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Colonialism, Biblical World-Making, and Temporalities in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 December 2008

Sylvester A. Johnson
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Extract

The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797) offers an unusual portrait of the dynamic relationship between scripture and colonialism. In 1789 Equiano, who also went by the name Gustavus Vassa, related his experience of slavery to support abolitionism in Britain in the form of a best-selling, two-volume autobiography titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. Equiano's autobiography comprises a striking description of religion and culture among the Igbo of West Africa, the nation with which he identified by birth. According to Equiano, the Igbo were descended from ancient Jews, and their religion was a modern survival of ancient biblical religion. This claim, seemingly casual at first, is actually a complicated maneuver that reveals how deeply he had mined a trove of biblical commentary to shape his interesting narrative for a skeptical readership. The early modern genre of biblical commentary, which was deeply influenced by the exigencies of European colonialism, constitutes in its own right an authoritative literature that proved quite useful for Equiano.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 77 , Issue 4 , December 2008 , pp. 1003 - 1024
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2008

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References

2 Equiano published nine editions of his autobiography and eventually switched to a single-volume presentation to enhance the book's marketability. For a detailed history of Equiano's publishing (and the definitive biography of Equiano), see Carretta, Vincent, Equiano, the African: The Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), especially chapter 12Google Scholar.

3 Vincent Carretta has recently challenged the veracity of Equiano's claim to Igbo origin. See his Equiano, the African. Carretta argues compellingly, though not conclusively, that Equiano's assertion of Igbo birth is a thoughtful ruse to enrich the potency of his damning criticism of the transatlantic slave trade; it functions to persuade putatively proslavery readers to take him more seriously and to question the violent displacement germane to the global trade and destruction of enslaved Africans. Carretta points to several pieces of evidence of North America as Equiano's birthplace. For instance, Equiano's discussion of West Africa, as remembered from his childhood, seems mechanically dependent upon European travel narratives such as that by Anthony Benezet. More directly, Equiano's baptismal record indicates North America (the Carolinas) as his place of birth. Responses to Carretta's revisionist biography of Equiano have been quite vociferous, perhaps unfairly so. I find Carretta's case to be compelling and certainly plausible. Not even Carretta himself, however, has presented Equiano's claim as beyond debate; rather, his recent biography of Equiano is conceived as an opening of debate. For the purposes of this essay, at any rate, I have tentatively considered Equiano's claim of Igbo origin to be plausible. But given the strength of Carretta's argument, I have in the conclusion of this essay considered the implications of recognizing the Carolinas as Equiano's actual birthplace.

4 Equiano, Olaudah, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African: Written by Himself, 2nd ed. (London: T. Wilkins, 1789), 1:25Google Scholar.

5 Ibid., 1:25–26.

6 This followed largely as a consequence of using the Bible to conceive of world history—the Genesis myths of origin (for example, creation, the Tower of Babel, the Noah legend) required a Palestinian locus of beginnings; from there, the challenge became explaining how the rest of the world was peopled. It is clear from early modern biblical commentary that Africa and the Americas especially inspired vigorous theological maneuvers to relate all of the world's people to these Bible stories. See, for example, Gordon, James Bentley, Terraquea; or, a New System of Geography and Modern History (Dublin: William Porter, 1794)Google Scholar.

7 Leakey, Richard, The Origin of Humankind (New York: Basic Books, 1994)Google Scholar.

8 But as Colin Kidd rightly notes, there were exceptions to this; some modern writers argued that the first humans were neither black nor white but lightly hued: see Kidd, Colin, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 80–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 1:25–26.

10 While living at sea as a slave of the English naval commander Michael Henry Pascal, Equiano received the education typical for a seaman to be able to read, write, and perform mathematical calculations for navigation. His learning sufficiently impressed a subsequent slaver in the West Indies for Equiano to be spared fieldwork and to be used as a bookkeeper instead. After purchasing his freedom, Equiano read as widely as possible: see Carretta, Equiano, the African, 139.

11 Mandelbrote, Scott, “Bedford, Arthur,” in The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

12 Gill made extensive use of secondary sources by Islamic authors in order to provide readers with an abundance of information about interpretive traditions.

13 Gill, John, An Exposition of the Old Testament (London: John Gill, 1763), 1:73Google Scholar.

14 Gill, Exposition of the Old Testament, 1:158. He cites the ancient theologian Cleodemus twice during his discussion of Abraham and Keturah. Gill's claim that Ham's descendants peopled all of Africa is his own gloss, not a summary of other commentators.

15 Brown, John, A Dictionary of the Holy Bible (Edinburgh: John Gray and Gavin Alston, 1769), 16Google Scholar.

16 Ibid., 573.

17 Bedford, Arthur, The Scripture Chronology Demonstrated by Astronomical Calculations, and Also by the Year of Jubilee, and the Sabbatical Year among the Jews: or, An Account of Time from the Creation of the World, to the Destruction of Jerusalem (London: James and John Knapton, 1730), 229Google Scholar.

