Olaudah Equiano

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Olaudah Equiano (c.1745 – 31 March 1797), also sometimes called Gustavus Vassa, was an eighteenth century African writer who lived in Britain and its American colonies. He was born in an unlocated village called Essaka, in what is now the Igbo-speaking region of Nigeria. At the age of eleven, he was taken as a slave to the New World and sold first to a captain in the Royal Navy, who gave him the name of Gustavus Vassa. Later, he was sold to Robert King, a Quaker (member of the Religious Society of Friends) merchant in Philadelphia. King taught him to read and write, and educated him in the Christian faith. Equiano bought his freedom by careful trading and saving and became a seaman, travelling widely over the world. In London, he became involved in the abolitionist movement, which led to him writing and publishing The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa the African (1789), a book that not only furthered the abolitionist cause, but also made Equiano's fortune. It is one of the earliest known examples of writing by a black African writer. Its first hand account of slavery (from the slave's perspective) and of the experiences of an Eighteenth Century black immigrant in Britain are very rare.

A few scholars such as Vincent Carretta, author of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (2005), claim that records show Equiano was actually born in South Carolina and suggest that his account of the Middle Passage was based on already published accounts or on the experiences of others.

Towards the end of his life, Equiano moved to Soham, Cambridgeshire. On the 7 April 1792, he married Susannah Cullen, a local spinster, in St Andrew's Church there. The couple settled in the area and had two daughters, Anna Maria in 1793 and Joanna in 1795. Susannah died in February 1796 and Equiano died a year after that on 31 March 1797. Soon after, the elder daughter died aged four years old, leaving Joanna to inherit Equiano's estate which was valued at £950 — a considerable sum, worth approximately £100,000 today. Joanna married the Rev. Henry Bromley and they ran a Congregational Chapel at Clavering near Saffron Walden in Essex, before moving to London in the middle of the nineteenth century - they are both buried at Abney Park Cemetery in Stoke Newington. Although Equiano's death is recorded in London, the location of his grave is unknown.

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