevich Tolstoy, the great-grandfather of Tolstoy. So there's not just Pushkin, there is Tolstoy in this story.

Is there a Dostoevsky who pops up? There's no Dostoevsky. I'm sorry to disappoint you. So Gannibal, and we'll call him Gannibal, he arrives in St. Petersburg, and he's presented to Peter the Great as a gift. Peter the Great takes a great shine to him. A year later, he has him baptised in Vilnius, which is then part of the Russian Empire. And Peter the Great himself serves as the boy's

godfather, interestingly. So what is Peter the Great up to here? Well, I think what he's trying to do is he sees himself as a great collector, as a man who has all sorts of curiosities. And Gannibal is one of the curiosities but he also wants to go further peter the great tom is a great modernizer as we know yes a figure of the enlightenment is a figure of the enlightenment and it's very important to him that he has what he sees as this sort of exotic strange non-christian boy and he is going to, in averted commas, civilize and modernize him. So he has Gannibal taught, little boy taught, mathematics and engineering. And the boy proves a whiz at it, an absolute whiz. He's got a real appetite for him. So he accompanies Peter the

Great when he travels. Peter the Great is a great traveler. He goes to the Netherlands. He goes to Paris. And they're in Paris in 1717. So when the boy is, you know, in his late teens, and Peter the Great says, listen, you're tremendously good at maths and engineering. Why don't you stay here in France and study science? So the boy does. He speaks several languages. He's learned geometry.

He's learned all these things. He joins the French army. And in 1720, he enters the french artillery academy so a bit of a sort of hint of bonaparte here yes yeah and um he's lucky because if he wants to see action because at precisely this point a war breaks out called the war of the quadruple alliance almost completely forgotten now between um france brit, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Dutch Republic on one hand, and the Spanish on the other. And off he goes, this young man as he now is,

this young Cameroonian man. He goes off to the Pyrenees, where he commands an artillery unit. He helps to capture several Spanish towns in the Basque country. But he's a great inventor and a tinkerer. And he's invented a cannon of his own design, which he fires. And it actually, as often happens with a lot of 18th century cannons, it fires, but unfortunately, in the

wrong direction. And it basically almost blows his own head off and suffers a bad head injury and is captured by the Spanish. So he ends up in Spain for two years in a Spanish prison. Then he's released and he comes back to Paris. And there he's a tremendous celebrity. So Dominic, so this is early 18th century. Yes. And the early 18th century is where the slave trade is really kicking in, in the Atlantic world.

Yeah. And it's often said that europe is a hotbed of racism but this would his career would seem to uh suggest otherwise yes well everyone knows that he's peter the great's pal you see and that peter the great is very fond of him and he has the sort of czar's uh approval but also i think it's fair to say he's a novelty but people certainly don't take against him. So when he goes back to Paris, the people in Paris, they are the people who call him Hannibal. Because of his exploits in Spain.

His exploits in Spain and because of the whole Carthaginian-African link, they call him Hannibal. Now, the Russians pronounce that Hannibal. Hence, that's why he's called Gannibal, as it were. But he mixes in kind of enlightened circles in Paris. Voltaire is said to have called him the dark star of the Russian enlightenment. And this may be a bit apocryphal. It's repeated by almost every single story about Hannibal. But let's imagine that Voltaire really did say it. Because Voltaire was quite racist towards Africans.

So good to see him not being racist there. It was nice about Hannibal. Yeah. And in 1723, he goes back to Russia as a bit of a celebrity. And Tom, I think we should take a break here. And then we should pick up this incredible story of this Cameroonian boy and follow his trajectory to a general and a nobleman in the Russian Empire after the break. Fantastic. Can't wait. See you back in a few minutes.

I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Hello welcome back to The Rest Is History and And courtesy of Dominic, we are midway through the remarkable story of the man I think it would be no exaggeration to say is probably the most famous person to have come from Cameroon in the 18th century. If there are specialists in Cameroonian history who could put us right on that, let us know. But I suspect he probably is certainly the most famous cameroonian to have become a general in russia in the 18th century i think that's unquestionably true so so so he's he's um he this young cameroonian boy who a slave in constantinople been given as a

page boy to peter the great he's become an artillery expert, an artillery studied in Paris. He's now come back to Russia and you're going to take up the story. He's come back to Russia as a great star. Peter the Great is very impressed with him. You know, he's absolutely vindicated all Peter's sort of faith in him and whatnot. So he comes back. He's going to be a military engineer and Peter appoints him tutor of mathematics to the imperial guard which is you know yeah um yeah but bad news for uh for um mr cannibal because in 1725 peter the great dies and his widow catherine becomes czarina catherine the first but the big strong man is a guy called prince menschikov and prince menschikov it does not approve of Gannibal at all.

He thinks he's vulgar, he's from below, he's an ex-slave, and he's a foreigner, and he's just a bad sort, you know, all things considered. Tom, you look as though you're gearing up to say something, are you? No, no. I was just thinking, what a rotter. Yeah, good. Well, he is a rotter.

