26
Testimony of Robert Norris, 1789, in
HCSP
69:38-39. See also John Thornton,
Africa and Africans,
99-105.
27
“Anonymous Account of the Society and Trade of the Canary Islands and West Africa, with Observations on the Slave Trade” (n.d., but c. 1784), Add. Ms. 59777B, f. 42v, BL; John Matthews,
A Voyage to the River Sierra Leone, on the Coast of Africa, containing an Account of the Trade and Productions of the Country, and of the Civil and Religious Customs and Manners of the People; in a Series of Letters to a Friend in England
(London: B. White and Son, 1788), 85-86; John Atkins,
A Voyage to Guinea, Brasil, and the West Indies; In His Majesty’s Ships, the Swallow and Weymouth
(London, 1735; rpt. London: Frank Cass, 1970), 176; Testimony of Thomas Trotter, 1790, in
HCSP,
73:83-84; Thomas Clarkson,
An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African, translated from a Latin Dissertation, which was honoured with the First Prize in the
University of Cambridge for the Year 1785, with Additions
(London, 1786; rpt. Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., 1969), 45; Testimony of Henry Ellison, 1790,
HCSP,
73:381. See also John Thornton,
Warfare in Atlantic Africa: 1500-1800
(London: Routledge, 1999), 128. On the import of guns into West Africa, especially for the period 1750-1807, see J. E. Inikori, “The Import of Firearms into West Africa 1750-1807: A Quantitative Analysis,”
Journal of African History
18 (1977), 339-68 and W. A. Richards. “The Import of Firearms into West Africa in the Eighteenth Century,”
Journal of African History
21 (1980), 43-59.
28
Moore,
Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa,
30; Rodney,
History of the Upper Guinea Coast,
114.
29
Barry,
Senegambia and the Atlantic Slave Trade,
6-7.
30
Atkins,
A Voyage to Guinea,
180; Bruce Mouser, ed.,
A Slaving Voyage to Africa and Jamaica: The Log of the
Sandown,
1793
-
1794
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 81-82 ; Thomas Clarkson,
Letters on the Slave-Trade and the State of the Natives in those Parts of Africa which are Contiguous to Fort St. Louis and Goree
(London, 1791).
31
Robert Norris wrote that the “Mahees” resisted enslavement by the king of Dahomey in the 1750s and 1760s by escaping to rugged, inaccessible mountain terrain, where they defended themselves. See his
Memoirs of the Reign of Bossa Ahádee, King of Dahomy, an Inland Country of Guiney, to which are added the Author’s Journey to Abomey, the Capital, and a Sort Account of the African Slave Trade
(orig. publ. London, 1789; rpt. London: Frank Cass and Company Limited, 1968), 21-22. See also Ismail Rashid, “ ‘A Devotion to the Idea of Liberty at Any Price’: Rebellion and Antislavery in the Upper Guinea Coast in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Sylviane A. Diouf, ed.,
Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies
(Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003), 137, 142.
32
Alexander Falconbridge,
An Account of the Slave Trade on the Coast of Africa
(London, 1788), 20. On children, see Audra A. Diptee, “African Children in the British Slave Trade During the Late Eighteenth Century,”
Slavery and Abolition
27 (2006), 183-96, and Paul E. Lovejoy, “The Children of Slavery—the Transatlantic Phase,” ibid., 197-217.
33
Captain William Snelgrave,
A New Account of Some Parts of Guinea and the Slave Trade
(London, 1734; rpt. London: Frank Cass & Co., 1971), 49 ;
Memoirs of Crow,
199- 200; Patrick Manning, “Primitive Art and Modern Times,”
Radical History Review
33 (1985), 165-81.
34
The grand pillage is described in Clarkson,
Letters on the Slave-Trade,
based on his conversations with Geoffrey de Villeneuve, aide-de-camp to the French governor of the slave-trading port Goree in Senegambia. See Letter II.
