Who Was Olaudah Equiano?

Abstract

At a time when most black men and women in the English-speaking world were slaves, when slavery and the slave trade had made the British empire prosperous, a former slave named Gustavus Vassa, or Olaudah Equiano (O-la-OO-day Ek-we-AH-no), traveled throughout the British Atlantic and the Mediterranean on British merchant ships, took part in an expedition to the Arctic, and published his astonishing autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which made him one of the most successful writers of his day. Equiano's Interesting Narrative went through nine editions between its pub- lication in 1789 and the author's death in 1797; it was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian. Equiano controlled the publication of each English edi- tion and personally sold copies throughout the British Isles, using each book tour to organize communities of antislavery activists. He was so successful fi nancially and artistically that he invested in London real estate and left his daughter an estate worth what today would be $160,000. William Lloyd Garrison's partner published an American edition in 1837, but Equiano's Interesting Narrative was supplanted as an anti-slavery weapon by Frederick Douglass's Narrative and Uncle Tom's Cabin, and for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it languished out of print. But it returned in the 1960s, brought back by novelist Arna Bontemps. Today at least three scholarly editions are readily available, and Equiano's is often the voice from whom students hear of the horrors of the Atlantic slave trade. Vincent Carretta—a professor of English at the University of Maryland; edi- tor of one edition of Equiano's Narrative, as well as editions of Phillis Wheatley's poetry, and the writings of other eighteenth-century Anglo-Africans; and author of a study of British political satire—has now written the fi rst scholarly biogra- phy of one of the most extraordinary writers in the Anglo-American canon. It is a book worthy of its subject. Like Equiano's Interesting Narrative, Carretta's Equiano, the African is powerful, engaging, and beautifully written.