Other historians also argue that the fact that many parts of Equiano's account can be proven lends weight to accepting his account of African birth. As historian Adam Hochschild has written: "In the long and fascinating history of autobiographies that distort or exaggerate the truth. ...Seldom is one crucial portion of a memoir totally fabricated and the remainder scrupulously accurate; among autobiographers... both dissemblers and truth-tellers tend to be consistent."^[28] He also noted that "since the ‘rediscovery’ of Vassa’s account in the 1960s, ‘scholars have valued it as the most extensive account of an eighteenth-century slave’s life’ and the difficult passage from slavery to freedom."^[4]
In her book on Equiano and what she says are his Igbo origins, Nigerian writer Catherine Obianuju Acholonu wrote in 1989 that he was born in a Nigerian town known as Isseke, where she said local oral history told of his upbringing.^[29] In his 1991 review of her work, O.S. Ogede criticized the lack of intellectual rigor and noted serious errors in her research, beginning with how she determined Isseke as the village of origin and claimed she saw people with features traditionally associated with his family, although he had left there 250 years ago. He also criticized her effort to determine Equiano's origins based on analysis of language that she interpreted through his transcriptions. He argued for the memoir being considered "literary biography" and noted that she did not refer to the current debate on whether Equiano's account "should be considered fiction or fact."^[7]