While still a teenager, Gannibal was being feted in the salons of Paris by Leibniz and Voltaire. Before the phrase had ever been thought of, Gannibal was the very embodiment of "young, gifted and black." Barnes shows that the same enlightenment scholars who hailed Gannibal as Europe's first black intellectual viewed his African brothers as little more than savages. It was not the last time the colour of Gannibal's skin would generate hostility.

Throughout the book Barnes shares with the reader his exasperation at the number of fabrications, falsehoods, claims, and counter-claims surrounding his subject. Not only was he hampered by a lack of documentary evidence, but also by unreliable accounts of Gannibal’s life, including Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, which twisted the truth out of all recognition. While Barnes may grumble at the use of poetic license, he himself is not averse to bursts of purple prose. Describing Gannibal’s banishment to Siberia after Peter the Great’s death, the author is almost breathless with excitement: "...one can imagine the Negro of Peter the Great on the road to Tobolsk, hurrying through forest-blackened hills towards the huge glimmering emptiness of Siberia – a twelfth the landmass of the world – the scenery wrapping itself around him like a fog."

The drift into fiction is excusable given the paucity of solid evidence, but in his forensic attention to what is known about Gannibal and his use of intelligent guesswork about what isn’t, Barnes never shortchanges his subject or his readers - and no one can say this author didn’t go the extra mile. Following in Gannibal’s footsteps takes him from the dark heart of Africa to the white nights of the Baltic and beyond. The account of his travels is as rewarding as the biography itself. In Siberia, close to Russia’s border with China, Barnes sees for himself the outline of a fortress Gannibal designed during his exile from the court of St Petersburg.

Unsurprisingly, confusion surrounds the precise date of Gannibal’s death, some time in 1781. His funeral was sparsely attended and no death notice was published. It was left to his great grandson, Alexander Pushkin, to revive interest in the "Negro of Peter the Great," but the real credit for uncovering the true Gannibal must go to Hugh Barnes. By dismantling the fairy tales and fraudulence surrounding Gannibal's life, Barnes has revealed a figure richer in intelligence and stronger in character than even the most gifted of writers could invent.