35
Louis Asa-Asa was apparently born soon after the movements to abolish the slave trade had succeeded in Britain and the United States, then transported out of West Afria on a French ship, and on both scores his life falls outside the formal boundaries of our exploration. Yet what he conveyed fits well with surviving evidence of the British and American trades in the earlier period, and in any case African narratives of the slave trade are so rare as to make his brief but vivid account extremely valuable. See “Narrative of Louis Asa-Asa, a Captured African,” in
The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself,
ed. Moira Ferguson (orig. publ. London and Edinburgh, 1831; rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 121-24.
36
I have not been able to identify the Adinyé warriors.
37
The chronology of Louis Asa-Asa’s life is confused, and indeed he may have worked on a New World plantation, even though the account assembled by Thomas Prince implies that Asa-Asa came from Sierra Leone directly to England. When he said that “friends and relations” in Egie were captured by the Adinyé and carried away as slaves, he added, “I know this because I afterwards saw them as slaves on the other side of the sea.”
38
Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, African Prince, As related by Himself
(Bath, 1770).
39
Mungo Park,
Travels into the Interior of Africa, Performed under the Direction and Patronage of the African Association, in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797
, ed. Kate Ferguson Marsters (orig. publ. 1799; rpt. Durham, N.C., and London: Duke University Press, 2000), 303.
40
John Newton,
Thoughts upon the African Slave Trade
(London, 1788), 23-24.
41
Testimony of Ellison, in
HCSP,
73:381.
42
For explorations of the experience see Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen, eds.,
Black Imagination and the Middle Passage
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
1
Olaudah Equiano,
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself
(London, 1789), reprinted in
The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings
(New York: Penguin, 1995), ed. Vincent Carretta, 55-56 (hereafter cited, Equiano,
Interesting Narrative
). For biographies of Equiano, see James Walvin,
An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745
-
1797
(London: Cassell, 1998) and Vincent Carretta,
Equiano the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man
(Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 2005); see also the essay by the distinguished Nigerian historian Adiele Afigbo, “Through a Glass Darkly: Eighteenth-Century Igbo Society through Equiano’s Narrative,” in his
Ropes of Sand: Studies in Igbo History and Culture
(Ibadan: University Press Ltd., 1981), 145-86.
2
I agree with scholars such as Paul Lovejoy and Alexander X. Byrd who have argued that Equiano’s deep knowledge of Igbo culture, language included, supports his claim that he was indeed born where he said he was. See Carretta,
Equiano the African,
xi-xix; Alexander X. Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation, and Gustavus Vassa’s
Interesting Narrative,
”
William and Mary
Quarterly 3rd ser. 63(2006), 123-48; Paul Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African,”
Slavery and Abolition
27 (2006), 317-47. Byrd notes that if Equiano was born in South Carolina, he could only have learned what he did through “prodigious listening” (143). A useful exploration of Equiano’s use of African philosophy is Paul Edwards and Rosalind Shaw, “The Invisible
Chi
in Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative,
”
Journal of Religion in Africa
19 (1989) 146-56.
3
Most would agree with Carretta’s claim that in writing about enslavement and the Middle Passage Equiano “has spoken for millions of his fellow diasporan Africans.” See Carretta,
Equiano the African,
xix; Afigbo, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 147. For a useful discussion of the few first-person African accounts of the Middle Passage and the slave trade, see Jerome S. Handler, “Survivors of the Middle Passage: Life Histories of Enslaved Africans in British America,”
Slavery and Abolition
23 (2002), 25-56. I follow Carretta in treating Equiano’s depiction of his early life as if true and request that the reader keep in mind that his account might embody a collective lore.
4
Three locations have been suggested as Equiano’s birthplace. G. I. Jones put forward Northern Ika Igbo province; Adiele Afigbo advanced Nsukke in northern Igbo land; and Catherine Obianju Acholonu (along with others) has suggested Isseke. See G. I. Jones, “Olaudah Equiano of the Niger Ibo,” in Philip D. Curtin, ed.,
Africa Remembered: Narratives by West Africans from the Era of the Slave Trade
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 61; Afigbo, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 156; and Catherine Obianju Acholonu, “The Home of Olaudah Equiano—A Linguistic and Anthropological Survey,”
Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
22 (1987), 5-16.
