Village life as Equiano described it

The first chapters of the Narrative are a short ethnography of an Igbo community, written for readers who thought of Africa as a place without institutions. Several authors in Korieh (2009) use them as evidence for eighteenth-century Igbo life, while Maureen Eke reminds readers that autobiography is selective memory and that Equiano shaped the picture for a purpose.

• Government. Elders, judges and chiefs (his father among them) ran justice. Equiano says his country was only nominally subject to the king of Benin; Igbo scholars point out that Isseke was never ruled from Benin.
• Marriage. A public declaration by the groom, a cotton string tied round the bride’s waist, serious penalties for adultery and polygamy that he says “seldom” went beyond two wives. Acholonu and others read this as matching customs still known at Isseke.
• Work and dance. Equiano calls the Igbo “almost a nation of dancers, musicians and poets”. Ukaegbu notes that he describes four dance divisions: married men, married women, young men and maidens, a pattern that Raphael Njoku reads as a sign of how age and gender organized public life.
• Farming and food. Hard work with hoes, no draught animals, cooperative farming and a table without spirits. Everyone contributes to the common stock and there are no beggars, he writes.
• Faith. One Supreme Being, Chukwu or Chineke, ancestors and spirits. Equiano compared several customs to those of the Hebrew patriarchs; the idea of Hebrew origins became a theme in later Igbo identity debates (see the Origins chapter).

Eke notes that some phrases in these chapters echo travel literature of the period, for example the writings of John Wesley and Anthony Benezet on tropical fertility. She treats this as evidence of rhetorical strategy rather than proof of invention.