Olaudah Equiano
c. 1745 – 31 March 1797)
Olaudah Equiano is best known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa . He was a writer and abolitionist from, according to his memoir, the village of Essaka in modern southern Nigeria. Enslaved as a child in Africa, he was shipped to the Caribbean and sold to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more before purchasing his freedom in 1766.
As a freedman in London, Equiano supported the British abolitionist movement. Equiano was part of the abolitionist group the Sons of Africa, whose members were Africans living in Britain and he was a leader of the anti-slave-trade movement in the 1780s. His 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, helped secure passage of the British Slave Trade Act 1807, which abolished the slave trade and sold so well that nine editions were published during his life. The Interesting Narrative gained renewed popularity among scholars in the late 20th century and remains a useful primary source.
According to his memoir, Equiano was born around 1745 in the Igbo village of Essaka in what is now southern Nigeria. He claimed his home was in the Kingdom of Benin but this was likely a geographical error and there was likely no connection between his home and Benin.
Equiano recounted an incident of an attempted kidnapping of children in his Igbo village, which was foiled by adults. When he was around the age of eleven, he and his sister were left alone to look after their family premises, as was common when adults went out of the house to work. They were kidnapped and taken far from their home, separated, and sold to slave traders. He tried to escape but was thwarted. After his owners changed several times, Equiano happened to meet with his sister but they were separated again. Six or seven months after he had been kidnapped, he arrived at the coast where he was taken on board a European slave ship. He was transported with 244 other enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to Barbados in the British West Indies. He and a few other slaves were sent on for sale in the Colony of Virginia.
Literary scholar Vincent Carretta argued in his 2005 biography of Equiano that the activist could have been born in colonial South Carolina rather than Africa, based on a 1759 parish baptismal record that lists Equiano’s place of birth as Carolina and a 1773 ship’s muster that indicates South Carolina. Carretta’s conclusion is disputed by other scholars who believe the weight of evidence supports Equiano’s account of coming from Africa.
In Virginia, Equiano was bought by Michael Henry Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Pascal renamed the boy “Gustavus Vassa”, after the 16th-century King of Sweden Gustav Vasawho began the Protestant Reformation in Sweden. Equiano had already been renamed twice: he was called Michael while on board the slave ship that brought him to the Americas, and Jacob by his first owner. This time, Equiano refused and told his new owner that he would prefer to be called Jacob. His refusal, he says, “gained me many a cuff” and eventually he submitted to the new name.: 62 He used this name for the rest of his life, including on all official records; he only used Equiano in his autobiography.
Pascal took Equiano with him when he returned to England and had him accompany him as a valet during the Seven Years’ War with France (1756–1763). Equiano gives witness reports of the Siege of Louisbourg (1758), the Battle of Lagos (1759), and the Capture of Belle Île (1761). Also trained in seamanship, Equiano was expected to assist the ship’s crew in times of battle; his duty was to haul gunpowder to the gun decks. Pascal favored Equiano and sent him to his sister-in-law in Great Britain so that he could attend school and learn to read and write.
Equiano converted to Christianity and was baptized at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 9 February 1759, when he was described in the parish register as “a Black, born in Carolina, 12 years old”.[15] His godparents were Mary Guerin and her brother, Maynard, who were cousins of his master Pascal. They had taken an interest in him and helped him to learn English. Later, when Equiano’s origins were questioned after his book was published, the Guerins testified to his lack of English when he first came to London.
In December 1762, Pascal sold Equiano to Captain James Doran of the Charming Sally at Gravesend, from where he was transported back to the Caribbean, to Montserrat, in the Leeward Islands. There, he was sold to Robert King, an American Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who traded in the Caribbean.
Robert King set Equiano to work on his shipping routes and in his stores. In 1765, when Equiano was about 20 years old, King promised that for his purchase price of 40 pounds (equivalent to £5,800 in 2021), he could buy his freedom.King taught him to read and write more fluently, guided him along the path of religion, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trading for his own account, as well as on his owner’s behalf. Equiano sold fruits, glass tumblers, and other items between Georgia and the Caribbean islands. King allowed Equiano to buy his freedom, which he achieved in 1766. The merchant urged Equiano to stay on as a business partner. However, Equiano found it dangerous and limiting to remain in the British colonies as a freedman. While loading a ship in Georgia, he was almost kidnapped back into enslavement.
