Latest / The Atlantic Slave Trade: Empire Built on Human Suffering — Fexingo History / Gustavus Vassa: The African Who Chronicled the Middle Passage
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you've heard the Middle Passage described through statistics and from abolitionist reports. But for this conversation, I want to focus on one voice that cuts through all of that — the voice of a man who lived it and wrote it down himself. Luna: You mean Olaudah Equiano? Lucas: Exactly. Olaudah Equiano, also known by his English name Gustavus Vassa. He was kidnapped from what's now southeastern Nigeria as a child, survived the Middle Passage, and eventually purchased his own freedom. His autobiography, published in 1789, became a cornerstone of the British abolition movement. But his story is even more remarkable than the book alone suggests. Luna: I know he was one of the earliest African authors published in Britain. But start from the beginning — where was he from? Lucas: According to his own account, Equiano was born around 1745 in a village called Essaka in the Igbo region, part of the Kingdom of Benin. He described a close-knit community with a system of chiefs, marriages, dances, and agriculture. When he was about eleven, he and his sister were kidnapped by slave raiders while the adults were working in the fields. Lucas: He was separated from his sister, passed through several African hands, and eventually reached the coast, where he was loaded onto a slave ship headed for Barbados. That voyage — the Middle Passage — he described in harrowing detail: the stench, the chains, the floggings, the suicide attempts. He saw people thrown overboard, both dead and alive. Luna: And he was just a child, probably twelve years old. Lucas: Yes. From Barbados he was taken to Virginia, where he was bought by a Royal Navy officer named Michael Henry Pascal. Pascal renamed him Gustavus Vassa after the 16th-century Swedish king — Equiano hated the name but couldn't refuse. Pascal took him to England, where Equiano learned to read and write, and served on various naval vessels during the Seven Years' War. Lucas: He saw combat, learned navigation, and even traveled to the Arctic with an expedition searching for the Northwest Passage. But Pascal, despite promising him freedom, sold him back into slavery in the Caribbean when the war ended. Equiano was devastated. Luna: So he was enslaved again, after all that service. Lucas: Yes, and now he was in the brutal sugar islands of the West Indies. He was bought by a Quaker merchant named Robert King on the island of Montserrat, who put him to work loading and unloading ships. Equiano was allowed to trade small goods on the side, and over three years he saved enough money — forty pounds — to buy his own freedom in 1766. Lucas: But freedom didn't mean safety. As a free black man in the Atlantic world, he could still be kidnapped and re-enslaved. So he stayed close to the sea, working as a seaman, traveling to the Mediterranean, the American colonies, Central America. He even visited the Miskito Coast and helped establish a settlement there. Luna: When did he become an abolitionist? Lucas: It was gradual. In 1774, he had a religious conversion and became an evangelical Christian. Around the same time, he met Granville Sharp and other abolitionists in London. The case of Sommersett v Stewart in 1772, which ruled that slavery was unsupported by English common law, was a huge inspiration. Equiano began attending meetings, writing letters, and eventually decided to publish his story. Lucas: His 'Interesting Narrative' was published in 1789 and became a bestseller. It went through nine editions in his lifetime. He toured Britain promoting the book — Scotland, Ireland, the English provinces — and it was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian. The book included detailed descriptions of Africa, the Middle Passage, and his arguments for abolition. Luna: He also used it to lobby Parliament, right? Lucas: Exactly. Equiano personally presented copies to members of the House of Commons, to King George III, and to Queen Charlotte. He strategically timed the publication to coincide with the 1788–89 parliamentary debates on the slave trade. He even helped recruit former slaves to testify before the Privy Council. Lucas: And he wasn't just a writer — he was an organizer. In 1786, he was appointed Commissary of Stores for the Sierra Leone resettlement project, the plan to send Black Loyalists and London's Black poor to West Africa. He clashed with the project's management over corruption and unfair treatment of the settlers, and he was eventually dismissed. But he documented everything. Luna: So his involvement with Sierra Leone was before he wrote the book? Lucas: Yes. The Sierra Leone disaster actually delayed the book. After his dismissal, Equiano went to Philadelphia, where he worked with the Quaker abolitionist Moses Brown. But he always returned to London, where he became a prominent figure in the abolitionist community. He married an Englishwoman named Susannah Cullen in 1792, and they had two daughters. Lucas: He died in 1797, at about 52, just a decade before the British abolished the slave trade. His daughter Joanna survived him, but she died in 1804 at age nine, and his widow had died earlier, so Equiano's direct line ended. But his book lived on, influencing generations of abolitionists and, later, civil rights activists. Luna: It's interesting that the show has done episodes on Granville Sharp and the Zong, but Equiano's own story is maybe the most personal link we've had. Lucas: He's the human face of the statistics. And you know, it's worth mentioning — we deliberately don't run ads on these episodes. If you want to support that choice, the link is buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It's a small way to keep this kind of deep storytelling available to anyone. Luna: Yeah, it's nice knowing these conversations aren't interrupted by commercials. Keeps the focus on the history. Lucas: So back to Equiano — there's one more layer. In the 1990s, some scholars began to question whether he was actually born in Africa. They found a baptismal record that listed his birthplace as South Carolina, not Essaka. That ignited a debate about whether his African narrative was partly invented to strengthen his abolitionist message. Luna: Wait, really? So he might have fabricated that part? Lucas: It's a controversy. The evidence is circumstantial — the record is a single document, and it might be a clerical error. Equiano himself never mentioned being in South Carolina, and his detailed descriptions of Igbo culture are hard to dismiss as pure invention. Most scholars still believe he was African-born, but the question highlights how we have to read historical sources critically. Luna: That's fascinating. So even the most personal account has a shadow of uncertainty. Lucas: Exactly. But whether he was born in Africa or the Americas, his experiences as an enslaved person were real, and his contribution to abolition was immense. He helped shift public opinion by putting a human story — a readable, emotional, intellectually rigorous story — at the center of the political debate. And that model, the slave narrative, became a genre that lasted well into the 19th century. Luna: And we still read it today. His book is taught in universities around the world. Lucas: Yes. And it's not just a historical document — it's a work of literature. Equiano was acutely aware of his audience. He quotes the Bible, classical authors, and Enlightenment philosophers. He positions himself as both a Christian and a rational man, appealing to the values of his readers. He even includes a poem at the end, a meditation on his own life. Lucas: I think what strikes me most is his resilience. He survived kidnapping, the Middle Passage, naval warfare, slavery in the Caribbean, and the constant threat of re-enslavement, and he turned his suffering into a tool for change. He didn't just tell his story — he used it to dismantle the system that had enslaved him. Luna: That's a powerful legacy. And it makes you wonder what other voices we've lost. Lucas: That's the tragedy of the Atlantic slave trade — countless millions whose names we'll never know, whose stories were never written. Equiano is the exception, and his book is a window into a world of suffering and resistance that we can barely imagine. It's a reminder of why this history matters.