Menshikov's an absolute rotter in this regard. Yeah. So in 1727, so two years after taking menschkoff has sort of come in as the strongman poor old avram petrovich ganabel ends up in a sort of semi-exile kind of remote posting to siberia and not just siberia but a place called selen ginsk which is basically right next to the chinese border it's about a far away from cameroon isn't it i mean that's a hell of a way from and not just Siberia, but a place called Selenginsk, which is basically right next to the Chinese border. It's about a far away from Cameroon, isn't it? I mean, that's a hell of a way from Cameroon, Tom. There's no disguising it.

He's a well-traveled man, let's put it that way. And there they basically get him to direct the construction of a big fortress to fend off any possible attacks from the Chinese. So Gannibal is there for two years. And after two years, good news, Prince Menshikov dies. Hooray. That's great news for Gannibal.

Yeah. Because the Tsarina says, you're no longer kind of in exile. You can hang around in Siberia. It would be nice if you hung around in Siberia for a couple more years, do more building work, but I'll give you a title. We'll call you a master engineer now. So he does that. And then he comes back to the West. Now, it swings and roundabouts with Hannibal's life, really, Tom. In 1731, he marries, and he marries a Greek woman called Yevdokia Diopi. Now, that might sound, you know, it's great that he's got married.

It's nice for him. But unfortunately, his wife absolutely detests him. So why did they marry him? Well, supposedly, it's hard to find the truth of this. I mean, again, as I said in the first half, a lot of it is very mysterious. It's hard to work out whether they were ordered to by the court because it was important they get married or he wanted to, but she didn't. And the court kind of backed him and forced her to marry him. Basically, quite early on, within a matter of kind of months, Gannibal thinks that this Greek lady is betraying him.

And his suspicions are confirmed, Tom, when she has a child who turns out to be completely white, which Gannibal sees as, yes, this is not the thing at all. And he has her arrested, and she's sent to prison for 11 years for adultery. Well, harsh, but robust. Yes, yeah, I suppose that's a fair verdict. Now, in the meantime, he meets somebody else.

He meets a kind of Baltic noblewoman called Christina Regina Sjöberg, who's got a kind of Scandinavian background, and he falls completely in love with her. And he marries her in 1736. Now, there's a slight... There's a kind of bigamous relationship. Yes, there's a slight drawback here, which is that he's not divorced from Yevdokia, who's in prison.

So the authorities make him pay a heavy fine as a punishment. Right. But he's perfectly happy to pay that because this is a splendid union. They have 10 children. Oh. And when his previous wife is released from prison prison she's forced into a nunnery so i think there's a moral there for anyone it's thinking of cheating on a russian general so so of these of these 10 children two of them are worth noting so one of them the oldest one is is called Ivan, and he becomes a naval officer. And would you believe, Tom, he is instrumental in founding the city of Kherson in southern Ukraine.

Very much in the news. Yes. At the moment, because of the battle for Kherson between Ukraine and Russia. And he becomes a general-in-chief, Ivan, as his father goes on to do. And the other child worth noting is called osip and he has a daughter called nadeja and she is the mother of pushkin so there's your link to alexander pushkin the poet do you know um some other famous descendants that he had is this your fact that you warned me at the beginning of the podcast you're going to

bring out and you're very pleased with yourself yes i can't wait for it tom because i don't know what can i tell it to okay yes so uh it's the children of um the uh the presenter of another history podcast who's been on our he's been a guest on our show wonderful man is it dan snow yeah yeah who you called deranged because of his uh that was just that was just bad knock about no so dan dan's uh wife edwina yeah is uh the daughter of the duke of westminster whose wife is descended from ganableibal. So Dan's children are descended from Gannibal.

So how is it that Dan Snow hasn't done it? We've beaten him to it. Well, maybe he has. But I read this yesterday when I was talking about Gannibal. Well, I just wanted to check that it wasn't a kind of internet, you know. And he said, no, he's terribly proud of it.

Rightly so. I mean, Gannibal, as you absolutely said, by far the most famous Cameroonian to become a Russian 18th century general. Well, he's a very kind of interesting man, isn't he? And I hope Dan won't mind me reading his private message. So I asked, was it really true that Hedwina was descended from ganabel and he said absolutely and it's a source of extraordinary pride romanov pushkin african princely descent big time so yeah yeah huge cause of pride tom i actually wish i hadn't chosen it now dominic nonsense anyway listen um so things cannibal's troubles are behind him there's a new uh czarina elizabeth the first as we know her in in the english-speaking world um she is a great francophile

tom whereas the the previous incumbent um had been uh germanophiles so so she's a great francophile and therefore she's very impressed with Hannibal, with all his stuff in Paris and his service to the French army. So he now enters the court with full honours. He becomes a general. He is sent to the city of Rival, which we know now as Tallinn on the Baltic, as governor.

