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Tracie Church Guzzio
Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vassa)
(c. 1745–1797)
Although his life spanned the second half of the
18th century and for most of his adult life he lived
and worked in England, Olaudah Equiano made a
profound contribution to modern African-Ameri-
can literature. His legacy remains significant—and
controversial—into the 21st century. His major lit-
erary achievement was The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or, Gustavus Vassa, the
African. Published in 1789, this work, an impor-
tant contribution to the campaign to abolish the
British slave trade, was in part autobiography, voy-
age narrative, conversion narrative, and political
treatise. In combining these, Equiano perfected the
autobiographical form that was later to be known
as the slave narrative.
In Narrative of the Life, Equiano tells us that
he was born in 1745 in Essaka in the province of
Eboe, identified by modern scholars as the tho-
speaking region of modern Nigeria. Equiano gives
us a detailed account of life in Essaka, his tradi-
tional village, before telling how he and his sister
were abducted by slave traders, taken on the long
journey to the coast, and put aboard a slave ship
bound for the Americas. The famous passages that
follow describe the horrors of the Middle Pas-
sage, in which “the shrieks of the women, and the
groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of
horror almost inconceivable.” Having crossed the
Atlantic, Equiano was taken first to Barbados and
then to Virginia. There he was sold to Michael Pas-
cal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
Equiano’s description of his African child-
hood, his abduction, and his voyage in the Middle
Passage is a rare and celebrated firsthand narra-
tive of life in an African village prior to European
colonization, as well as an eyewitness account of
the horrors of the slave trade. In Equiano’s time,
these vivid and detailed episodes provided di-
rect evidence that could be used in the abolition
campaign. For readers in later generations, par-
ticularly for descendents of those who suffered
slavery, Equiano’s accounts offer a personal point
of connection between Africa and the New World.
Recent research by Vincent Carretta, however, has
suggested that Equiano was not born in Africa but
in South Carolina, then a British colony in North
America. According to Carretta, Equiano may
never have visited Africa, and the early parts of his
Narrative of the Life may well be rhetorical exer-
cises in oral history rather than his true personal
history. Carretta’s evidence, a baptismal record
and a muster roll, strongly suggests that, before
the publication of the Narrative of the Life in 1789,
Equiano was in the habit of telling employers and
officials that he was born in South Carolina. Nev-
ertheless, the evidence, although intriguing, is not
yet overwhelming, and many readers continue to
accept Equiano’s account of his African nativity as
told in the Narrative of the Life. It seems likely that
the truth about Equiano’s birth and early life will
never be known for certain.
What is certain are Equiano’s later achieve-
ments, which are both outlined in detail in the
Narrative of the Life and supported by a wealth
of external evidence. As Pascal’s slave, the young
Equiano spent about six years on a ship in the
Royal Navy. During this time he saw action in the
war with France, but more important, the rela-170 Equiano, Olaudah