People · c. 1745 to 1797 · Disputed
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Olaudah Equiano wrote that he was kidnapped as a child from an Igbo village. A Nigerian scholar placed it near Ihiala. Then two old English records said he was born in Carolina.
In 1789, a free Black man in London published a book about his life. He called himself Olaudah Equiano, and he said he was born around 1745 in a village he called "Essaka", in the "Eboe" country, which is to say Igbo land. He wrote that he was the second youngest of seven children, five brothers and a little sister. His father was a titled elder who helped settle quarrels in the community.
When he was about eleven or twelve, he wrote, raiders came while his parents were away and took him and his sister. They were sold on through traders. After about six months he reached the coast, saw the sea for the first time, and saw a slave ship waiting at anchor. His wonder turned to terror once they carried him on board. The crew grabbed him and tossed him about to check if he was healthy, and he became sure he had fallen into a world of evil spirits who meant to kill him. Below deck, the smell and the crowding made him so ill he couldn't eat. When he refused food, two of the crew tied him down and flogged him.
The ship took him to Barbados and then on to Virginia. In 1754 a British naval officer, Captain Henry Michael Pascal, bought him and gave him a new name, Gustavus Vassa. He didn't take it quietly, and he was beaten until he gave in. He spent years at sea on British ships during the Seven Years' War, learned to read and write from fellow sailors, and was baptised at St Margaret's Church, Westminster, in early 1759. Pascal had promised to free him, then sold him instead. Eventually, in the Caribbean, a Quaker merchant called Robert King agreed to let him buy his freedom for the £40 he had cost. Equiano saved it up faster than King expected, and in 1766, at about 23, he was free.
Equiano became one of the best-known Black voices in Britain. He worked with campaigners against the slave trade and spoke at public meetings about what he had seen. His book was a bestseller. It came out in Germany, America and Holland too, and in Ireland alone he sold about 2,000 copies. Part of its power was his description of home. He showed an Igbo society with order, elders and rules, not the savages the slave traders described.
For Nigerians, that made him precious. Chinua Achebe called him "the father of African literature". And people naturally wanted to know where Essaka was.
The late Nigerian scholar Catherine Acholonu went looking. She identified Essaka as Isseke, also written Iseke, in Ihiala, in today's Anambra State. The Igbo Community in Dorset, which has written about him, also suggests the name "Equiano" may be a garbled version of "Ekweano". He was a child when he was taken and wrote decades later with no contact with home, so names could easily have drifted. Supporters point to small details too. He wrote that his father bore the ichi marks on his forehead and that he expected to get them himself. The website Equiano's World argues this fits the custom at Isseke.
Then in 2005 the American scholar Vincent Carretta published a book that upset many people. He had found two documents. One was the 1759 baptism record from St Margaret's, Westminster, which describes the boy as "a Black, born in Carolina, 12 years old". The other was a ship's muster from 1773, which also gives his birthplace as South Carolina.
If those records are right, Equiano may have been born in America and never seen Igbo land at all. His account of Essaka could have been built from what he heard from other Africans, and shaped for a book meant to fight the slave trade. The writer David Dabydeen, reviewing the book in The Guardian, noted that many Nigerians were "up in arms", because Equiano is their "star writer and witness".
Nobody has settled it. Records written by English clerks about a Black boy could easily be wrong, or reflect what someone else said about him. A first-hand memory could also be invented, or borrowed, for good reasons. BBC History points out that, apart from his early years, everything in his autobiography can be checked against other records. It's the childhood, the most important part for Nigerians, that can't be proven either way.
What's not in doubt is the rest of his life. He married Susanna Cullen of Soham, Cambridgeshire, in April 1792, and they had two daughters, Anna Maria and Johanna. Susanna died in February 1796. Equiano died a year later, on 31 March 1797, before he could join an expedition to resettle freed Black people in Sierra Leone. His will left part of his estate to help West Africans if his daughters didn't reach 21. Anna Maria died at four. Johanna lived to 1857.
So whether a small town near Ihiala was really his home stays an open question. But his description of an Igbo childhood, true or pieced together, is still one of the oldest written pictures of that world we have.
