Equiano, Olaudah (1745–1797), slave and spiritual autobiographer, creator of the slave narrative genre, and abolitionist leader. Olaudah Equiano (later also known as Gustavus Vassa) was eleven years of age when he was kidnapped in the African country that is now known as Nigeria. As he was taken to the slave ship on the coast, he witnessed the corrupting influences of European intrusions upon the African societies. Sent to Barbados and then to Virginia, he escaped a sentence to plantation slavery when he was purchased by a British captain who changed the youth's name to Gustavus Vassa and placed him in service aboard ship. Equiano spent the next ten years of his captivity on several vessels engaged in commerce and sometimes in naval warfare.

After his daily slave duties, the industrious and thrifty Equiano worked at various private enterprises that eventually enabled him to save enough funds to purchase himself out of bondage. On 10 July 1766, he became a freeman, but continued working aboard ships. In the ensuing years, Equiano traveled to many countries in Europe, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and North, Central, and South America. He even journeyed on a scientific expedition to the Arctic regions.

When he served as a young slave on various ships, Equiano formed close relationships with the sailors, who taught him how to read and introduced him to Christianity. They fired up a lifelong desire for learning that he especially pursued whenever he visited friends in England. The religious spark ignited by the sailors led in later years to a lengthy and intense spiritual conversion experience, after which Equiano chose the Methodist faith. Eventually he settled in England, where in 1792 Equiano married the Englishwoman Susanna Cullen; they had two daughters.

In the 1780s, when the British Parliament debated whether to end the slave trade, Equiano became an active participant in the antislavery movement. In order to sway the minds of those involved in the controversy, he undertook the writing of a two-volume autobiography describing his life of bondage and freedom and giving his eyewitness account of the sufferings and injustices endured by thousands of enslaved men and women. The result was The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, which appeared in England in 1789, and in 1791 in the United States. From 1789 to 1794 the Narrative ran through eight editions in Great Britain. Translations were made into Dutch in 1790, German in 1792, and Russian in 1794. Nineteen editions were produced in the United States and Europe by the mid nineteenth century.

In his lengthy account, Equiano mixes his personal remembrances of African societies, slave experiences, and a freeman's life in the West with the facts and ideas he derived from his wide range of reading in works of history, geography, religion, politics, and commerce. He is at his best when re-creating the opposing feelings of awe and fear that grip him when he comes into contact with both the marvels and terrors of the Western world. A vital part of Equiano's narrative is the winning of his freedom. He becomes a new man as he is reborn into a society where he now can operate on a free plane of existence. His physical and spiritual liberations enable him to complete himself as a person who can assume new and commanding roles in life. These roles include his taking charge of a vessel during a storm at sea, serving as a parson when required, and even acting as an overseer of slaves. In his mature years, the proudest roles are those of abolitionist leader and autobiographer. Thus readers of the Interesting Narrative come to see Equiano as an intelligent, clever, and complex man.

Equiano's slave narrative displays one of the first attempts by an African writer to enter the literary world of Western culture. Equiano followed the spiritual autobiographical tradition of St. Augustine and John Bunyan, but added to it a new dimension consisting of social protest. His new type of personal story influenced how black narrative literature was written throughout the antislavery era. Thus Equiano's autobiography became the prototype of the slave narratives that appeared after his great work. Looking over the whole range of African American literature, one can see the structure and elements of the slave narrative genre in such important works as Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), Harriet A. Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Richard Wright's Black Boy (1945), Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man (1952), and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987).

Bibliography

• William L. Andrews, To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865, 1986.
• Angelo Costanzo, Surprizing Narrative: Olaudah Equiano and the Beginnings of Black Autobiography, 1987.
• Keith A. Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth–Century Afro-English Writing, 1988.
• Paul Edwards, introduction to The Life of Olaudah Equiano, 1989.
• The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, ed. Vincent Carretta, 1995

Angelo Costanzo

The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.