1789 Olaudah Equiano, the ‘black Ben Franklin’, is the first notable author of African extraction in Western literature. The moot point is whether it is English or American (or – arguably – ‘colonial’) literature.
Equiano, later known as Gustavus Vassa, was, he claimed, born around 1745 in what is now the Ibo (‘Essaka’, as he calls it) region of Nigeria. It was then a part of the Abyssinian empire. Equiano’s father was, he records, a village elder. He was also a slave-owner, but, his son hastens to add, a very humane slave-owner.
By his own account, Equiano was brought up in a condition of Edenic simplicity, a world away from the invasions, wars and revolutions that were upheaving Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and North America during the second half the 18th century.
Aged around eleven, his African paradise was lost. Equiano was kidnapped while playing innocently with his sister, and carried off to slavery. Initially, like his father’s slaves, his masters were African. But he was sold on to the traders at the coast. Here it was that he first came into contact with white people. It inspires one of the more vivid sections in his autobiography. They strike him as monsters. These pale devils, with their ‘red faces and loose hair’ must be cannibals, he assumes: they will eat him.
The description of the middle passage of his life is the most affecting, and horrifying, in Equiano’s published memoirs. His later career, vivid as it is on the page, can be briefly summarised. Sold on a number of times, he was transported to Barbados, where he was judged too physically slight for labour in the sugar plantations. He eventually found himself in the colony of Virginia, where he was bought by a Royal Navy officer, renamed Gustavus Vassa, and – as a personal valet – humanely treated.
Equiano endeared himself by loyal service both to his master and, as a sailor on board ship, to the Crown. In England he was, still a teenager, sent to school to learn how to read and write. Equiano also became a devout Christian, persuading his master to let him be baptised in 1759 – so that he might go to heaven.
He might be free up there. But not, for a few years yet, down here. Poor ‘Gustavus’ was sold on again. He was now a valuable property – a literate, numerate, well-spoken slave. As such he was eventually bought by a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia and put to work as an inventory clerk, on a tiny salary. Equiano eventually saved up the £40 required to buy his freedom.
The great day in his life was 10 July 1766, when he became a free man.
After manumission, he prudently took up residence in England and went into trade himself for a few years (including black gold, or slaves) before allying himself with the British abolitionist movement, whose figurehead he became. He gave heart-rending speeches, preached, and married an Englishwoman in 1795. In 1789, with the help of noble patrons, he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
The last phase of Equiano’s life was, evidently, happy but is largely unrecorded. There were two daughters to his marriage, his wife died in 1796 and he followed her a year later, aged (probably) 52. It’s not known where he was buried – although he left a sizeable amount to his daughters.
Equiano’s interesting narrative was widely circulated in the abolition movement, as eyewitness evidence of the realities of slavery. So it was accepted for centuries. But a few years ago, scholars – notably Vincent Carretta – found convincing evidence (specifically a baptismal certificate and a ship’s muster roll) that Equiano had been born in South Carolina. He was American.
This, if true (and it seems currently incontrovertible), means that the most vivid African and slave-ship sections of the book – its heart – must be invention. Fictional.