The man and the book

Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa (died 1797), is the author of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789. According to the Narrative, he was born around 1745 in a village he calls “Essaka”, in a country he calls “Eboe”, was kidnapped at about eleven with his sister, crossed the Atlantic, served a Royal Navy officer and then a Quaker merchant, bought his freedom in 1766 and became an abolitionist in England.

The book was a bestseller. Contributors to Korieh (2009) note that it went through eight English editions in Equiano’s lifetime and was translated into Dutch, German and Russian. It appeared at a decisive moment: the Zong massacre of 1781, in which enslaved captives were thrown overboard, had come to public attention, and the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded in 1787.

For a long time the book was read as British abolitionist literature, as an African-American slave narrative and as a source on the Middle Passage. Emmanuel Obiechina’s foreword to Korieh (2009) argues that the African part of the story had been neglected and that Equiano should be read first as an Igbo. Early “reclamations” of the Narrative for African studies were Paul Edwards’s edition in the Heinemann African Writers Series (1964) and Philip Curtin’s anthology Africa Remembered (1967).

Whether the love of one’s country be real or imaginary, or a lesson of reason, or an instinct of nature, I still look back with pleasure on the first scenes of my life.

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative, chapter 1, quoted in Eke (Korieh 2009, p. 23)

Equiano explains his Igbo name in the Narrative: Olaudah means “vicissitude, or fortune; also, one favoured, and having a loud voice and well spoken”. Eke reads the whole book as a fulfilment of that name, an African speaking back to the people who enslaved him.