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The Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African by Olaudah EquianoReview by: Richard David RalstonAfrican Historical Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (1971), pp. 168-171Published by: Boston University African Studies CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/216288 .

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BOOK REVIEWS BOOK REVIEWS

Ethiopia: The Modernization of Autocracy is not the only recent work on

Ethiopia's politics, nor does it supersede those by Margery Perham, Christopher Clapham, or Richard Greenfield. These other books have different emphases. Hess's book is, however, the best balanced, most up-to-date, and wide-ranging single work available on the subject.

Herbert S. Lewis

University of Wisconsin

THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO OR GUSTAVUS VASSA THE AFRICAN. By Olaudah Equiano. New Introduction by Paul Edwards. 2 volumes. New York: Humanities Press, 1970. Pp. lxxi, 272; 255. $31.50.

Frantz Fanon, their oft-quoted theoretician, styles the history of the world's dispossessed as the view of the damned. And black students and schol- ars have come to demand insistently and passionately that the voices and per- spectives of their forebears be put into the record. Essentially their demand is for a history from below, from the powerless, often illiterate underclasses, and traditional histories and historians have been neither well-suited nor dis- posed to handle this perspective. Happily, the retrieval of oral literature in the form of myths, legends, sagas, praise songs, chants, anecdotes, and other tales and traditions, can help to correct the situation; much evidence of this type has been collected through modern interviews and tape recordings, resulting in such impressive achievements as the more than ten thousand manuscript pages in the Slave Narrative Collection of the Library of Congress. Other evidence results from the survival of published narratives, journals, diaries, autobiographies, and histories by blacks themselves which, combined with the former, are making the understanding of a subterranean black history more possible and its continued denial more difficult. The printed compilation of such perspectives might indeed

help to defuse the sensitive issue of who is or is not able to put before student audiences the black experience as blacks have perceived it. The reprinting of The Life of Olaudah Equiano, with a fine introduction by Paul Edwards, exemplifies the insertion of the perspective of the black underclasses into the history of the

eighteenth century; it is an important addition to the social history of that period as well.

Black slave and freedman Olaudah Equiano offers to this spirit uncommon

insight into one of the most dreary and shameful experiences of Western history, the Atlantic slave trade. A Nigerian by birth, he came also to be known as Gus- tavus Vassa, a name capriciously given him by his slaving ship's captain. Know-

ingly or unknowingly, the captain named Equiano after the adventurous, neurotic founder of a Swedish dynasty which lasted from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Who Olaudah Equiano was and the authenticity of his authorship of this narrative became lively issues for reviewers, issues discussed in depth in the current introduction. Although the debate does not rival the controversy over the

authorship of the works of Shakespeare, there is nonetheless a long history to it. In a journal article appearing shortly after the publication of the narrative in 1789, for example, it was alleged that while the document was generally authen- tic, "it is not improbable that some English writer has assisted him" (I, x). In point of fact, the biographical details known about the life of Equiano or recon- structible from his narrative are sufficient to reasonably put to rest doubts about

Ethiopia: The Modernization of Autocracy is not the only recent work on

Ethiopia's politics, nor does it supersede those by Margery Perham, Christopher Clapham, or Richard Greenfield. These other books have different emphases. Hess's book is, however, the best balanced, most up-to-date, and wide-ranging single work available on the subject.

Herbert S. Lewis

University of Wisconsin

THE LIFE OF OLAUDAH EQUIANO OR GUSTAVUS VASSA THE AFRICAN. By Olaudah Equiano. New Introduction by Paul Edwards. 2 volumes. New York: Humanities Press, 1970. Pp. lxxi, 272; 255. $31.50.

Frantz Fanon, their oft-quoted theoretician, styles the history of the world's dispossessed as the view of the damned. And black students and schol- ars have come to demand insistently and passionately that the voices and per- spectives of their forebears be put into the record. Essentially their demand is for a history from below, from the powerless, often illiterate underclasses, and traditional histories and historians have been neither well-suited nor dis- posed to handle this perspective. Happily, the retrieval of oral literature in the form of myths, legends, sagas, praise songs, chants, anecdotes, and other tales and traditions, can help to correct the situation; much evidence of this type has been collected through modern interviews and tape recordings, resulting in such impressive achievements as the more than ten thousand manuscript pages in the Slave Narrative Collection of the Library of Congress. Other evidence results from the survival of published narratives, journals, diaries, autobiographies, and histories by blacks themselves which, combined with the former, are making the understanding of a subterranean black history more possible and its continued denial more difficult. The printed compilation of such perspectives might indeed

help to defuse the sensitive issue of who is or is not able to put before student audiences the black experience as blacks have perceived it. The reprinting of The Life of Olaudah Equiano, with a fine introduction by Paul Edwards, exemplifies the insertion of the perspective of the black underclasses into the history of the

eighteenth century; it is an important addition to the social history of that period as well.

