‘The Stamp of Their Own Iniquity’: Ottobah Cugoano on the Mark of Cain, Noah’s Curse, and Enslavers

Abstract

ABSTRACT Recently, Nyasha Junior has argued that interpretations of Cain by Black interpreters should not be understood as merely a reaction or corrective to anti-Black aetiological theories about the mark of Cain (Gen. 4:15). Surveying a range of 19th- and early 20th-century Black interpreters, Junior showed how they used the story of Cain to account for the violence that they believed is inherent in white people. In this article, I provide further evidence for this reading of Cain’s violence as an aetiological explanation for white violence. I analyse Ottobah Cugoano’s discussion of Cain in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery: and Commerce of the Human Species (1787) as a further example of this type of interpretation within African diasporic writings. In unmooring the mark from racial origins and linking it closely to racial violence, in part through a connection that Cugoano makes with Noah’s curse of his grandson Canaan in Genesis 9, elements of Cugoano’s argument anticipate the 19th- and early 20th-century Black interpreters who, as Junior discussed, argue that white people resemble Cain in their inherently violent tendencies.