Black people believe this gollywog was a noble samurai.
Yasuke (Moonspeak: 弥助 or 弥介, pronounced: ya-sucky) was an Africanslave who was brought to glorious Nippon during the mid-1500s where he served the great Oda Nobunaga for about 15 months during the 1580s. Despite what Wikipedia will likely try to tell you, there is absolutely no evidence that Yasuke was ever a samurai or even anything more than a common slave.
In 2016, Lockley released his thesis entitled The Story of Yasuke: Nobunaga's African Retainer.
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Yasuke first arrived in Japan in the service of Jesuit Alessandro Valignano. He was summoned to Nobunaga after Nobunaga wished to see a black man.
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—Nobunaga wanted to see a Nobunigga.
In 2019 Lockley released the bookAfrican Samurai: The True Story of Yasuke, a Legendary Black Warrior in Feudal Japan
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When Yasuke arrived in Japan in the late 1500s, he had already traversed much of the known world. Kidnapped as a child in Northeast Africa, he served as a bodyguard to the head of the Jesuits in Asia, traveling to India and China, and eventually arriving in Japan, where everything would change.
Most Japanese people had never seen an African man before. Some believed he was a god. Others saw him as the black-skinned Buddha.
Among those drawn to him was Lord Nobunaga, head of the most powerful clan in Japan, who made Yasuke a samurai in his court. Soon, Yasuke was learning the traditions of martial arts and ascending the upper echelons of Japanese society, where he would live on to become a legend for the centuries to come.