Black slave and freedman Olaudah Equiano offers to this spirit uncommon

insight into one of the most dreary and shameful experiences of Western history, the Atlantic slave trade. A Nigerian by birth, he came also to be known as Gus- tavus Vassa, a name capriciously given him by his slaving ship's captain. Know-

ingly or unknowingly, the captain named Equiano after the adventurous, neurotic founder of a Swedish dynasty which lasted from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century.

Who Olaudah Equiano was and the authenticity of his authorship of this narrative became lively issues for reviewers, issues discussed in depth in the current introduction. Although the debate does not rival the controversy over the

authorship of the works of Shakespeare, there is nonetheless a long history to it. In a journal article appearing shortly after the publication of the narrative in 1789, for example, it was alleged that while the document was generally authen- tic, "it is not improbable that some English writer has assisted him" (I, x). In point of fact, the biographical details known about the life of Equiano or recon- structible from his narrative are sufficient to reasonably put to rest doubts about

168 168

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BOOK REVIEWS

its authenticity or its authorship. Equiano is known to have gotten a wide if rough and informal Western education in his odyssey and sojourns in the Carib- bean and Europe. He spent over twenty years in Western countries, sufficient time, it seems, to make the question of his proficiency in a Western language churlish and unnecessary. Furthermore, Edwards sensibly cites the high in- cidence of certain "West African English rhymes," such as sin/between and re-

lieve/give, in a poem in the text as evidence of African authorship (II, 155-159). For his part, Equiano caused a number of editions of his narrative to be pub- lished later, in part as an attempt to rebut or deflect questions raised about the authorship and accuracy of the first edition, which came out in 1789. Again one can find close parallels in a literary controversy of another era. Toward the end of 1852, as Uncle Tom's Cabin attained enormous circulation, mounting attacks on the validity of the book caused Harriet Beecher Stowe to put together a five hundred page rebuttal as a follow-up publication.

Internal evidence in his narrative suggests that Equiano was born around 1745 in eastern Nigeria. He was kidnapped and sold into slavery to the British in 1756, delivered first to the West Indies, then taken to England where he was sold to the English sea captain who named him. In the early 1760's he was re- sold and taken again to the Americas. He subsequently purchased his freedom, although he continued to sail on European merchant ships until 1777, traveling as far as Greenland and Turkey. He later settled in England, married, fathered a son, and became active in the English anti-slavery movement. Not all of these biographical details are determinable from the first edition of his narrative. However, eight editions of the book were brought out in Great Britain during Equiano's lifetime, and several posthumous editions. The American edition of this work, a compelling anti-slavery tract, was published in 1791. Interestingly, Jefferson's denunciation of slavery in his Notes of Virginia, written between 1781 and 1782, out of regard for pro-slavery sentiment was only published in the United States in 1788 after publication of earlier editions in Paris and London.

The Life of Olaudah Equiano is at once a petsonal drama and a social panorama pointing up aspects of slavery, freedom, and cross-cultural experi- ences. Equiano's narrative skills and keen observations are evident throughout the text and represent no mean accomplishment. He frequently speaks harshly, bitterly, and properly so. However, the power of the document lies in its re- strained, reasonable, almost matter-of-fact ventilation of his own attitudes and experiences and the ones of those who enslaved him. His observations include comments on his own life as a slave, the mechanics of slaving, traditional Af- rican society, the condition of slaves and free blacks in the West in the eighteenth century, black resistence to slavery, African cultural retentions among New World blacks, the Middle Passage, and the impact of slavery on slavers and en- slaved alike.

Equiano contends that the capture of African slaves was the result more often than not of African chiefs being tempted by white slavers with European goods into falling on their neighbors to obtain prisoners or booty (I, 23). He also observes that the domestic African systems of social servitude were often the manifestation of spoils taken in war, noting the differences in an African slave's condition from that of a European-held one in the West Indies. Whether Equiano's explanation satisfies social scientists who have studied unfree labor in pre-European Africa or not, it does undermine the view that Africans carried to

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BOOK REVIEWS

to the Americas as slaves did so already preconditioned for Western plantation slavery. As Equiano explains it:

With us [domestic slaves] do no more work than other members of the community, even their masters; their food, clothing and lodging were nearly the same as theirs (except that they were not permitted to eat with those who were freeborn); and there was scarce any other difference between them, than a superior degree of importance which the head of a family possesses in our state . . . over every part of his household (I, 26-27).

