Olaudah Equiano

Ibo slave, writer, and abolitionist

• Born: c. 1745
• Birthplace: Essaka, Kingdom of Benin (now in Nigeria)
• Died: March 31, 1797
• Place of death: London, England

Equiano was kidnapped in 1756, enslaved in Virginia, purchased by an English naval lieutenant, and subsequently sold to a Quaker. He purchased his freedom in 1766 and later published an autobiography. He exposed the Zong disaster, in which a captain drowned 132 slaves to recover insurance money. In 1788, he presented an antislavery petition to England’s Queen Caroline.

Early Life

The father of Olaudah Equiano (oh-LOW-duh ehk-wee-AHN-oh) was an elder (an embrenché) of their African tribe who served as a judge. His father held many slaves and had numerous children, seven of whom remained alive by Equiano’s eleventh year. Equiano claimed himself to be from a nation that celebrated music, dance, and poetry. He equated his people, the Ibo, with the ancient Jews. In warfare, his people carried shields that could cover a man from head to foot. He had been trained to fight with javelins. The land was fruitful, but workers had to walk several hours to reach the fields, where they tilled the land by hand, without oxen or machines.

When he was eleven years of age, while the adults were away, kidnappers captured children of the village and carried off Equiano and his sister; they were soon separated as they were transferred or sold from one slaveholder to another. Equiano soon found himself on a slave ship bound for Barbados. Once there, he was auctioned off to the highest bidder. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or, Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), describes the chaotic nature of the slave auction. Sold to a Virginia slaveholder, he saw a kitchen worker unable to eat or drink the food she was preparing because her face was encased in an iron muzzle. Equiano was next purchased by a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, Michael Henry Pascal. Throughout his adventures, Equiano developed a knowledge of languages and was able to adjust himself to each new situation. On his trip to England, Richard Baker, a boy sixteen or seventeen years old, taught him to read and write English.

Life’s Work

Olaudah Equiano was subjected to the oppression of the slave trade and the whims of slaveholders until he gained his freedom. However, his experience sailing with Michael Henry Pascal gave him knowledge of trade and sufficient education in sailing, in military warfare, in transcontinental business—including the slave trade—and in mercantilism. His experience would later enable him to become a successful businessman in his own right.

Near the age of twelve, in Falmouth, England, Equiano made the discovery that white people did not sell each other into slavery. He was also moved by attendance at a Methodist church service, where he learned of the concept of God. These experiences, as recounted in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, provide readers with an appreciation of Equiano’s view of life, but they also introduce engaging anecdotes. To entertain visitors on the ship, Equiano and a white sailor were forced to fight with each other, and they were paid from five to nine shillings for their effort. It was the first time he had a bloody nose.

Equiano learned the art of modern warfare on the Roebuck, a man-of-war that sailed the French coast and captured seventeen ships. He was permitted to fire the guns. On the warship Namur, Equiano witnessed the defeat of the French fleet at Louisbourg, off Nova Scotia, in 1758. He recognized the mayhem of war, with men falling thick about him and ships’ masts and main sails torn apart. So skillfully did he serve that he was ultimately appointed steward of the Namur.

Baptized in St. Margaret’s Church, Westminster, in February, 1749, Equiano was given Thomas Wilson’s book A Guide to the Indians (1740) by his friends the Guerin sisters, for religious study. His wartime experiences had increased his faith in Providence, for he had seen a woman with a baby at her breast fall from the upper deck of the Jason into the hold near the keel and suffer no injury; he himself had fallen headlong from the upper deck of the Etna into the after-hold; those who saw him fall assumed that he had been killed. Equiano attributed the woman’s and his survival to God’s will. Success as a seaman and as a crew member gave him confidence to perform other work. In Georgia, he conducted a funeral for the dead child of a black woman who could get no white minister to perform the ceremony. He also gained skill as a barber.

