A South African living in Bermuda has a direct family connection to Mary Prince, honoured by Government recently as a national hero.David Pringle’s great great great uncle Thomas Pringle helped publish the slave’s acclaimed autobiography in 1831.Mary Prince was born a slave in Bermuda in 1788. In her book, ‘The History of Mary Prince’ she detailed the brutality she suffered as a slave here and in the Caribbean.Thomas helped publish her book and played a significant role in her life as a free woman.David, who has lived in Bermuda for four years, has researched the connection between Mary Prince and his distant relative.“Thomas Pringle was a struggling writer and poet and through an acquaintance, Sir Walter Scott, a patron of the arts, secured free passage to South Africa as part of the Scottish 1820 settler party,” David explained.“The British colonial government sent settlers out to South Africa in the early 1800s to settle on the land between the Briths Cape Colony and the Xhosa settlements East of the Fish River. Thomas Pringle was part of the Scottish settlers who were granted land in the area which is today known as Bedford. Thomas was a cripple, having broken his legs as a child, and he couldn’t cut it in the frontiers of South Africa so he got his brother to come out and take over the family farm.”Thomas’ brother William was David’s great, great grandfather. The Pringle family still lives on the farm in Baavian’s River in the Eastern Cape David’s brother farms land there with his father.After his family was settled, Thomas moved to Cape Town where he worked at the newly created South African Public Library and pursued his writing career.To supplement his small income he opened a school with a friend from Scotland and in 1823 started a newspaper, the South African Journal, and a magazine, the South African Commercial Advertiser.He and his staff published editorials advocating reforms of the British colonial system.After both publications were censored by the government, Thomas resigned. His reformist views also led to the failure of his school. He resigned from the library and returned to his family’s property in 1824 however he continued to fight for the freedom of the native people.Eventually the harsh conditions took their toll and he and his wife returned to London around 1826 in financial ruin.Thomas’ work in South Africa attracted the attention of the British Anti-Slavery Society and they offered him a job as secretary, a job that suited him perfectly.It was while living in London as a slave of the Wood family that Mary Prince tried to buy her freedom and approached the Anti-Slavery Society.She found employment as a paid domestic worker for Thomas and his wife and lived in their house in 1829 and 1830. It was during that time that the abolitionists tried to convince the Wood family to sell Mary Prince her freedom, but all their attempts failed. They even mounted a petition to Parliament on June 24, 1829 for her “return to the West Indies not as a slave” but that also failed.While Mary Prince was deemed free in the United Kingdom, slavery was still legal in the colonies and she ran the risk of enslavement if she returned to her husband Daniel James, who was in Antigua.Thomas’ friend Susanna Strickland transcribed Mary Prince’s narrative while he served as editor. The publication of the narrative brought about intense controversy.Mary Prince and Thomas were challenged by anti-emancipationists, primarily James Macqueen, editor of the Glasgow Courier.Two court cases ensued. Thomas won the first and was awarded damages of £3 against publisher Thomas Cadell.He lost the second against Mr Wood, Mary Prince’s owner, who was awarded £25 in damages.Both court cases were settled in 1833, the year that the Emancipation Bill which made slavery illegal in the colonies, finally passed the House of Lords. Thomas died the following year.“After ‘The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave’ was published, Thomas got [tuberculosis] and was due to return to South Africa but died before he could travel and was buried in London,” explained David. “He was reburied on the family farm in South Africa in 1870 in accordance with his final wish to be buried on his land in South Africa.”Last week’s article about Mary Prince in The Royal Gazette article caught David’s attention when he saw his relative’s name.“When I read it and read that it was about the abolition of slavery I thought it had to be my distant relative,” he explained.“I didn’t know the Mary Prince story in great detail, other than it played an important part in the final abolition of slavery. I knew more about Thomas Pringle’s South African history, so I did a bit of research and figured out how intricately linked his and Mary Prince’s stories are. It is an unbelievably small world, I never expected the connection to Bermuda would be so significant.”You just have to google Thomas Pringle and anything you see about him will always include some reference to Mary Prince’s autobiography.”Mary Prince disappeared from the public eye after testifying in a libel lawsuit in 1833. There is no record of where or how she died.Five years earlier she wrote: “Oh the horrors of slavery! How the thought of it pains my heart! But the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate; for few people in England know what slavery is. I have been a slave - I have felt what a slave feels, and I know what a slave knows and I would have all the good people in England to know it too, that they may break our chains and set us free.”Useful websites: www.timespub.tc/2008/06/yearning-for-freedom; www.stevebailey.co.za/steves-photo-blog/2011/04/02/the-home-of-thomas-pringle.