Life in the Igbo Region

Life in the Igbo Region

The Interesting Narrative of Oladuah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano is one of the best-known figures in the history of the transatlantic slave trade. A former slave and world traveler, he became an active participant and activist in the abolitionist movement. His autobiography remains one of the most popular and widely published narratives of the slave trade era.

The Interesting Narrative provides a first-hand account of the violence that underpinned the plantation system: the rapacity of slave traders, the inhumanity of the Middle Passage on slave ships, the savagery of plantation owners, and the treatment of black people (freed as well as enslaved) by whites in the West Indies and American colonies. At the same time, it paints a picture of traditional life in Africa somewhat removed from the idealized and Arcadian notions of many contemporary abolitionists; for example, Equiano refers to the existence of domestic slavery and local warfare in Ibo society. His autobiography is suffused with his passionate and profound evangelical Christianity, attacking slave-owners and slave-traffickers as “nominal Christians” who fail to do to others what they wish to be done to them, corrupted by avarice and wickedness. It forms a worthy supplement to John Wesley's sermons against the evils of slavery. Above all, it is a personal statement by one who had lived the life of a slave. It is written from his own experience; his oftenquoted description of the “red faces” of white slavers and the “large furnace” on the ship that took him away from Africa (chap. 3) is etched with the sharp instrument of childhood recollection.

The Interesting Narrative brought Equiano considerable fame in his lifetime. The Prince of Wales (later George IV) and the Duke of York were among its fans. It provided Equiano with a sufficient return to make his final years ones of comfort. On April 7, 1792, he married a white woman, Susanna Cullen, who predeceased him by a year. He died in London on March 31, 1797, and thus did not live to see the Atlantic slave trade abolished. His fame lingered a little thereafter, and then virtually disappeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when chroniclers venerated Wilberforce and his white colleagues for their crusade against slavery and the slave trade, but ignored the contribution made by Equiano and other former black slaves such as Ignatius Sancho and Ottobah Cuguano. The rising interest in black history since the 1960s (especially in the United States) has rectified this imbalance. It has led to the rediscovery of Equiano and his book, which has won “an iconic status” (Walvin 1994) in black diaspora studies. It has also furnished future ages with an authentic and first-hand account of the black experience at the height of the British plantation system in the late eighteenth century.

The Igbo

The Igbo are the third largest ethnic group in Nigeria. Their home area is in the southeastern part of Nigeria. Their origins are obscure. The Igbo language is part of the Kwa ...