5
Quotations in this section appear in Equiano,
Interesting Narrative,
32-33, 35, 37, 38, 46. See also Daryll Forde and G. I. Jones,
The Ibo and Ibibio-Speaking Peoples of South-Eastern Nigeria
(London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 37; G. I. Jones,
The Trading States of the Oil Rivers
(London: Oxford University Press, 1962); G. I. Jones, “Olaudah Equiano of the Niger Ibo,” 64. Equiano’s familiarity with guns raises questions about whether he was as ignorant of Europeans and the sea as he claimed.
6
On the Aro see Kenneth Onwuka Dike and Felicia Ekejiuba,
The Aro of South-eastern Nigeria, 1650
-
1980
(Ibadan: University Press Ltd., 1990). This paragraph and indeed this entire section is much indebted to the work of Douglas B. Chambers, “ ‘My own nation’: Igbo Exiles in the Diaspora,”
Slavery and Abolition
18 (1997), 72-97; “Ethnicity in the Diaspora: The Slave Trade and the Creation of African ‘Nations’ in the Americas,”
Slavery and Abolition
22 (2001), 25-39 ; “The Significance of Igbo in the Bight of Biafra Slave-Trade: A Rejoinder to Northrup’s ‘Myth Igbo,’ ”
Slavery and Abolition
23 (2002), 101-20; and
Murder at Montpelier: Igbo Africans in Virginia
(Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2005), especially ch. 2 and 3.
7
Afigbo, “Economic Foundations of Pre-Colonial Igbo Society,” in
Ropes of Sand,
123-44; John N. Oriji,
Traditions of Igbo Origin: A Study of Pre-Colonial Population Movements in Africa
(New York: Peter Lang, 1990), 4; Chambers,
Murder at Montpelier,
39-40.
8
David Northrup,
Trade Without Rulers: Pre-Colonial Economic Development in South-Eastern Nigeria
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 15; Chambers,
Murder at Montpelier,
191; Afigbo, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 179.
9
Chambers, “My own nation,” 82; Chambers,
Murder at Montpelier,
59-62.
10
Northrup,
Trade Without Rulers,
65-76.
11
Quotations in this section appear in Equiano,
Interesting Narrative,
46-54.
12
Both Carretta (
Equiano the African,
34) and Lovejoy (“Autobiography and Memory”) suggest that the
Ogden
was likely the vessel on which Equiano sailed, and I am inclined to agree. For details on the voyage, see
TSTD
, #90473.
13
Quotations in this section appear in Equiano,
Interesting Narrative,
55-57. Equiano’s reaction to the ship was remarkably similar to that of an English boy, Jack Cremer, who went aboard a naval vessel in 1708 at about eight years of age: “I was not taken notice of for a day or two, nor could I think what world I was in, weather among Spirits or Devills. All seemed strange; different languidge and strange expreshions of tonge, that I thought myself always a sleep or in a dream, and never properly awake. Every morning a dreadful Noise for Waking Ship, and evenings in boats, that I was always dreading what was the matter.” See John Cremer,
Ramblin’ Jack: The Journal of Captain John Cremer, 1700
-
1774,
ed. R. Reynall Bellamy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936), 43. William Butterworth also pronounced himself “amazed” by the “stupendous pieces of naval architecture” when as a teenager he first saw the Liverpool docks. See
Three Years Adventures
, 4.
