Olaudah Equiano (; c. 1745 – 31 March 1797), known for most of his life as Gustavus Vassa (), was a writer who, drawing on his experiences as an enslaved African in the Americas, became a celebrated figure within the abolitionist movement in Great Britain and Ireland. According to his memoir, he was kidnapped from his home in West Africa (a village in what is now southern Nigeria) and shipped first to Barbados and then to Virginia. There he was bought by a Royal Navy officer whom he accompanied, during the Seven Years' War, as a valet. He was sold twice more in the Caribbean before, having been permitted to trade on his own account, purchasing his freedom in 1766.
As a freedman in London, Equiano embraced the British abolitionist movement, in the 1780s becoming one of its Sons of Africa, Africans living in Britain active as speakers on the abolitionist circuit. His 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, went through nine editions in his lifetime, and is credited with helping shift opinion in favour of the British Slave Trade Act 1807, under which the Royal Navy was committed to the suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. As a member of the London Corresponding Society, he was also associated with the cause of democratic reform.
The Interesting Narrative was rediscovered by scholars in the late 20th century and remains a widely-cited primary source.
Early life and enslavement
According to his 1789 memoir, Equiano was born around 1745 in the village of Essaka (thought to be Isseke in today's Anambra State, Nigeria).Paul E. Lovejoy, "Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African" , Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 3 (2006): 317–347. In the 4th, 1791, edition of his book, he is also described as a native of the Eboe (Igbo) province, and in addresses and correspondence variously described himself as an "African", an "Eboan African" and as an "oppressed Ethiopian".
He was the youngest of six surviving sons, and had a sister; their father owned many slaves. His older brothers had helped foil one attempt at kidnapping of children in his village, but at the age eleven, alone in the family compound, he and his sister were seized. Separated and sold to slave traders, he was trafficked a considerable distance, changing owners several times. Six months after he had been kidnapped, he arrived at the coast, where he was taken on board a European slave ship. With 244 other enslaved Africans, he was transported across the Atlantic Ocean to Barbados in the British West Indies. He and a few other slaves were then sent on for sale in the British colony of Virginia.
In Virginia, Equiano was bought by Michael Henry Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Pascal renamed the boy Gustavus Vassa after the 16th-century King of Sweden Gustav Vasa who led had Protestant forces in the Thirty Years' War. Equiano had already been renamed twice: he had been called Michael on board the slave ship that brought him to the Americas and Jacob by his first owner. This time Equiano protested, telling Pascal that he would prefer to be called Jacob. His resistance, he says, "gained me many a cuff" and eventually he submitted to the new name. He used this name for the rest of his life, including on all official records; he used Equiano only in his autobiography.
Pascal took Equiano with him when he returned to England and had him accompany him as a valet during the Seven Years' War. Equiano was present at the siege of Louisbourg in 1758, the Battle of Lagos in 1759 and the capture of Belle Île in 1761. Also trained in seamanship, Equiano assisted the crews of the ships he was on in times of battle as a powder monkey. Pascal favoured Equiano and sent him to his sister-in-law in Great Britain so that he could attend school and learn to read and write. Equiano converted to Christianity and was baptised at St Margaret's, Westminster on 9 February 1759.
Controversy over his origins Vassa (Equiano) was recorded in the St Margaret parish register as "a Black, born in Carolina, 12 years old", and not, as Equiano suggests in his memoirs, a 14-year old born in Africa.David Dabydeen, "Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man by Vincent Carretta" (book review), The Guardian, 3 December 2005, . Retrieved 11 January 2018. Researching a new edition of Equiano's memoir, in 1999 Vincent Carretta at the University of Maryland cited the parish register, and a later 1773 ship's muster, as evidence that Equiano was indeed born in the American colonies, and that a childhood in Africa had been fictionalised for effect.Robin Blackburn, "The True Story of Equiano", The Nation, 2 November 2005 (archived). Retrieved 28 September 2014 . Noting the number details in Equiano's narrative that Carretta was able to corroborate from alternate sources, other scholars are satisfied that the weight of evidence support an African birth.Douglas Chambers, "'Almost an Englishman': Carretta's Equiano" , H-Net Reviews, November 2007. Retrieved 28 September 2014.Paul E. Lovejoy, "Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African" , Slavery and Abolition 27, no. 3 (2006): 317–347.Alexander X. Byrd, "Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavus Vassa's Interesting Narrative" , William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (2006): 123–148, at JSTOR Autobiographies may "distort or exaggerate the truth", but historian Adam Hochschild proposes that "seldom is one crucial portion of a memoir totally fabricated and the remainder scrupulously accurate".