He's the governor of Tallinn. He's the governor of Tallinn for the best part of a decade and it's at this point that in 1742 he um sends elizabeth a letter basically petitioning can he join the nobility and have a coat of arms and he's designed his own crest he wants a crest with an elephant on it and with the cameroonian so the elephant presumably is an allusion to hannibal africa and hannibal exactly exactly and this mysterious word. Yeah. F-U-M-M-O. Now, there are two possible explanations for this word. So one of them is that it does mean, as I said in the first off, homeland in the Kotoko language from Cameroon. The other rather disappointingly is that it actually stands for a Latin expression, Fortuna vitam mea mutavit omnino,

which means, Tom, fortune has changed my life entirely, which would be a great motto for him. And so what's the consensus on that? No one knows. No one knows. No one knows. But what we do know is Elizabeth I, she does give him, she gives him an estate in a place called Mikolayovskoia

in northwestern Russia, and hundreds of serfs. So he's a big magnate now. He's a big man. He's made the chief military engineer of the entire Russian army in 1756. Then he's raised to the rank of general in 1759. And he's an aging man now. And eventually, 1762, Elizabeth dies. And a friend of yours, Tom, Catherine the Great, comes in as empress. And Hannibal knows now that he's kind of past it and he's a symbol of the old regime.

So the last thing he does is he organizes a massive, as the engineer, he organizes a massive fireworks display for the new Tsarina outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. And then he retires to his estate in Mykolaivsk, where he dies in 1781 at the age, I think, probably of 85. And he has outlived eight Tsars and sorry astonishing story and he's an awfully long way from cameroon but actually the story doesn't really end there because his legacy obviously lives on it lives on in pushkin um and pushkin sort of pushkin's ideal that he has been descended from this sort of vision that he has that he's been descended by from an abyssinian prince because it inherently makes it more interesting and poetic of course

it makes it more interesting yeah and actually as the as the 19th century goes on you were talking about racism in the 18th century but as the 19th century goes on i think it becomes more and more important to russians that he is not a sort of black sub-Saharan African, but in fact, a Christian Ethiopian. Right. Yeah. So for example, a friend of Pushkin's says in the 1830s about Gannibal, there was nothing of the Negro in him. He was Abyssinian. He had regular features, a cruel but intelligent expression. I mean, that's just completely made up. There's no reason for him to know that. They start to call him the Moor.

And it's sort of deliberate sort of Shakespearean. He's kind of a fellow. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Deliberate sort of Shakespearean overtones. And there's a portrait of a sort of nobleman with dark skin that Pushkin had in his apartment that scholars thought, well, this must be Gannibal. And actually, the British writer Hugh Barnes tracked this portrait down. It was hidden in the Pushkin Museum.

It was in an attic. And he asked them to clean it. And when they cleaned it, it turned out that actually it was a portrait of a white man. So it wasn't Gannibal at all. But in the Soviet Union, Gannibal even played a part. So the Soviet Union, obviously in the Cold War, was very keen to present itself as anti-racist compared to the racist Americans.

Yeah. And as part of that, in 1976, they made a film called How Tsar Peter the Great Married Off His Moor. And a man called Vladimir Vlisotsky played cannibal and played him as a sort of it's a sort of it's a comedy um but what slightly makes it unfunny now i think for for modern viewers is that he's completely blacked up as cannibal so it's quite hard to watch you haven't watched the great have you which is the uh i think brilliant brilliantly funny dark kind of faintly

surreal uh narrative of how catherine becomes sarina and i'm amazed that that ganabel wasn't included in that because he would have been brilliant i don't know why they didn't put him in well i'll tell you he'd be very disappointed black american writers of the early 20th century because this is the point where it's to end so you you've got this Cameroonian bloke. We actually know so little about him. The outline that I've given is probably as much as we know, to be honest. We know that he was a slave. We know that he came to St. Petersburg. We know he had this tremendous military career, and then an engineer, blah, blah, blah. But everything else is a bit of a mystery. But in the 20th century, he became an icon for some very 20th century he became an icon for

some very unlikely people he became an icon for the writers of the harlem renaissance in america so um was they did they know about him through pushkin or through pushkin you see they like they love the idea that pushkin the great russian writer was at heart an African. So Langston Hughes says of Pushkin in the 1920s, he was the first black writer to scale the mountain standing in the way of true Negro art in America. Paul Robeson talks a lot about Pushkin. And indeed, even today, there are critics who say that that book, The More of Peter the Great, Pushkin's book about his great grandfather is is, as one American critic puts it, the first work of fiction in modern times by a black writer with a black hero. The black writer, she thinks, is Pushkin, and the black hero is Avram Petrovich Gannibal, who, as you very rightly said, Tom, probably the most famous Cameroonian to have become a Russian general.

Well, thank you very much, Dominic. That was absolutely wonderful. What an extraordinary story. And I have to say, I am loving doing these because, you know, we couldn't have done a whole episode on him, a kind of traditional episode, but just beautiful bite-sized subject. So thanks very much. Yeah, love that story. And we'll be back.

We're back tomorrow with a couple more episodes. So see you then. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com.

That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. TheRestIsEntertainment.com