Starting Black Literature Through Olaudah Equianos Slave And After-slavery Experiences

Posted on March 24, 2008 - Filed Under Arts and Entertainment, Computers and Technology

Olaudah Equiano was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British debate for the abolition of the slave trade. His autobiography depicting the horrors of slavery helped influence British lawmakers to abolish the slave trade in 1807.

Equiano’s early life began about 1745 in the village of “Essaka” in an Igbo-speaking region of present-day Nigeria. where his father was a chief and an important elder who helped settle disputes.

He and his sister at the age of eleven, were kidnapped by fellow Africans and sold into slavery. After changing hands a few times he was shipped across the Atlantic to Barbados where he remained unpurchased because of his small size; for the work on a sugar plantation required much strength.

He was then sent to a plantation in Virginia where Equiano observed with horror the use of an “iron muzzle” around the mouth of fellow slaves to keep them quiet thus rendering them barely able to speak or eat. The objects inside the house so amazed and frightened him that he even thought the pictures hanging on the wall followed him wherever he went, and a clock hanging from the chimney would tell his master about anything he would do wrong.

At that plantation he was seen, liked and bought immediately by Michael Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. As renaming, was a common practice among slave owners then, Pascal renamed him Gustavus Vassa one of his many new names he was given by his owners. (This is the Latinized form of the name of King Gustav I of Sweden, known for having liberated his country from Danish rule in the 16th Century.) Though Equiano at first detested the name, he later on used it in most of his writings and became known by it.

Being the slave of a naval captain, Equiano was afforded naval training and was able to travel extensively. He participated in the Seven Years War of England with France. He was at the siege of Fort Louisburg in Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia. He also served Pascal as a seaman. He became Pascal’s personal servant but was also expected to contribute in times of battle. His duty was to haul gunpowder to the gun decks. Equiano was sent to Ms. Guerin and her sister, family friends of Pascal, to attend school and learn to read in England. At this time the other servants warned Equiano that if he wasn’t baptized he wouldn’t be able to go to Heaven. Eventually he was allowed to be baptized. This he did in St. Margaret’s church, Westminster, in February 1759. Whilst here in England his honesty and trustworthiness won him friendship and support from many English people, a base which he was going to find most useful later in his abolitionist as well as writing and speaking advocacy..

But after the war was won, Equiano didn’t receive his share of the prize money awarded to the other sailors, along with his freedom. Later, to his dismay, he was in 1763 sold on the island of Montserrat in the Caribbean Leeward Islands. Equiano’s literacy and seamanship skills as well as his knowledge of hairdressing, wine making and arithmetic made him less desirable to some. For it had made him too valuable for plantation labour. These made him less desirable to some slave traders. For he was too well educated and the fact that he knew how to navigate a ship scared many away from him..

He was eventually acquired by Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who carried on much of his business trading in ‘live cargos’ in the Caribbean. King however, unlike most slave owners then treated Equiano humanely. He set Equiano to work on his shipping routes and in his stores, promising him in 1765, that for forty pounds, the price King had paid for Equiano, he could buy his freedom. King taught him to read and write more fluently, educated him in the Christian faith, and allowed him to engage in his own profitable trading as well as on his master’s behalf, enabling Equiano to come by the forty pounds honestly. As a result Equiano soon succeeded in buying his freedom. Once having gained his freedom he pledged never to set foot again on American soil.

This was despite King’s then urging Equiano to stay on as a business partner. For Equiano found it dangerous and limiting to remain in the British American colonies as a freed black. For, while loading a ship in Georgia, he was almost kidnapped back into slavery. He was only released when the level of his education was made apparent. His intention to settle in London for the rest of his life was realised in 1769. He made his living there as a free servant, a hair dresser for affluent Londoners. But his skill as a seaman and his remarkable curiosity made him restless for new adventures. But before that he had learnt to play the French horn onto mastering it almost to the level of an accomplished musician.

Equiano remained at sea for several years more voyaging to the Arctic as a surgeon’s assistant and to the Mediterranean as a gentleman’s valet, and living for a time among the Makito Indians of Nicaragua. Equiano returned to England, where after Somerset’s Case of 1772 it was proclaimed that no person could be a slave again in England.

Equiano became deeply involved in the abolitionist movement which had been particularly strong amongst Quakers, but was by now non-denominational. Equiano himself was now broadly Methodist, having been influenced by George Whitefield’s evangelism in the New World.

Equiano proved to be a popular speaker and was introduced to many senior and influential people, who encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors. His lectures and preparation for the book were promoted by, among others, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon. His account surprised many with the quality of its imagery and description,its literary style, as well as its narrative which was profoundly indictive of those who had not joined the 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 went through 36 editions between 1789 and 1857 and was translated into Dutch in 1790, into German in 1792 and into Russian in 1794. Nineteen editions were produced in the United States and Europe by the mid-nineteenth century. It is one of the earliest known examples of published writing by an African writer as well as the first influential slave autobiography, and first-hand account of slavery which caused a sensation when published in 1789, fuelling a growing anti-slavery movement in England.

