Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, a Self-Made Man

Britain’s loss of its thirteen North American colonies in the American Revolution caused many Britons to seek an explanation for such a humbling defeat. What national sin would justify such divine punishment? And how might Britain redeem itself? For many of its citizens, Britain’s predominant role in the transatlantic slave trade was an obvious possible answer to the first question. And ending that trade, to the second. The movement to abolish Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade developed rapidly in the 1780s. The emancipationist Granville Sharp had warned his fellow Britons on the eve of the American Revolution that their involvement with slavery risked dire national consequences. Parliament held hearings in which former slave owners, slave-ship surgeons, and slave-ship captains testifying to the cruelty of the trade helped turn the public toward the abolitionist position.

Gustavus Vassa—now better known as Olaudah Equiano, the name he publicly either reclaimed or assumed in 1789—saw that effective witnesses to the cruelty of the slave trade could influence legislators. And he certainly noticed how large the market was for information about the abominable trade. Most importantly, he recognized that what the abolitionist cause needed was exactly what he positioned himself to give them in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (London, 1789)—the story told from the point of view of an enslaved victim who had suffered the Middle Passage on a slave ship from Africa to the Americas. [1]

Equiano’s autobiography is multi-generic: a spiritual autobiography, captivity narrative, travel book, adventure tale, slavery narrative, economic treatise, apologia, and argument against the transatlantic slave trade as well as slavery. Equiano says that he was born in 1745 in present-day Nigeria, kidnapped into slavery around the age of eleven, and taken to the West Indies for a few days before being brought to Virginia and purchased by a local planter, who soon sold him to a British Royal Navy lieutenant commanding a commercial vessel while on extended leave. Equiano tells us that his enslaver renamed him Gustavus Vassa, and brought him to London in 1757. Gustavus Vassa remained his legal name throughout the rest of his life: on his baptismal record, his manumission document, his naval records, his marriage record, and his will.

Recent biographical discoveries, however, contradict Equiano’s story of his birth and early years. Records prove that he first reached England not in 1757, but at the end of 1754. He undoubtedly appreciated that the older he says he was when he arrived in North America the more credible his account of a childhood in Africa would be. Furthermore, Equiano’s baptismal and naval records say that he was born not in Africa, but in South Carolina. If true, he may have invented his African nativity and his much-cited account of the Middle Passage to more profitably support the abolitionist cause.

Equiano served with his enslaver on various ships during the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), but rather than freeing Equiano at the war’s close, as he had expected, his enslaver instead sold him into West Indian slavery at the end of 1762. Equiano personally avoided the horror of plantation labor because his West Indian enslaver recognized that the literacy and skills Equiano had gained in the Royal Navy rendered him more useful as an agent representing his business interests throughout the Caribbean islands. Equiano’s extraordinary mobility allowed him to bear witness to the evils of West Indian slavery, and enabled him to purchase his own freedom in 1766 with the profits he had made through private trading. Equiano remained in his previous enslaver’s employ for a year, making several trading trips to Georgia and Pennsylvania. Between 1767 and 1773, Equiano, based in London, worked on commercial vessels sailing to the Mediterranean and the West Indies, and commented on all the versions of slavery, White and Black, he observed. After suffering a near-death experience on an expedition to the Arctic seeking a Northeast Passage in 1773, Equiano embraced Methodism when he returned to London. And in 1774 he experienced the spiritual rebirth commemorated in his autobiography’s frontispiece. Again growing restless, in 1775–1776 he helped a friend and former employer in a short-lived attempt to establish a plantation in Central America, with Equiano acting as buyer and overseer of the enslaved workers. Disgusted by the irreligious behavior of his fellow employees, Equiano soon returned to London, where he increasingly became involved with the growing abolitionist movement. He published hostile newspaper reviews of pro-slavery books and argued for racial intermarriage (Equiano married an Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, in 1792). He joined Thomas Clarkson, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, James Ramsay, and Granville Sharp in their drive to abolish the transatlantic African slave trade, and with the project to resettle in Sierra Leone the Black poor, many of whom had fled from slavery to Canada and London with the British forces at the end of the American Revolution.

The remarkable achievement of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was immediately recognized. His initial list of 311 subscribers, headed by the Prince of Wales, included both prominent and obscure members of British society. Equiano accumulated more than a thousand subscribers by the ninth edition in 1794. Part of the book’s great popularity can be attributed to its timely publication at the height of the abolition movement. His first reviewers acknowledged the significance of the first-hand perspective of the Narrative. Equiano’s autobiography offered the only account by a former slave of slavery in Africa and on the Middle Passage, as well as in the West Indies, North America, the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and Britain. Equiano’s pre-publication advertisements for his book and his supervision of the publication and distribution of its nine British editions between 1789 and 1794 make him an important figure in the history of book publishing. Equiano’s extraordinary decision not to sell his copyright enabled him to keep most of the profits from the sale of his books. He initiated the modern practice of the author’s book tour by traveling to Ireland, Scotland, and throughout England to sell his autobiography. During his lifetime unauthorized editions and translations appeared in Holland (1790), New York (1791), Germany (1792), and Russia (1794).

At his death on March 31, 1797, Equiano was the wealthiest author of African descent in the English-speaking world. He had achieved the economic and social status he sought throughout his life. Most of his wealth came from his success as a self-made man who took advantage of the opportunities he found during a life of varied adventures, obstacles, and ultimate personal triumph. A genius at self-representation and self-promotion, Equiano defied convention by writing his autobiography, and then publishing, marketing, and distributing it himself. He was the first successful professional writer of African descent in the English-speaking world.

Timely when it first appeared, Equiano’s Interesting Narrative has also proven to be timeless. Although Equiano did not live to see the abolition in 1807 of the legal transatlantic slave trade, he had contributed to its cessation by having so skillfully and creatively fashioned the story of his life. With the publication of his Interesting Narrative, Olaudah Equiano gave the abolitionist cause the African voice it needed. Historians, literary critics, and the general public recognize Equiano as the most accomplished autobiographer of African descent before Frederick Douglass. Several modern editions are now available of his Interesting Narrative. Equiano, who considered himself a citizen of the world, would undoubtedly be gratified by the posthumous reception and influence of the story of his life he had fashioned. Excerpts from his book are in almost every anthology and on nearly all websites covering American, African American, British, and Caribbean eighteenth-century history and literature. Equiano has been the subject of television shows, films, comic books, and children’s books. His Interesting Narrative established many of the conventions employed in subsequent slave narratives, particularly in North America. As W. E. B. Du Bois noted in 1913 in The Negro in Literature and Art, Equiano founded the African American slave narrative genre that continues in fictional neo-slave narratives such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Vincent Carretta is emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland. He is the author of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005), The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque, The First African Anglican Missionary (2010), co-edited with Ty M. Reese, and Phillis Wheatley: Biography of a Genius in Bondage (2011). His most recent book is a scholarly edition of the writings of Phillis Wheatley (Oxford University Press, 2019).