Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-made Man
by Vincent Carretta
(University of Georgia)
When Olaudah Equiano published his autobiography in England in 1789, he achieved instant celebrity. Several thousand copies were sold, the subscribers including the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York and the Duke of Cumberland. The book went through nine editions between 1789 and 1794, and pirated versions appeared in Holland, New York, Russia and Germany. He was a bestselling author and became the wealthiest black man in the English-speaking world. He was so well off that he dabbled in moneylending to English people.
Two centuries on, Equiano continues to sell — there are more than half a dozen editions on the market. He is required reading in every British, American or African university teaching black studies. Chinua Achebe called him “the father of African literature”. Henry Gates claimed him as “the founding father of the Afro-American literary tradition”. In Britain, where he spent much of his life, he is deemed the founder of black British literature and has pride of place in the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Black British History.
A major reason for Equiano’s popu-larity is that his autobiography contains a detailed account of his birth and childhood in Nigeria, with rare descriptions of the culture of 18th-century Igbo society. His narrative of the Atlantic crossing in a slave ship is as unique as it is moving. He was kidnapped at the age of 10, sold to European merchants and despatched to the Americas.
Equiano writes passionately and vividly of his separation from his mother and sister; of his initial horror at seeing Europeans (they behaved so brutishly and were so alien to behold that he feared they were cannibals); of his astonishment at seeing a ship for the first time; and, on the transatlantic journey, of the strange and exotic sight of flying fish and other sea creatures.
In the midst of dreadful suffering, the child-Equiano asserts the magical beauty of life. A sympathetic white sailor lets him look through a quadrant. “The clouds appeared to me to be land, which disappeared as they past along. This heightened my wonder and I was now more persuaded than ever that I was in another world, and that everything about me was magic.”
Fascinating and bestselling material, but how truthful? Vincent Carretta’s biography seems to have torpedoed the slave ship and shattered trust in Equiano’s veracity. Through years of patient and tenacious research in neglected archives, Carretta has discovered a baptism record from February 9 1759, in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, stating that he was a “black, born in Carolina, 12 years old”. Also, a muster list from a ship on which Equiano served in 1773, on which his birthplace is given as “South Carolina”. In other words, Equiano may never have set foot in Africa, never mind boarded a slave ship. The narrative of his early life may be pure fiction.
Needless to say, many scholars of African-American studies are furious with Carretta. One of them suggested he should have buried the evidence: “Carretta’s conclusions threaten a pillar of scholarship on slave narratives and the African diaspora. Questioning Equiano’s origins calls into doubt some fundamental assumptions made in departments of African-American studies.” The fact that Carretta is white has increased the level of hostility toward his book.
So how are we to reassess Equiano? Carretta suggests that his possible birth in Carolina, rather than Africa, in no way diminishes the power of his testimony. Autobiography, after all, is always partly fictional, the narrator shaping the tale, dressing up dull facts.
Equiano was African in terms of origin, he knew the horrors of the slave trade, which, by the 1780s, were widely broadcast by white abolitionists. What he did was to take it upon himself to write the first substantial account of slavery from an African viewpoint but, as importantly, to write it with pulse and heartbeat.
Carretta’s biography, far from detracting from Equiano’s greatness, calls attention to it. Apart from the doubt about Equiano’s birth, Carretta has tracked down records proving that practically everything else he told about his life was factually correct. Carretta reveals a man almost unique in his travelling and experience of different cultures and landscapes.
Equiano worked on ships trading in the West Indies, North America, Central America and the Mediterranean. In 1773, he was an able seaman on an expedition to the North Pole and probably the first African to set foot on Arctic ice. He conveys the sense of a natural world of overpowering beauty, far removed from the sordid human world of slavery.
Equiano’s autobiography, Carretta suggests, is a monumental 18th-century text, a unique mixture of travel writing, sea lore, sermon, economic tract and fiction. That the early chapters may have invented a life in Africa only adds to our appreciation of Equiano’s imaginative depth and literary talent.
Carretta deserves applause, not resentment, for his indefatigable research. — Â