Equiano's origins had been questioned when his memoir was first appeared. In response, his new godparents, cousins of his master, Pascal, testified that when Equiano arrived in London they had to help teach him English.
Release
In December 1762 Pascal sold Equiano to James Doran, the captain of the merchantman Charming Sally, at Gravesend, Kent. Onboard Charming Sally, Doran took Equiano to the British colony of Montserrat, where he was sold to Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who traded in the Caribbean.
Robert King forced Equiano to work on his shipping routes and in his stores. In 1765, when Equiano was about 20 years old, King promised that for his purchase price of 40 pounds () he could buy his freedom.
King taught him to read and write more fluently, guided him along the path of religion, and allowed Equiano to engage in profitable trading for his own account, as well as on his owner's behalf. Equiano sold fruits, glass tumblers and other items between Georgia and the Caribbean islands. King allowed Equiano to buy his freedom, which he achieved in 1766. The merchant urged Equiano to stay on as a business partner. However, Equiano found it dangerous and limiting to remain in the British colonies as a freedman. While loading a ship in Georgia, he was almost kidnapped back into enslavement.
Freedom By about 1768, Equiano had gone to Britain. He continued to work at sea, travelling sometimes as a deckhand based in England. In 1773 on the Royal Navy ship HMS Racehorse, he travelled to the Arctic in an expedition towards the North Pole.Douglas Chambers, "'Almost an Englishman': Carretta's Equiano" , H-Net Reviews, November 2007. Retrieved 28 September 2014. On that voyage he worked with Dr Charles Irving, who had developed a process to distill seawater and later made a fortune from it. Two years later, Irving recruited Equiano for a project on the Mosquito Coast in Central America, where he was to use his African background to help select slaves and manage them as labourers on sugar-cane plantations. Irving and Equiano had a working relationship and friendship for more than a decade, but the plantation venture failed.Lovejoy (2006), p. 332. Equiano met with George, the "Musquito king's son".
Equiano left the Mosquito Coast in 1776 and arrived at Plymouth, England, on 7 January 1777.
Pioneer of the abolitionist cause Equiano settled in London, where in the 1780s he became involved in the abolitionist movement. The movement to end the slave trade had been particularly strong among Quakers, but the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787 as a non-denominational group, with Anglican members, in an attempt to influence parliament directly. Under the Test Act, only those prepared to receive holy communion according to the rites of the Church of England were permitted to serve as MPs. Equiano had been baptised into the Church of England in 1759; but had taken an interest in the evangelism of John Wesley (an abolitionist) to whose Methodism he had been introduced in America by George Whitefield.
As early as 1783, Equiano informed abolitionists such as Granville Sharp about the slave trade; that year he was the first to tell Sharp about the Zong massacre, which was being tried in London as litigation for insurance claims. It became a cause célèbre for the abolitionist movement and contributed to its growth.
On 21 October 1785 he was one of eight delegates from Africans in America to present an 'Address of Thanks' to the Quakers at a meeting in Gracechurch Street, London. The address referred to A Caution to Great Britain and her Colonies by Anthony Benezet, founder of the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.
Equiano was befriended and supported by abolitionists, many of whom encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially in this effort by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors, and many in the nobility subscribed to his book. His lectures and preparation for the book were promoted by, among others, Selina Hastings, Countess of Huntingdon.
Memoir
Entitled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), the book went through nine editions in his lifetime. It is one of the earliest-known examples of published writing by an African writer to be widely read in England. By 1792, it was a best seller and had been published in Russia, Germany, Holland and the United States. An "assertion of the universality of mankind and an invitation . . . . to extend the principle of the Enlightenment", it sought to expose as both "impious and absurd" the defence offered by enslavers and their apologists. Equiano wrote: When you make men slaves, you deprive them of half their virtue, your set them in your own conduct an example of fraud, rapine and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war, and yet you complain they are not honest and faithful. You stupefy them with stripes and think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance, and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning . . . [and] that culture would be lost on them.The argument may not, itself, have been unfamiliar to his readers. In his 1774 Thoughts Upon Slavery, John Wesley had insisted that the purported “stupidity [of Black people] in our plantations is not natural; otherwise than it is the natural effect of their Condition”. Their enslavers gave them "no opportunity", and "no motive, either from hope or fear", to "improve their understanding". Those Africans who had the same motives and opportunities as Europeans, were in no way inferior.Jorati, J., (2025) “The Effects of Slavery on Enslaved People and Eighteenth-Century Antislavery Arguments”, Journal of Modern Philosophy 6(2). doi: https://doi.org/10.25894/jmp.2498