Olaudah Equiano’s memoir ignited the abolitionist movement in Britain

FROM THE Americas to England, the free African man, Olaudah Equiano, returned. Eventually, he became involved in the movement to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself. The religious group, The Quakers, were the main antislavery agitators at the time.

Equiano was distressed in 1774 by the kidnapping of his friend, a black cook named John Annis by his former enslaver, who transported Annis to Saint Kitts, where he was punished severely, and put to work as a plantation labourer until he died. With the aid of Granville Sharp, Equiano had tried to get Annis released before he was shipped from England, but he was unsuccessful.

Equiano records his and Granville Sharp’s central roles in the anti-slave trade movement, and their effort to publicise the Zong massacre, which became known in 1783. It was Equiano who told abolitionists, such as Granville Sharp, about the atrocities of the slave trade. He was the first person to tell Sharp about the Zong massacre, the case of the mass drowning of more than 130 captured Africans by the crew of the British trade ship, Zong, over several days from November 29, 1781.

After the Zong arrived at the port at Black River, Jamaica, the Zong’s owners made a claim to their insurers for the loss of the Africans. They were insured as property, not as people. The insurers refused to pay, they were sued, and lost the case. They appealed. The appeal judges, led by Lord Chief Justice, the Earl of Mansfield, ruled against the owners on the grounds that new evidence suggested that the captain and crew were at fault.

After the first trial, Equiano brought news of the massacre to the attention of the anti-slavery campaigner Granville Sharp, who worked unsuccessfully to have the ship’s crew prosecuted for murder. This much-publicised legal dispute energised the abolitionist movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was singularly a major testament of the systemic evil of the trade in Africans, and more so the horrors of the Middle Passage, the trade route from Africa to the West Indies.

Equiano was befriended and supported by many abolitionists, many of whom encouraged him to write and publish his life story. He was supported financially in this effort by philanthropic abolitionists and religious benefactors.

The memoir, entitled, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, manifested in 1789. The book went through nine editions in his lifetime, and was translated into Russian, German and Dutch. He travelled throughout England, Scotland and Ireland promoting the book, spending eight months in Ireland alone between 1792 and 1793. His stomach-churning accounts of the inhumane conditions on the trade ships tugged at the hearts of abolitionist, who used such accounts as part of their fight against the wretched trade in Africans.

“At last, when the ship we were in had got in all her cargo, they made ready with many fearful noises, and we were all put under deck, so that we could not see how they managed the vessel. But this disappointment was the least of my sorrow. The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air,” he writes in one section.

“But now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers.”

In 1787, the non-denominational Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade was founded. The next year, Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act 1788, its first law regulating the slave trade, to limit the number of captured African per ship. In 1791, Parliament prohibited insurance companies from reimbursing ship-owners when enslaved Africans were murdered by being thrown overboard.

Olaudah Equiano, the African, died on March 31, 1797 in London, England. Ten years later, the ‘Slave Trade Act 1807’ was enacted, making it illegal for Britain to participate in the trade in Africans. The location of his grave is no longer known, but his memoir will always be known as the narrative of the formerly enslaved African that helped to abolish the slave trade and slavery.

In 2009, a tablet memorialising him was installed at London’s St Margaret’s Church, where he was baptised in 1759.