14
Femi J. Kolapo, “The Igbo and Their Neighbours During the Era of the Atlantic Slave-Trade,”
Slavery and Abolition
25 (2004), 114-33; Chambers, “Ethnicity in the Diaspora,” 26-27; Chambers, “Significance of Igbo,” 108-9 ; David Northrup, “Igbo: Culture and Ethnicity in the Atlantic World,”
Slavery and Abolition
21 (2000), 12. A major recent finding of scholarship on the slave trade is that there was less randomness, and hence less cultural mixing, in the gathering of slaves than previously believed. On the contrary, the clustering of cultural groups at African slave-trading ports facilitated communication aboard the ship. For more on this issue, see chapter 9. On the cultural flows from Africa to America, important work includes Michael A. Gomez,
Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carlina Press, 1998); Philip D. Morgan, “The Cultural Implications of the Atlantic Slave Trade: African Regional Origins, American Destinations and New World Developments,”
Slavery and Abolition
18 (1997), 122-45; Gwendolyn Midlo Hall,
Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
15
Chinua Achebe, “Handicaps of Writing in a Second Language,”
Spear Magazine
(1964), cited in Lovejoy, “Autobiography and Memory.” See also Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation,” 127, 132, 134, 137. For a more expansive exploration of the meaning of “Igbo,” which includes “the people” and “forest-dweller,” see Oriji,
Traditions of Igbo Origins,
2-4. On Igbo ethnogenesis, see Chambers, “My own nation,” 91, and “Ethnicity on the Diaspora,” 25-39.
16
It is not known how many people died while the vessel was anchored on the coast and making its Atlantic crossing, only that the captain of the
Ogden
apparently planned to gather a “cargo” of 400 people and actually delivered 243. See
TSTD,
#90473.
17
Quotations in this section appear in Equiano,
Interesting Narrative,
58-59.
18
Forde and Jones,
Ibo and Ibibio-Speaking Peoples,
27; Afigbo, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 181. Suicide on the slave ship might have been more common among the Igbo than other Africans. Michael Gomez has argued that the stereotype among planters that the Igbo were predisposed to suicide may have had a basis in social reality. See his “A Quality of Anguish: The Igbo Response to Enslavement in the Americas,” in Paul E. Lovejoy and David V. Trotman, eds.,
Trans-Atlantic Dimensions of the African Diaspora
(London: Continuum, 2003), 82-95.
19
I follow the birth date (1742) and early chronology for Equiano proposed by Lovejoy in “Autobiography and Memory.”
20
Quotations in this section appear in Equiano,
Interesting Narrative,
60-61.
21
On the tendency of the Igbo to see masters as sorcerers, see Chambers, “My own nation,” 86.
22
That Equiano had never seen horses supports the argument for his origins in central Igbo land, which because of the tsetse fly did not have horses, rather than the north, which did have them. See Forde and Jones,
Ibo and Ibibio-Speaking Peoples,
14, and Afigbo, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 150.
23
As noted above, the
Ogden
spent eight months on the coast gathering its human cargo.
24
Quotations in this section appear in Equiano,
Interesting Narrative,
62-67. On the
Nancy,
see Carretta,
Equiano the African,
37.
25
Equiano,
Interesting Narrative,
52. The world of the Atlantic slave trade was in some ways a small one. Equiano appeared on the coast for transshipment to America at a time when John Newton (had he ventured farther eastward) might have been the one to carry him to the New World. Moreover, by the time Equiano wrote his memoir in 1789, he had already read James Field Stanfield’s
Observations on a Guinea Voyage
and indeed cited him on the character of the people in Benin. It is quite likely that Newton and Stanfield read Equiano’s spiritual autobiography, as both were following the debate on the slave trade closely. For accounts of Stanfield and Newton, see chapters 5 and 6. Quotations in this section appear in Equiano,
Interesting Narrative,
51, 55, 56, 63, 64.
26
Afigbo, “Through a Glass Darkly,” 152.
27
Sidney W. Mintz and Richard Price,
The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Perspective
(1976, 1992). Chambers is critical of Mintz and Price but writes of the importance of Igbo shipmates in mid-eighteenth-century Virginia. See
Murder at Montpelier,
94.
28
Byrd, “Eboe, Country, Nation,” 145-46; Afigbo, “Economic Foundations,” 129.