Mistaken Identities? Olaudah Equiano, Domingos Álvares, and the Methodological Challenges of Studying the African Diaspora

Abstract

SCHOLARS OF SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAS have debated the meanings of African identities for many years, but a recent resurgence in questions about identity seems to have coincided with the emergence of the African diaspora and Atlantic studies as discrete fields of study. Much of this recent debate centers on the meanings of ethnic or national signifiers such as Angola, Mina, Guinea, and Yoruba. In the historiography of early North America, for example, strong disagreements have emerged around the question of Igbo identity.' Perhaps the most famous and controversial of these disputes centers on literary scholar Vincent Carretta's recent suggestion that Olaudah Equiano, one of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world's most prominent historical figures, was not born in Igbo land, and thus probably invented an African identity.2 In his autobiography, Equiano claimed that he was born in Essaka, an Igbospeaking region near the Niger River in contemporary Nigeria. At ten years old, he was kidnapped by African traders and sold to Europeans on the African coast. After enduring the Middle Passage, he labored as a slave for more than ten years in Barbados and Virginia, and on merchant ships crossing the Atlantic and Mediterranean. He purchased his freedom in 1766 and continued to work as a seaman, traveling widely to Central America, the Caribbean, the Arctic, and North America, before finally settling in England.