Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth Century Debate over Africa and the Slave Trade

Olaudah Equiano was a British citizen and former slave who, in the 1780s, became a leader of the movement to abolish the slave trade. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was first published in London in 1789 and went through nine editions in the next five years. It contributed significantly to turning British public opinion against the slave trade. As the title suggests, Equiano was regarded as an authority on the subject of the slave trade, in large part, because he would that he had been born in Eboe, a province of the kingdom of Benin, in what is now southern Nigeria. He could recall his African childhood and describe the experience of being captured and sold into slavery.
In the 1790s, supporters of the slave trade sought to undermine Equiano’s credibility and the cause of abolition by questioning his claim to African identity and suggesting that he had been born in the West Indies. These arguments were dismissed as politically motivated until recently, when the scholar Vincent Carretta discovered two eighteenth-century documents that indicate that Equiano may indeed have been born in the British colony of South Carolina. Carretta’s discovery has fueled an impassioned and as yet unresolved debate among literary critics and historians about Equiano’s identity and our evaluation of different kinds of historical evidence. The literary critic George Boulukos recently suggested that we reframe this debate by studying Equiano’s narrative within the context of the eighteenth-century British debate on Africa. As Boulukos observes, debates over the slave trade often “hinged on each participant’s understanding of the state of civilization in Africa.” By exploring this debate, we can more fully appreciate the stakes of Equiano’s representation of his African origins and his contribution to the movement to end the slave trade.