Olaudah Equiano - The Interesting Narrative

On a warm morning in the summer of 2003, the then President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, addressed the then President of Senegal, Abdoulaye Wade, at a ceremony on Gore Island, a former slave-trading fort in the Atlantic Ocean, clearly visible from the quayside of the Senegalese capital Dakar. In this, his first visit to Africa, President Bush spoke, as he put it, mindful of past wrongs and dedicated to the advance of human liberty. He reflected on the brutal history of slavery in both Africa and America before noting the paradox of American liberty: that the freedom and prosperity enjoyed by many Americans in its early years came at a steep price, when one in every seven human beings was the property of another. In this era, Bush noted, a man named Olaudah Equiano was taken in bondage to the New World. He witnessed all of slaverys cruelties, the ruthless and the petty. He also saw beyond the slave-holding piety of the time to a higher standard of humanity. This man, said President Bush, was followed by many others who took a stand against slavery, racism, and oppression; the very people traded into slavery, he said, helped to set America free.

Olaudah Equiano may have been surprised to have been associated so strongly with the United States, a country which he had visited but in which he had never been resident. Nevertheless, he would, one suspects, have been delighted to have had his life and work celebrated by the leader of the most powerful nation on earth in the name of international friendship, African development, and the progress of freedomideals which were central to his life and work. That Equianos fame would endure into the twenty-first century was no sure thing. Successful in his own time, and remembered for a few decades after his death in 1797, he was largely forgotten until the mid-twentieth century when scholars in Scotland, England, Nigeria, and the United States rediscovered his work and hailed him as a distinctive and important voice of the age of slavery. By the start of the twenty-first century, his only major writing, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African Written by Himself (1789), was available in print, in anthologies, and online, and was read by scholars, students, and interested readers across the world. When an American president made Equiano the centrepiece of a speech in Africa, it was a signal that Equianos life and work were no longer considered as interesting but obscure historical asides, but rather as central moments in a global struggle against slavery and oppression.

The work on which Equianos reputation rests, The Interesting Narrative, can be viewed in many lights, but at its most simple level it is the autobiography of an individual who tells his story from his earliest recollections to the point immediately before the book was published. The author was born, he tells us, as Olaudah Equiano, the son of a chief in the Igbo-speaking region of Guinea, which today corresponds to south-east Nigeria. He had a happy childhood until, at about the age of eight or ten, he and his sister were kidnapped by strangers and forcibly marched to the coast. The journey took several months, after which he was separated from his sister and put aboard a European slave-trading ship. After experiencing a horrific transatlantic voyage, he was taken first to Barbados and next to Virginia, where he was sold as a slave to a British sea captain called Michael Pascal who gave the child the name Gustavus Vassa, which he would continue to use throughout the rest of his life. With Pascal, Equiano served on a variety of Royal Navy warships during the Seven Years War (175463) where he saw action in Canada and the Mediterranean and learned to read and write. In late 1762 he was unexpectedly sold and taken to the Caribbean island of Montserrat, where he became the slave of a Quaker planter, Robert King. After three years, the young man had saved up enough money from trading to buy his own freedom, and shortly after he departed for London where he trained as a hairdresser. For the next twenty years he worked variously as a personal servant and as a ships steward, taking voyages to the Mediterranean and America. In 1773 he joined Constantine John Phippss famous expedition to find a north-east passage across the Arctic to the Pacific, experienced a profound conversion to Christianity in 1774, and in 1776 took part in a short-lived scheme to found a colony on the Caribbean coast of modern-day Nicaragua. In 17867, he briefly worked for the British government as a Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the scheme to resettle Londons black poor in Sierra Leone, before being dismissed after protesting at the corruption he witnessed. He then turned his attention to supporting the campaign for the abolition of the British slave trade, writing to newspapers, petitioning the Queen, and finally contributing his own testimony to the cause in the form of