After the war, Equiano was sold to a slaveholder in the West Indies, where he saw the horrors of slavery. One slave who had earned enough money to purchase a boat for himself in turn had the boat confiscated by an angry slaveholder who refused to allow him his property. Another slave was staked to the ground and flogged for not giving up a paycheck to his owner soon enough. Shocked at the oppression, extortion, and cruelty of the slaves’ owners, Equiano gained relief when he was sold to the Quaker Robert King. Equiano was to handle many of King’s affairs in the slave trade. Equiano had difficulty reconciling the Christian beliefs of these slaveholders with their conduct toward their slaves. Having gained wealth working for the Quaker, Equiano purchased his freedom from King in 1766, at the age of twenty-one.

Equiano sought to end the slave trade and soon found himself involved in numerous abolitionist ventures, supported by the Methodist Church. He acted essentially as a world ambassador, advancing the cause of abolition in places such as Turkey, Italy, Genoa, Portugal, London, and Nicaragua. His travels, however, were not without the constant worry of being kidnapped again and sold back into slavery. In Savannah, Georgia, for example, two white men accosted him, maliciously identifying him as a missing slave.

Equiano exposed to the world the affair of the slave ship Zong. The Zong had sailed from Saõ Tomé, near West Africa, in September, 1781, with 440 slaves. Deadly disease spread through the ship, killing seven crew members and sixty slaves. When the ship reached the Caribbean, disease had spread so widely through its “cargo” that the captain of the ship knew the ship’s owners would suffer at the slave market because sick slaves would not sell profitably. Instead of bringing them to market, therefore, he chained 132 of them (in groups of 54, 42, and 36) and had them thrown overboard, thus collecting insurance money from their supposedly accidental drowning. The story told by Equiano rallied the abolitionists.

Equiano saw numerous organizations formed to seek the abolishment of slavery, including the Society for the Abolition of Slavery in England and the French Société des Amis de Noirs. In Massachusetts, New York, and Pennsylvania, legislators banned slavery. Slave revolts took place in the French colony of Saint Domingue(1791-1803) and in Richmond, Virginia (1800). By 1807, Great Britain had officially abolished the slave trade.

Significance

Olaudah Equiano helped to drive the international abolition movement in the eighteenth century, a time when the attitude of the world toward the slave trade was indeed changing. Slavery came to be seen by some as the antithesis of their religious beliefs and of democratic idealism. The English mainland law and the establishment of a nation that professed all individuals equal provided an opportunity for some to see an inherent hypocrisy in espousing religious morality while maintaining that the slave trade was an economic necessity.

Equiano’s greatest frustration lay in the difficulty of gaining freedom for those enslaved. He could not prevent William Fitzpatrick’s men in 1774 from carrying away his friend John Annis and returning him to slavery at St. Kitts, where he was subjected to torture and death, despite having gained his freedom in England. Feeling guilty for not saving Annis, Equiano seemed about to give up the struggle. In a stirring and prolonged passage at the end of chapter 10 of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, relating events of October 6, 1774, Equiano explains why he continued to fight. He compares himself to Jacob wrestling with the angel and relates a vision of Christ that reaffirmed his faith and sustained his fight for the freedom of the slave.

Bibliography

Allison, Robert J., ed. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Written by Himself. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1995. Reading Equiano’s narrative is the most important first task in studying his life and work. This text is annotated with a comprehensive introduction in five parts.

Carretta, Vincent. Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005. An informative and engrossing study of Equiano’s life and times that also provides an in-depth examination of Equiano’s slave narrative.

Costanzo, Angelo. Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1987. Equiano’s work is in the Spanish picaresque tradition of a traveller engaged in private and public affairs, a useful vehicle for objectifying slave narratives.

Potkay, Adam. “Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27 (1994): 677-690. Equiano’s “talking book” topos has African books talking to each other across time. The added integer is the spiritual lesson these books teach the African and Equiano’s religious commitment.

Sollors, Werner, ed. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or, Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. New York: W. W. Norton. Equiano’s authorship of The Narrative is confirmed with contemporary accounts (1789) extracted from the Monthly Review, the General Magazine and Impartial Review, and the Gentleman’s Magazine.