The Igbo Intellectual Tradition

Creative Conflict in African and African Diasporic Thought

G. Chuku, G. Chuku

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137311290
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

In this groundbreaking collection, leading historians, Africanists, and other scholars document the life and work of twelve Igbo intellectuals who, educated within European traditions, came to terms with the dominance of European thought while making significant contributions to African intellectual traditions.

CHAPTER 1

Olaudah Equiano and the Foundation of Igbo Intellectual Tradition

Gloria Chuku

Introduction

This chapter evaluates the controversies surrounding Olaudah Equiano’s birthplace, and the creative conflict in his literary and intellectual developments. It also examines his contributions to the development of Igbo intellectual tradition, slavery historiography, African American literary genre, comparative literature and other fields of study. His roles as an eighteenth-century Afro-British abolitionist, human rights activist, successful entrepreneur and a writer and author of a bestseller and a classic are articulated. By no means will a piece of work of this size claim a complete exhaustion of the issues surrounding the life of Olaudah Equiano as a boy in Igbo region, his ordeals in the hands of his kidnappers and enslavers in Africa, through the “Middle Passage” and enslavement in the Americas, and as a freeman in England. However, Equiano’s life experiences and embodied identities, which helped to shape his personality, his humanity and the intellectual tradition that he left behind are discussed.

Knowledge about Olaudah Equiano comes from his book, The Interesting Narrative, which was published in London in 1789, and from other sources. Born an Igbo in 1745 in what became southeastern Nigeria, Equiano was the youngest son in a family of six sons and a daughter. He was kidnapped along with his younger sister between the age of ten and eleven by two men and a woman in 1756. He passed from one slave dealer to another within the region including a blacksmith whose people spoke his own language. After many months of traveling, Equiano landed on the coast from where he embarked on the horrific “Middle Passage” to Barbados, in the West Indies. From there, he was sold to a Virginia planter in North America. It was in Virginia that Michael Henry Pascal, a British naval officer, bought him from the planter. Pascal renamed Olaudah Equiano, Gustavus Vassa,¹ and took him to London. He served with Pascal in the Royal Navy during the Seven Years War (1756–1763, also known in North America as the French and Indian Wars).

After the war, Pascal betrayed Equiano by reselling him back to the West Indies, where he was bought by Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia (PA) who owned many vessels operating between the Caribbean and North America. Equiano’s commercial voyages on behalf of his master took him to places including St. Kitts, St. Eustatius and New Providence in the Bahamas, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Santa Cruz, Charleston (SC), Philadelphia and Savannah (GA). One of the ship captains of Equiano’s master helped him to engage in petty trade on his own account. Equiano was thrifty enough to save £40 needed to buy his freedom in 1766 from Robert King. During the period of his enslavement, Equiano learned the arts of literacy and literature from his master and dearest friend, Richard “Dick” Baker, a White Virginia youth and slave owner. Another friend, Daniel Queen, taught him how to dress hair and read the Bible. Equiano also became an experienced sailor. It is evident that Equiano regained his freedom by sheer hard work, diligence, entrepreneurial skills and by carefully studying and manipulating both individuals and institutions including those that worked to perpetuate slavery, as well as by what he referred to as “the mercies of Providence.” The same society that repressed him also offered him the very tools and skills with which he resisted the oppression. Here lies one of the contradictions in Equiano’s life experience.

Following his freedom, Equiano returned to England and became a hair-dresser, musician and valet. It was however, a disappointing experience. Poverty forced him back to the commercial voyages in the Americas. Equiano embarked on several commercial and adventurous voyages to North America (Savannah and Philadelphia), the Mediterranean, the West Indies and the North Pole. Even as a freeman, he was constantly exposed to abuse, insult and the risk of reenslavement. Equiano finally settled in London where he pursued spiritual and social transformation. He converted to Christianity as a Methodist. He married Susanna Cullen, an Englishwoman in April 1792 and they had two daughters: Ann Mary, born on October 16, 1793, and Joanna, born April 11, 1795. Equiano died on March 31, 1797, following the death of his wife and daughter (Ann Mary). Before his death, Equiano was an avid campaigner against slavery and the slave trade. He worked very hard to achieve fame and wealth.²

