Free Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives by John Sutherland

upheaving Europe, the Indian subcontinent, and North America during the second half of the eighteenth century. Equiano’s childhood environment was a place, as he describes (in his stilted high Augustan prose):
where nature is prodigal of her favours, our wants are few and easily supplied; of course we have few manufactures. They consist for the most part of calicoes, earthern ware, ornaments, and instruments of war and husbandry. But these make no part of our commerce, the principal articles of which, as I have observed, are provisions. In such a state money is of little use.
     
    He stresses the village’s high standards of virtue, cleanliness, abstemiousness and moral decency, contradicting the image of savagery that one finds, for example, in
Robinson Crusoe
. There is nothing in Equiano’s account of his Igbo/Essaka upbringing to contradict the slogan on the abolitionist medal: ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ Equiano’s account in fact makes the Igbo even nobler than the whites who presume to ask that question.
    Aged around eleven years, Equiano lost his African paradise. He was kidnapped while playing innocently with his sister, and carried off to slavery. Initially, like his father’s slaves, his masters were African, but then he was sold on to the traders at the coast. Here he first came into contact with white people. It inspires one of the more vivid sections in the narrative. They strike him as monsters, as he is thrown into the cargo vessel which will carry him away to the New World. These pale devils, with their ‘red faces and loose hair’ must be cannibals, he assumes: they will eat him. He faints with shock, horror, fear and despair – and, as he disgustedly recalls, the stench (‘the salutation to my nostrils’).
    The description of the middle passage is the most affecting, and horrifying (and the most ‘interesting’) in Equiano’s later published
Interesting Narrative
. His later career, vivid as it is on the page, can be briefly summarised. Sold on a number oftimes, he was transported to Barbados, where he was judged too physically slight for field labour in the sugar plantations. He eventually found himself in the colony of Virginia, where he was bought by a Royal Navy officer, renamed Gustavus Vassa, and – as a personal valet – humanely treated.
    Equiano endeared himself by loyal service both to his master and, as a sailor on board ship, to the Crown – in acknowledgement of which, in England, he was, while still a teenager, sent to school to learn how to read and write. Equiano also became a devout Christian, persuading his master to let him be baptised, in 1759 – so that he might go to heaven with the white folk. He might be free up there, but not, for a few years yet, down here. Poor ‘Gustavus’ was sold on again. He was now a valuable property – a literate, numerate, well-spoken slave. As such he was eventually bought by a Quaker merchant in Philadelphia and put to work as an inventory clerk, on a tiny salary. Equiano eventually saved up the £40 required to buy his freedom.
    After manumission, he prudently took up residence in England and went into trade himself for a few years (including ‘black gold’, or slaves) before allying himself with the British abolitionist movement, whose figurehead he became. He gave heart-rending speeches, preached, and married an Englishwoman. In 1789, with the help of noble patrons, he published
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African.
The last phase of Equiano’s life was, evidently, happy, but is largely unrecorded. There were two daughters from his marriage; his wife died in 1796 and he followed her a year later, aged (probably) fifty-two. It is not known where he was buried – although he left a sizeable amount to his daughters.
    Equiano’s interesting narrative was widely circulated in the abolition movement, as eyewitness evidence of the realities of slavery. It was everywhere