Olaudah Equiano: A Great Abolitionist Of African Origin (1745-1797)

Olaudah Equiano History

Olaudah Equiano, of Ibo descent, was born in a hamlet near modern-day Onitsha in 1745. Slave traders kidnapped him when he was about eleven years old, and after passing through several black owners, British slavers eventually sent him to the New World as one of three million Africans removed from Africa in the eighteenth century.

Gustavus Vassa was named after the Swedish king who had emancipated his people from Danish tyranny, most likely with irony in mind. He continued to use the moniker after emancipation, though he frequently qualified it on paper with the words “the African.” 

He endured a variety of hardships in the West Indies, converted to Christianity in 1759, and developed skills as a domestic worker, barber, sailor (including a stint in the Seven Years War against France), and independent trader.

Despite facing numerous deceptions from white customers, Equiano’s economic activities enabled him to accumulate sufficient wealth to secure his manumission in 1767. Equiano moved to London later that year and worked as a sailor for the next ten years, traveling to the Mediterranean and Levant, the West Indies (again), and the Arctic in one of the unsuccessful attempts to discover the North West Passage. 

He participated in a similar unsuccessful settlement effort on Nicaragua’s Mosquito Coast. He had a religious experience in October 1774 where he saw a vision of Christ and realized that divine mercy had saved him. In 1777, he began domestic work in London. One employer, struck by his Christian dedication, recommended missionary work in West Africa, but the Church of England, then uninterested in such activity, denied him ordination. 

After a sea voyage to Philadelphia in 1784, where he encountered the city’s sizable free black community, Equiano eventually became involved in the Sierra Leone plot, which Granville Sharp, with whom he had been in contact since the early 1770s, had inspired.

In 1786, the British government appointed him “Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the Black Poor to Sierra Leone,” a position that in fact required him to balance the interests of his employers and those of the black settlers themselves. 

His efforts to protect both from the dishonesty of the white official in charge of the mission led to his wrongful dismissal in March of the following year. In 1789, Equiano published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative, under his birth name and included his slave name as a subtitle.

It gained tremendous sales, thanks to its author’s promotional tours around the country, and was published in nine British editions, the final in 1794, when the tide turned against the abolitionist cause following the French revolutionary horror and the Saint-Domingue slave insurrection. 

The Interesting Narrative is a firsthand account of the violence that underpins the plantation system: the rapacity of slave traders, the inhumanity of the Middle Passage on slave ships, the savagery of plantation owners, and the treatment of black people (free and enslaved) by whites in the West Indies and American colonies. 

At the same time, it offers a picture of traditional African life that differs from the idealized and Arcadian views of many contemporaries of abolition; for example, Equiano mentions household slavery and local conflict in Ibo society. 

He infuses his narrative with his passionate and profound evangelical Christianity, portraying slave-owners and slave-traffickers as “nominal Christians” corrupted by selfishness and immorality, who fail to treat others as they would have treated themselves. It is a worthy addition to John Wesley’s sermons against the evils of slavery. 

Above all, it is a personal declaration from someone who has lived as a slave. His depiction of the “red faces” of white slavers and the “large furnace” on the ship that brought him away from Africa (Chapter 3) is based on his personal experiences, engraved with the sharp instrument of boyhood recall. Equiano’s interesting narrative earned him a lot of attention during his life.

The Prince of Wales (later George IV) and the Duke of York were among its supporters. It gave Equiano a substantial return, ensuring a comfortable retirement. He married Susanna Cullen, a white woman, on April 7, 1792, and she died a year before him. Before the prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade, he passed away in London on March 31, 1797.

His fame lingered for a while, then faded away in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when chroniclers praised Wilberforce and his white colleagues for their crusade against slavery and the slave trade while ignoring the contributions of Equiano and other former black slaves, such as Ignatius Sancho and Ottobah Cuguano. Since the 1960s, there has been an increase in interest in black history, particularly in the United States. 

It has resulted in a rediscovery of Equiano and his book, which has achieved “an iconic status” (Walvin 1994) in black diaspora studies. It has also provided future generations with an accurate and firsthand account of the African experience during the peak of the British plantation system in the late 18th century.

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