Equiano’s Igbo Origin and the Controversies

Questions surrounding Equiano’s birthplace, which the author believes, hinge on the complexity of race and ethnic identity, have remained a subject of discussion by individuals in both academic and non-academic spheres. Those involved in the discourse have been motivated by diverse reasons ranging from political to economic gains and from nationalist sentiments to pure academic inquiry. To the abolitionists and pro-abolitionist readers of The Interesting Narrative, and some scholars, especially of Igbo origins,³ Equiano was what he said he was, an Igbo.⁴ Adiele Afigbo, an esteemed Igbo historian, states, “[t]here is no doubt that Equiano was an Igbo man to the marrow.”⁵ The doubts about Equiano’s Igbo origin started with pro-slavery writers in England who denied his African origin soon after the publication of his book in the late eighteenth century with the motive of discrediting him and his narrative. With more scholarly investigations and interpretations of diverse records, the question of Equiano’s birthplace has been revived since the twentieth century. Looking at the sociopolitical atmosphere of England when the book was published, it is not surprising that Equiano’s accounts of his early life in Igbo society, his kidnapping and experience during the Atlantic crossing attracted criticisms from anti-abolitionist quarters because it was the most impressive and fascinating aspect of his narrative, which won the patronage of its early readers and became therefore the most effective in winning public support to the abolitionist cause. As Folarin Shyllon states, “Because Equiano did much to advance the cause of Abolition, he incurred the bitter displeasure of the dealers in human flesh, who tried to discredit him and neutralize his influence. But they failed.”⁶

While the eighteenth-century critics claimed that he was born and bred in the Danish Island of Santa Cruz, in the West Indies (present St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands), others, especially since the twentieth-century point to the baptismal and naval documents that suggest a South Carolina birthplace.⁷ Unlike during the twentieth- and twenty-first-century revelations of a possible South Carolina birthplace, Equiano was alive in the eighteenth century to refute the Santa Cruz claims. From the fifth edition of The Interesting Narrative, Equiano made reference to two separate publications in The Oracle and The Star, alleging that he was born and bred in the Danish Island of Santa Cruz, in the West Indies, which he saw as orchestrated attempts to tarnish his character and integrity and hinder the sale of his book. In his rebuttal of these allegations, he appealed “to those numerous and respectable persons of character who knew [him] when [he] first arrived in England, and could speak no language but that of Africa . . . and to the friends of humanity” who might be touched by the cruel and dehumanizing conditions of enslaved Africans and help to end the trade in human cargo.⁸ In a letter by Alexander Tilloch to John Montieth, he reinforced Equiano’s argument that those allegations about his birthplace were fabrications meant to destabilize abolitionists’ efforts to end the slave trade. And in another correspondence, one Reverend Dr. J. Baker queried: “can any man that reads your Narrative believe that you are not a native of Africa?”⁹

The most forceful and explosive claims to a South Carolina birthplace came from Vincent Carretta, an American professor of English, who relied on Equiano’s baptismal record of 1759 and naval records from his Arctic voyage in 1773. Although Carretta has been pointing to South Carolina as Equiano’s birthplace since the mid-1990s in his various publications, it was not until his powerful biography was released in 2005 that this topic generated sustained scholarly responses: one of the most interesting being the exchanges between him and Paul Lovejoy, a prominent Canadian Africanist historian on the pages of Slavery and Abolition.¹⁰ In his persuasive argument that Equiano might not have been born in Africa based on his documented baptismal information that support South Carolina birthplace, Carretta states:

Recent biographical discoveries have cast doubt on Equiano’s story of his birth and early years. The available evidence suggests that the author of The Interesting Narrative may have invented rather than reclaimed an African identity . . . Baptismal and naval records say that he was born in South Carolina around 1747. If they are accurate, he invented his African childhood and his much-quoted account of the Middle Passage on a slave ship. Other newly found evidence proves that Equiano first came to England years earlier than he says. He was clearly willing to manipulate at least some of the details of his life.¹¹