By about 1768, Equiano had gone to Britain. He continued to work at sea, traveling sometimes as a deckhand based in England. In 1773 on the Royal Navy ship HMS Racehorse, he traveled to the Arctic in an expedition towards the North Pole. On that voyage, he worked with Dr Charles Irving, who had developed a process to distill seawater and later made a fortune from it. Two years later, Irving recruited Equiano for a project on the Mosquito Coast in Central America, where he was to use his African background to help select slaves and manage them as laborers on sugarcane plantations. Irving and Equiano had a working relationship and friendship for more than a decade, but the plantation venture failed. Equiano met with George, the “Musquito king’s son”. Equiano left the Mosquito Coast in 1776 and arrived at Plymouth, England, on 7 January 1777.
Equiano settled in London, where in the 1780s he became involved in the abolitionist movement. The movement to end the slave trade had been particularly strong among Quakers, but the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787 as a non-denominational group, with Anglican members, in an attempt to influence parliament directly. Under the Test Act, only those prepared to receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper according to the rites of the Church of England were permitted to serve as MPs. Equiano had been influenced by George Whitefield’s evangelism.
As early as 1783, Equiano informed abolitionists such as Granville Sharp about the slave trade; that year he was the first to tell Sharp about the Zong massacre, which was being tried in London as litigation for insurance claims. It became a cause célèbre for the abolitionist movement and contributed to its growth.[10]
On 21 October 1785, he was one of eight delegates from Africans in America to present an ‘Address of Thanks’ to the Quakers at a meeting in Gracechurch Street, London. The address referred to A Caution to Great Britain and her Colonies by Anthony Benezet, founder of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.
Equiano was befriended and supported by abolitionists, many of whom encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially in this effort by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors. His lectures and preparation for the book were promoted by, among others, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon.
MEMOIR
Entitled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), the book went through nine editions in his lifetime. It is one of the earliest-known examples of published writing by an African writer to be widely read in England. By 1792, it was a best seller and had been published in Russia, Germany, Holland, and the United States. It was the first influential slave narrative of what became a large literary genre. But Equiano’s experience in slavery was quite different from that of most slaves; he did not participate in fieldwork, he served his owners personally and went to sea, was taught to read and write, and worked in trading.
Equiano’s personal account of slavery, his journey of advancement, and his experiences as a black immigrant caused a sensation in publication. The book fuelled a growing anti-slavery movement in Great Britain, Europe, and the New World. His account surprised many with the quality of its imagery, description, and literary style.
In his account, Equiano gives details about his hometown and the laws and customs of the Eboe people. After being captured as a boy, he described the communities he passed through as a captive on his way to the coast. His biography details his voyage on a slave ship and the brutality of slavery in the colonies of the West Indies, Virginia, and Georgia.
Equiano commented on the reduced rights that freed people of color had in these same places, and they also faced risks of kidnapping and enslavement. Equiano embraced Christianity at the age of 14 and its importance to him is a recurring theme in his autobiography. He was baptized into the Church of England in 1759; he described himself in his autobiography as a “protestant of the church of England” but also flirted with Methodism.
Several events in Equiano’s life led him to question his faith. He was distressed in 1774 by the kidnapping of his friend, a black cook named John Annis, who was taken forcibly off the British ship Anglicania on which they were both serving.[citation needed] His friend’s kidnapper, William Kirkpatrick, did not abide by the decision in the Somersett Case (1772), that slaves could not be taken from England without their permission, as common law did not support the institution in England & Wales. Kirkpatrick had Annis transported to Saint Kitts, where he was punished severely[why?] and worked as a plantation laborer until he died. With the aid of Granville Sharp, Equiano tried to get Annis released before he was shipped from England but was unsuccessful. He heard that Annis was not free from suffering until he died in slavery. Despite his questioning, he affirms his faith in Christianity, as seen in the penultimate sentence of his work that quotes the prophet Micah (Micah 6:8): “After all, what makes any event important, unless by its observation we become better and wiser, and learn ‘to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God?'”
In his account, Equiano also told of his settling in London. He married an English woman and lived with her in Soham, Cambridgeshire, where they had two daughters. He became a leading abolitionist in the 1780s, lecturing in numerous cities against the slave trade. Equiano records his and Granville Sharp’s central roles in the anti-slave trade movement, and their effort to publicize the Zong massacre, which became known in 1783.
Reviewers have found that his book demonstrated the full and complex humanity of Africans as much as the inhumanity of slavery. The book was considered an exemplary work of English literature by a new African author. Equiano did so well in sales that he achieved independence from his benefactors. He traveled throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland promoting the book. He worked to improve economic, social, and educational conditions in Africa. Specifically, he became involved in working in Sierra Leone, a colony founded in 1792 for freed slaves by Britain in West Africa.
