Olaudah Equiano

By his own account Equiano was born in 1745 in a district he calls Eboe, in the kingdom of Benin (Equiano, Interesting Narrative ch. 1), was kidnapped as a child and was carried across the Atlantic in a slave ship to Barbados (Equiano, Interesting Narrative ch. 2). He was baptized at St Margaret’s, Westminster, in February 1759 under the name Gustavus Vassa (Equiano, Interesting Narrative ch. 4). He prints the deed by which his owner in Montserrat set him free on 10 July 1766 for seventy pounds of the island’s money (Equiano, Interesting Narrative ch. 7), and he describes a conversion on 6 October 1774, when he came to believe that salvation was the gift of God and not the reward of his own good deeds (Equiano, Interesting Narrative ch. 10).

In March 1788 he presented a petition to the queen on behalf of his “African brethren” (Equiano, Interesting Narrative ch. 12), and a year later he dedicated his Interesting Narrative to Parliament (Equiano, Interesting Narrative dedication). See Christians and the Abolition of the Slave Trade.

The African birth rests on his own word: Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005), found that the register of his baptism and a ship’s muster roll of 1773 give his birthplace as Carolina, and argues that the African chapters may be a reconstruction.