And with a touch of irony, Equiano undoubtedly surprised eighteenth- century white readers when he related an early perplexity and apprehension at

encountering white men:

When I looked round the ship . . . and saw a large furnace or copper boiling, and a multitude of black people of every description chained

together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted my fate.... I asked them if we were not to be eaten by these white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair (I, 71).

Equiano's portrayal of the dreaded Middle Passage is powerful and pic- turesque, reducing legend to flesh and blood with skillful description (I, 78). At one point he movingly recalls that "I was ready to curse the tide that bore us, the gale that wasted my prison, and even the ship that conducted us; and I called on death to relieve me from the horrors I felt and dreaded that I might be in that place 'where slaves are free, and men oppress no more' " (I, 187). On slave suicides and attempted suicides aboard slave ships, he confides that "could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side" and that "the crew used to watch us very closely who were not chained down to the decks, lest we leap into the water" (I, 74).

The so-called "seasoning" process in the West Indies is recalled and ex- plained as follows:

The white people got some old slaves from the land to pacify us.

They told us we were not to be eaten, but to work, and were soon to go on land, where we should see many of our country people. This eased us much; and sure enough soon after we were landed, there came to us Africans of all languages (I, 84-85).

Equiano allows that "nine-tenths of the mechanics throughout the West Indies" were black slaves (I, 203) and further that they formed large numbers of the coopers, carpenters, masons, smiths, and fishermen. He remarks at the time he is sold to a new owner that he "knew something of seamanship, and could shave and dress hair pretty well" and that he could "refine wines . . . write, and understand arithmetic tolerably well" (I, 195).

Concerning black resistance to slavery, a subject of continuing dispute in recent professional historical writing, Equiano tells of black men who, ironic- ally, were beaten to death for attempting to leap from slave ships and others who were hanged for attempting to murder their overseers. For himself, he assures

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BOOK REVIEWS

his readers that "had the cruel man [his overseer] struck me I certainly should have defended myself at the hazzard of my life; for what is life to a man thus op- pressed?"(I, 207). Furthermore, unlike some of the professional historiography on the slave period, Equiano's work concerns itself not only with the reactions of slaves to slavery but with the pathology of the holders of slaves as well.

This document leaves little doubt that blacks imported into the Caribbean islands retained aspects of African culture. For example, Equiano observes that in Kingston, Jamaica:

Each different nation of Africa meet and dance after the manner of their own country -- they still retain most of their native customs:

they bury their dead, and put victuals, pipes and tobacco, and other

things, in the grave with the corps, in the same manner as in Af- rica (I, 101).

Furthermore, although apprehensive of the vaunted black colonization experiment in Sierra Leone, fearing as others did that black men were being sent to a penal colony or to be sold as slaves again, Equiano came ultimately to court repartri- ation in Africa for himself. He failed to return to Africa as a member of the Sierra Leone expedition, but the thought remained with him as he traveled around Britain speaking against the slave trade and selling subscriptions for his book.

Equiano's reasoning in the lectures was both interesting and singular. Using an

argument part economic and part pragmatic, he held that "if the blacks were permitted to remain in their own country, they would double themselves every fifteen years" (I, 253-254), and "in proportion to such increase would be the de- mand for manufactures" (I, 253-254).

The Life of Olaudah Equiano is a sensitive, compelling, often almost lyr- ical document. Although he discounted any thought that his work would be com-

parable in artistry with the major writers of fiction and biography, in many ways it surpasses these others in artistry and in importance. The essential value of this kind of work, which begins with the self-effacing words "I ought to entreat

your pardon for addressing to you a work so wholly devoid of literary merit," is

appropriately found in the words of others. A John Williams character, for ex-

ample, in The Man Who Cried I Am, speaks for himself and for the perspective represented in these two volumes when he charges:

There has got to be something inherently humble about having the sickness and weakness of [a] society described by a person who is a victim of them; if he the victim is capable of describing what they have believed non-existent then they, the members of the majority, must choose between living the truth, which can be

pretty grim, and the lie, which isn't much better. But at least

they will have the choice.

Richard David Ralston

University of California Los Angeles

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