Olaudah Equiano

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Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano (c.1745 – 31 March 1797), also sometimes called Gustavus Vassa, was an eighteenth century merchant seaman and writer of African descent, who lived in Britain's American colonies - the United States of America after 1776 - and in Britain. He was a leading influence in the abolition of slavery.

Olaudah Equiano was born about 1745 into the Ibo tribe in the village of Isseke in Benin. His life was disturbed from the start and also through the rest of his life. Slavery was a big part of his culture and his own family had slaves, but he wasn’t far from being a slave of his own.

At the age of eleven, Equiano and his younger sister were abducted from their home while the rest of the Family were working in the fields and was transported to the West Indies. While in the West Indies he had African slave masters whom treated him well. During the time of Equiano being in the West Indies he was passed to slave master to another. But they decided to send Equiano and some slaves to the coast seven months after his abduction from his family. While he was on the coast he endured a dramatic middle passage to the New World. For most of the slaves it was a nightmare with merciless flogging, and horrible stench cries of women and children of them dying. When the ship ported to land in Barbados, where most slaves were bought, but Equiano had no buyer for more than two weeks. His first buyer was Mr. Campbell but that didn’t last long and he was sold to another slave master by the name of Michael H. Pascal. Mr. Pascal was a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.

During Equiano’s seven year time span with Mr. Pascal he learned English and go to know ways and culture of the people that surrounded him. Mr. Pascal sent Equiano to school to learn how to read, write, and was even baptized. When he was baptized he decided to spend the rest of his life striving to become a better Christian. Once again Equiano was sold to another slave master by the name of Captain James Doran. But Equiano; with Captain Doran he returned back to the West Indies to be sold again to a Quaker merchant by the name of Robert King, where served Mr. Kings merchants ships and their accomplished seamen. During this time he got into a fight with a jealous by a white man because of Equiano’s rank of becoming a sailor.

Later, Olaudah Equiano was sold to Robert King, a Quaker (member of the Religious Society of Friends) merchant in Philadelphia. King taught him to read and write fluently, and educated him in the Christian faith.

1 Pioneer of the Abolitionist Cause
2 Issues of Origin
3 Family in Britain
4 Last Days & Will
5 External links

[edit] Pioneer of the Abolitionist Cause

At 21 years old, Equiano bought his freedom; his Quaker owner having encouraged his well-educated protege to engage in profitable trading on his own as well as his masters' behalf.

After several years of travels and trading, Equiano was moved to journey to London and become involved in the abolitionist movement. This was particularly strong amongst Quakers, but which was non-denominational, and he himself was broadly Methodist, having been influenced by Whitefield's evangelism in the New World.

Olaudah Equiano proved a popular speaker, supported financially by philantropic abolitionists and religious benefactors; his lectures and preparation for the book were promoted by, among others, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. Meeting with great success as a public speaker, Olandah Equiano was introduced to many senior and influential people. They encouraged him to write and publish his life story, which exceeded all expectations for the quality of its imagery and description as a literary style, as well as its profoundly shaming narrative towards those who had not yet joined the cause of slavery abolition. Entitled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African it was first published in (1789) and rapidly went through several editions. It is one of the earliest known examples of published writing by a black African writer. Its first-hand account of slavery (from the slave's perspective) and of the travels and experiences of an Eighteenth Century black immigrant in America and Britain made a profound impact.

This book not only furthered the abolitionist cause whilst providing an exemplary work of English literature by a new, and African, author, but also made Equiano's fortune. This gave him independence from his benefactors and enbled him to more fully chart his own life and purpose, and develop his interest in working to improve economic, social and educational conditions in Africa and elsewhere, particularly Sierra Leone.

[edit] Issues of Origin

Vincent Carretta, a professor of literature and author of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005), points out that a major problem facing any biographer is how to deal with Equiano's account of his origins.

As Carretta explains: Eqiuano 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.

This current doubt about his origins, arises from records that suggest Equiano may have been born in South Carolina. Other academics have reported an oral history record of his upbringing, as he claimed, in Isske, Africa, principally based on Catherine Obianuju Acholonu's study: The Igbo Roots Of Olaudah Equiano: An Anthropological Research 1989. A more recent paper (2005/06) that favours Olandah Equiano's own account of his African birth, is the Canadian academic study by Paul Lovejoy, Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, allis Olandah Equiano, the African. Historians have never discredited the accuracy of Equiano's narrative, nor the power it had to support the abolitionist cause, particularly in England during the 1790s, but parts of Equiano's account of the Middle Passage may have been based on already published accounts or the experiences of those he knew.

[edit] Family in Britain

At some point, having travelled widely, Olaudah Equiano appears to have decided to settle in Britain and raise a family. Equiano is closely associated with Soham, Cambridgeshire, where, on the 7 April 1792, he married Susannah Cullen, a local girl, in St Andrew's Church. He announced his wedding in every edition of his autobiography from 1792 onwards, and it has been suggested his marriage mirrored his anticipation of a commercial union between Africa and England. The couple settled in the area and had two daughters, Anna Maria , born 16th October 1793 and Joanna born 11th April 1795.

Susannah died in February 1796 aged 34, and Equiano died a year after that on 31 March 1797, aged c.52. Soon after, the elder daughter died aged four years old, leaving Joanna to inherit Equiano's estate which was valued at £950 — a considerable sum, worth approximately £100,000 today. Joanna married the Rev. Henry Bromley and they ran a Congregational Chapel at Clavering near Saffron Walden in Essex, before moving to London in the middle of the nineteenth century - they are both buried at the Congregationalists' novel non-denominational Abney Park Cemetery, in Stoke Newington.

[edit] Last Days & Will

Although Equiano's death is recorded in London, the location of his burial is unknown. One of his last London addresses appear to have been Plaisters Hall in the City of London (from where he drew up his will on 28 May 1796).

Having drawn up his will, Olandah Equiano, moved to John Street, Tottenham Court Road, close to Whitefield's Methodist chapel (where there is a small, recent memorial); and lastly Paddington Street, Middlesex where he died. His death was reported in newspaper obituaries at the time, but seems not to have been widely known. He may moved frequently and left an unlear trail to his burial place, having held concerns for his own safety and to rest in peace, since sections of the political elite sought to suppress reformers, and those linked to them in the 1790s, the time of the American and French Revolutions. In December 1797, unaware that he had died nine months earlier, the government sponsored Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner presumed him to still be alive, for it satirised him at a fictional meeting of the Friends of Freedom.

Olandah Equiano's will demonstrates the sincerity of his religious and social beliefs. Had his daughter Joanna died before reaching the age of inheritance (twenty-one), his wealth would have passed, half to the Sierra Leona Company for the continued provision of help to West Africans, and half to the organisation formed the previous November at the Countess of Huntingdon's Connection Spa Fields Chapel. This was The Missionary Society, the organisation that by the early nineteenth century had become well known world-wide as a non-denominational, though largely Congregational, London Missionary Society promoting education overseas.