Here, Carretta also refutes Equiano’s date of birth and when he first arrived in England, which he placed in 1754. In addition to raising the curiosity as to why Equiano never used his Igbo/African names until a short while before the publication of his book, Carretta questions the motive behind Equiano’s alleged embellishment or falsification of his birth records. He believes that

[T]he abolitionist debate created a demand for an African victim’s account of the Middle Passage. Motive is the most likely key to recognizing what we should believe in Equiano’s account, as well as to understanding why he suppressed the records in his autobiography . . . His account of Africa is a combination of printed sources, imagination, oral history and memory. But was the memory his own? . . . Equiano’s possible financial and ideological motives for inventing an African nativity are clear.¹²

In his response, focusing primarily on the relationship between autobiography and memory, Lovejoy argues:

Despite the existence of documentation that refutes his claim to an African birth . . . circumstantial evidence indicates that he was born where he said he was, and that, in fact, The Interesting Narrative is reasonably accurate in its details, although, of course, subject to the same criticisms of selectivity and self-interested distortion that characterize the genre of autobiography.¹³

Employing his historical analytical skills, Lovejoy has raised interesting questions regarding the discrepancies surrounding the St. Margaret’s Church parish register of February 9, 1759, which states: “Gustavus Vassa a black born in Carolina 12 years old,” and his godmother’s (Mary Guerin) willingness to support Equiano’s Africanity rather than expose his “lies” when he was accused of falsifying his birth records by claiming an African birthplace instead of Santa Cluz; and the record in the muster book of the Racehorse during his Arctic expedition in 1773 in which Gustavus Weston was identified as a 28-year-old seaman from the Carolina instead of Gustavus Vassa. In addition to important pieces of historical information that correspond to Equiano’s narrative,¹⁴ Lovejoy also raises significant linguistic questions that reinforce Equiano’s Igbo birthplace.

There is significant and convincing evidence that support Equiano’s account that he could not speak any language but Igbo until the late 1750s. If Equiano was employed in 1775 by Dr. Charles Irving in his abortive Mosquito Shore project because of his fluency in an African language (Igbo), as Lovejoy suggests, and if he joined his employer in 1776 to purchase slaves at Kingston to cultivate a plantation and he chose mainly his Igbo countrymen thereby using his ethnicity as a social control mechanism, where then did he acquire his fluency in Igbo if we accept the South Carolina birthplace? Bearing in mind how difficult experts say it is to learn the Igbo language in comparison to other languages in the Bight of Biafra, it would have been too much for Equiano to learn Igbo and English at the same time.¹⁵ Moreover, while there is evidence that shows how and when he learned English, there is none for the Igbo language. He might have interacted with some of the enslaved and freed Igbo in the West Indies and England, but there is no record of such interactions with the Igbo in South Carolina and Virginia. If he was born in South Carolina, he would have acquired a certain level of proficiency in English that would have saved him the trouble of learning the language from his friends and master on sea voyages. His effort would have been rather focused on Igbo language. But, assuming Equiano’s childhood was spent in South Carolina, he would have spoken Gullah and not Igbo. We are yet to trace any family, childhood friends or master connections that linked him to South Carolina. Nobody has explained how Equiano at the age of seven or nine as Carre...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Maps
• Introduction
• 1. Olaudah Equiano and the Foundation of Igbo Intellectual Tradition
• 2. Nnamdi Azikiwe: The Triumph of Knowledge
• 3. Mbonu Ojike: An African Nationalist and Pan-Africanist
• 4. Bishop Anthony Nwedo of Umuahia: Faith, Vision and Mission
• 5. Kenneth Dike: The Father of Modern African Historiography
• 6. Adiele Afigbo and the Development of Igbo and Nigerian Historical Studies
• 7. Pius Nwabufo Okigbo: A Pragmatic Economist and an Intellectual Giant
• 8. Ben Nwabueze and African Intellectual Tradition
• 9. Chinua Achebe and the Development of Igbo/African Studies
• 10. Nwanyibuife Flora Nwapa, Igbo Culture and Women’s Studies
• 11. Helen Chukwuma: The Inimitable Advocate for African Women’s Empowerment
• Selected Bibliography
• Index