Equiano, Olaudah, b. 1745

Equiano, Olaudah

When The Interesting Narrative first appeared, it was at the height of the popular campaign to abolish the slave trade. Equiano himself took a critical and vigorous role in the promotion of his book, travelling and speaking on it at every opportunity. The book was immensely popular, running through eight editions in six years in Great Britain, and being translated into both Dutch and German. In 1794, while Equiano was still alive, his book suffered a change of fortune when Pitt's government, alarmed by events in France and the spread of radicalism, launched an onslaught on anything it perceived as radical agitation. Tainted with governmental fears generated by the French Revolution, abolition was temporarily discarded along with general reform. However, by the mid-nineteenth century, nineteen editions were produced in Europe and the United States. Reprinted in 1837 as part of the anti-slavery campaign, it then receded mysteriously out of sight for almost a century and a half.

By the early 1790s Equiano was famous and in demand. He was consulted by Lord Stanhope over the slave legislation under debate in Parliament, and in May 1792 addressed the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland thanking them for their support for abolition. In April 1792, Equiano married Susanna Cullen at the parish church of Soham, Cambridgeshire. They had two daughters, Ann Mary and Joanna. Susannah died, aged 34, in December 1795. Olaudah Equiano died, aged in his early fifties, on 31 March 1797. He left an estate to Joanna, his surviving daughter, worth nearly £1000.

Following his death, Equiano's reputation ebbed and flowed, mainly according to the vicissitudes in fortune of the cause which he had so articulately espoused. The Interesting Narrative enjoyed a brief revival in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s in the British campaign against American slavery, and extracts from it were habitually quoted in anti-slavery anthologies. After the American Civil War, however, Equiano was forgotten and neglected until the 1960s when his autobiography acquired a new relevance in relation both to the struggle for black American civil rights and the wider context of racism in general. By the bicentenary of Equiano's death in 1997, his autobiography was selling more copies than in his lifetime, albeit presumably aided in no small part by modern marketing promotional practice. Equiano has found a new audience among the descendants of Africans scattered around the world by the diaspora. In 1996 the Equiano Society was founded in London devoted to 'the education of the public about the life and work of Olaudah Equiano' and to 'promote the education of the public about the contribution of African and Caribbean people who have made outstanding contributions to the arts, culture, and to the well-being of Britain during the past 400 years'.

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