FAMILY
On 7 April 1792, Equiano married Susannah Cullen, a local woman, in St Andrew’s Church, Soham, Cambridgeshire. The original marriage register containing the entry for Vassa and Cullen is held today by the Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies. He included his marriage in every edition of his autobiography from 1792 onwards. The couple settled in the area and had two daughters, Anna Maria (1793–1797) and Joanna (1795–1857) who were baptized at Soham church.
Susannah died in February 1796, aged 34, and Equiano died a year after that on 31 March 1797.[Soon after, the elder daughter died at the age of four, leaving the younger child, Joanna Vassa, to inherit Equiano’s estate when she was 21; it was then valued at £950 (equivalent to £77,000 in 2021). Anna Maria is commemorated by a plaque at St Andrew’s Church, Chesterton, Cambridge. Joanna Vassa married the Reverend Henry Bromley, a Congregationalist minister, in 1821. They are both buried at the non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington, London; the Bromleys’ monument is now a Grade II listed building.
He drew up his will on 28 May 1796. At the time he made this will he was living at the Plaisterers’ Hall, then on Addle Street, in Aldermanbury in the City of London. He moved to John Street (now Whitfield Street), close to Whitefield’s Tabernacle, Tottenham Court Road. At his death on 31 March 1797, he was living in Paddington Street, Westminster.Equiano’s death was reported in American as well as British newspapers.
Equiano was buried at Whitefield’s Tabernacle on 6 April. The entry in the register reads “Gustus Vasa, 52 years, St Mary Le bone”. His burial place has been lost. The small burial ground lay on either side of the chapel and is now Whitfield Gardens. The site of the chapel is now the American International Church.
Equiano’s will, in the event of his daughters’ deaths before reaching the age of 21, bequeathed half his wealth to the Sierra Leone Company for a school in Sierra Leone, and half to the London Missionary Society
HISTORICAL ACCOUNTS QUESTIONED BY RESEARCHERS
Following the publication in 1967 of a newly edited version of his memoir by Paul Edwards, interest in Equiano revived. Scholars from Nigeria have also begun studying him. For example, S.S. Ogede identifies Equiano as a pioneer in asserting “the dignity of African life in the white society of his time”.
In researching his life, some scholars since the late 20th century have disputed Equiano’s account of his origins. In 1999 while editing a new version of Equiano’s memoir, Vincent Carretta, a professor of English at the University of Maryland, found two records that led him to question the former slave’s account of being born in Africa. He first published his findings in the journal Slavery and Abolition. At a 2003 conference in England, Carretta defended himself against Nigerian academics, like Obiwu, who accused him of “pseudo-detective work” and indulging “in vast publicity gamesmanship”.[48] In his 2005 biography, Carretta suggested that Equiano may have been born in South Carolina rather than Africa, as he was twice recorded from there. Carretta wrote:
Equiano was certainly African by descent. The circumstantial evidence that Equiano was also African-American by birth and African-British by choice is compelling but not absolutely conclusive. Although the circumstantial evidence is not equivalent to proof, anyone dealing with Equiano’s life and art must consider it.[8]
According to Carretta, Equiano/Vassa’s baptismal record and a naval muster roll document him as from South Carolina. Carretta interpreted these anomalies as possible evidence that Equiano had made up the account of his African origins, and adopted material from others. But Paul Lovejoy, Alexander X. Byrd, and Douglas Chambers note how many general and specific details Carretta can document from sources that related to the slave trade in the 1750s as described by Equiano, including the voyages from Africa to Virginia, sale to Pascal in 1754, and others. They conclude he was more likely telling what he understood as fact, rather than creating a fictional account; his work is shaped as an autobiography.
Lovejoy wrote that:
circumstantial evidence indicates that he was born where he said he was, and that, in fact, The Interesting Narrative is reasonably accurate in its details, although, of course, subject to the same criticisms of selectivity and self-interested distortion that characterize the genre of autobiography.
Lovejoy uses the name of Vassa in his article since that was what the man used throughout his life, in “his baptism, his naval records, marriage certificate and will”.He emphasizes that Vassa only used his African name in his autobiography.
Other historians also argue that the fact that many parts of Equiano’s account can be proven lends weight to accepting his account of African birth. As historian Adam Hochschild has written:
In the long and fascinating history of autobiographies that distort or exaggerate the truth. … Seldom is one crucial portion of a memoir totally fabricated and the remainder scrupulously accurate; among autobiographers … both dissemblers and truth-tellers tend to be consistent.
He also noted that “since the ‘rediscovery’ of Vassa’s account in the 1960s, scholars have valued it as the most extensive account of an eighteenth-century slave’s life and the difficult passage from slavery to freedom”.