It is widely regarded as the prototype of the slave narrative, a form of autobiography that in the nineteenth century gained a wide international readership due to its compelling firsthand testimony against slavery. It is indeed one of the first attempts made by an African writer to enter the literary world of western culture following the trail of the spiritual autobiographical tradition of St Augustine and John Bunyan but with a new dimension of social protest added. In its bulky two volumes, it tells a richly detailed story of personal remembrances of African societies, slave experiences, seagoing adventure, spiritual enlightenment, his life as a free man in the West with the facts and ideas derived from his wide reading of historical, geographical, religious as well as political works and economic success in England and the Americas. He is at his best when he is recreating the conflicting feelings of awe and fear that often seize him when he comes into contact with both the marvels and terrors of the Western world.. Equiano’s ability to espouse the highest ideals of his era in the language of the ordinary man and woman contributed immensely to the work’s impressive publication record. After its publication Equiano travelled extensively in England and Ireland promoting it.

Equiano’s narrative begins in the West African village Essaka (an Igbo village formerly in northeast Nigeria), where he was adorned in the tradition of the “greatest warriors.” and where he was kidnapped into slavery in 1756. In vividly recalling his childhood, Equiiano is unique in his recollection of traditional African life before the advent of the European slave trade. He also vividly recalls the pestilence and horror of the Middle Passage: “I now wished for the last friend, Death, to relieve me.” As described in his book, the young Equiano was eventually shipped to a Virginia plantation where he witnessed slaves tortured with thumbscrews and the iron muzzle. Slavery, he explained,brutalizes everyone, slave as well as slaver.

A vital part of the work is given to how Equiano wins his freedom thus eventually becoming a new man reborn into a society where he can operate on a free plane of existence. This physical and spiritual liberation enables him to become complete as a person who can assume new and commanding roles in life like: taking charge of a vessel during a storm at sea, serving as a parson, overseeing slaves, and then graduating to the proudest role of abolitionist leader and autobiographer. He thus succeeds in projecting himself as a very intelligent, clever and complex man.

The autobiography goes on to describe how Equiano’s adventures brought him to London, where he married into English society and became a leading abolitionist.His exposé of the infamous slave-ship Zong - 133 slaves thrown overboard in mid-ocean for the insurance money - shook the nation. But it was Equiano’s book that would prove his most lasting contribution to the abolitionist movement, a book which vividly demonstrated the humanity of Africans as much as the inhumanity of slavery.

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

Equiano recalls his childhood in Essaka (an Igbo village formerly in northeast Nigeria), where he was adorned in the tradition of the “greatest warriors.” He is unique in his recollection of traditional African life before the advent of the European slave trade. Equiano’s life on the high seas, which included not only travels throughout the Americas, Turkey and the Mediterranean; but also participation in major naval battles during the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War), as well as in the search for a northwest passage led by the Phipps expedition of 1772-1773 is vividly recorded. Equiano also records his central role, along with Granville Sharpe, in the British Abolitionist Movement. As a major voice in this movement, Equiano petitioned the Queen of England in 1788. He was appointed to the expedition to settle London’s poor Blacks in Sierra Leone, a British colony on the west coast of Africa. Sadly, he did not complete the journey back to his native land., because of intrigues against him after he had exposed corruption amongst some officials.

Olaudah Equiano settled in Britain and raised a family. For it was in Soham, Cambridgeshire, where, on the 7th of April 1792, he married Susannah Cullen, in St Andrew’s Church. The original marriage register containing the entry is today held by Cambridgeshire Archives and Local Studies at the County Record Office in Cambridge. His wedding is announced in every edition of his autobiography from 1792 onwards, and his marriage mirrored his anticipation of a commercial union between Africa and Great Britain. The couple settled in the area and had two daughters, Anna Maria , born October 16, 1793, and Joanna, born April 11, 1795.

Though Equiano was not the first African-born former slave to write about his experiences in bondage and freedom, he was the first to write the story of his life himself unaided by white ghost writers or editors. Because of the resulting independence of thought it didn’t strive to patronise the whites but to unrepentantly expose the atrocities of slavery whilst calling for its total and immediate abolition.

With Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, the Life of Olaudah Equiano verified the much disputed claim during the Enlightenment, that blacks could represent themselves effectively and positively through writing. No black voice before Frederick Douglas spoke so movingly to us about man’s inhumanity to man as Equiano’s. His story stands in a classs quite by itself.

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Arthur Edgar E. Smith was born, grew up and was schooled in Freetown, Sierra Leone. He has taught English since 1977 at Prince of Wales School and, Milton Margai College of Education. He is now a Senior Lecturer at Fourah Bay College where he has been lecturing English, Literature, as well as Creative Writing for the past seven years.

Mr Smith is widely published with his writings appearing in local newspapers as well as in West Africa Magazine, Index on Censorship, Focus on Library and Information Work amongst others.

He was one of 17 international visitors who participated in a seminar on contemporary American Literature sponsored by the U.S.State Department in 2006. His growing thoughts and reflections on this trip which took him to various US sights and sounds could be read at lisnews.org.

His other publications include: Folktales from Freetown, Langston Hughes: Life and Works Celebrating Black Dignity, and ‘The Struggle of the Book’

Tags: autobiography., black literature, experiences, freedom, olaudah equiano, slavery and after

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