18 Ibid., 230.

19 Potkay, Adam, “History, Oratory, and God in Equiano's Interesting Narrative,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34:4 (Summer 2001): 601–614CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Ibid. Also, see Potkay, Adam and Burr, Sandra, eds., Black Atlantic Writers of the Eighteenth Century: Living the New Exodus in England and the Americas (New York: St. Martin's, 1995)Google Scholar.

21 Potkay, “History, Oratory, and God in Equiano's Interesting Narrative,” 602, 612 n. 10. Potkay seems not to have examined Equiano's commentary sources. Had he done so, he would have realized that Equiano does subvert the colonizing claims of his sources considerably.

22 Equiano rather explicitly frames his enslavement and eventual Christianization as a fortunate event, one for which he is deeply grateful because it effected his deliverance from a continent of spiritual darkness; in other words, he had escaped eternal damnation.

23 Masuzawa, Tomoko, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Wings of Ethiopia, 153. Equiano's narrative certainly provides much to corroborate Moses’ claim. For instance, after having purchased his freedom, Equiano returned to the West Indies to relive the adventure of seafaring. On one such voyage, Equiano joined members of the Mosquito nation in a festive celebration. His reprehension and disgust toward their clothing, etiquette, food, and libations, by no accident, strike the reader as uncompromisingly “British” and stiff-collared. There can be little doubt that Equiano treasured his cultivated sensibilities of upper-crust British elitism: see Carretta, Equiano, the African, 182–187.

25 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 128Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., 141, 153.

27 The classic treatment of this hybridity is that by Gilroy, Paul, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

28 Brooks, Joanna, American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 33–35Google Scholar.

29 Jonathan Edwards, History of the Work of Redemption, in The Works of President Edwards (1817; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 5:221–222. As Brooks notes, George Whitefield owned slaves and used their labor to ensure the profitability of an orphanage he owned. For an excellent study of Whitefield's shift from abolitionism to slaveholding and public advocacy of slavery, see Stein, Stephen, “George Whitefield on Slavery: Some New Evidence,” Church History 42:2 (June 1973): 243–256, esp. 244–245CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 Biddick, Kathleen, The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Biddick explains how Christian cartography was a technology that literally erased Jews from space and represented the topos of Europe as a Christian land devoid of contemporary Jews.

31 See, for instance, Smith, Jonathan Z., Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1982), xiGoogle Scholar; Foucault, Michel, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1972)Google Scholar; Long, Charles H., “Religion, Discourse, and Hermeneutics: New Approaches in the Study of Religion,” in The Next Step in Studying Religion: A Graduate's Guide, ed. Courville, Mathieu E. (London: Continuum, 2007), 183–197Google Scholar.

32 See Wimbush's, Vincent L. introduction to his edited African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures (New York: Continuum, 2000)Google Scholar; and his edited Theorizing Scriptures: New Critical Orientations to a Cultural Phenomenon (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2008). Wimbush has compellingly argued for applying methods of cultural history to understand how scriptures have been deployed to refashion the world symbolically (world-making), particularly as a means of ordering relations of power, effecting human destruction, negotiating social suffering, and constituting psychological modes, especially in recent centuries.

33 Long, Charles H., Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, Colo.: The Davies Group, 1986), 85–87Google Scholar; Charles H. Long, “Religion, Discourse, and Hermeneutics,” 195–197; Long, Charles H., “Bodies in Time and the Healing of Spaces: Religion, Temporalities, and Health,” in Faith, Health, and Healing in African American Life, ed. Mitchem, Stephanie Y. and Townes, Emilie M. (New York: Praeger, 2008)Google Scholar; and especially Long, Charles H., “African American Religion in the United States of America: An Interpretative Essay,” Nova Religio 7:1 (July 2003): 23–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Long crystallizes a reading of black bodies as coeval with and incorporating modern subjectivity, thus serving as data that become efficacious for theorizing the contemporary world.

34 Biddick, Typological Imaginary, 22–23.

35 Bhabha, Homi, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 236–255Google Scholar. Bhabha foregrounds the relationship between modernity and violence in a manner that recalls Hannah Arendt's classic thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), and that parallels the recent work of Silverblatt, Irene, Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 Gordon, Lewis has aptly examined the routine, mechanistic nature of dehumanization within colonialism in Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An Essay on Philosophy and the Human Sciences (New York: Routledge, 1995)Google Scholar. His analysis of modernity as a colonial problem of historical consciousness is the most theoretically astute.

37 Rediker, Marcus, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007), 5Google Scholar; Davidson, Basil, The African Slave Trade: Precolonial History, 1450–1850 (Toronto: Little, Brown, and Company, 1961), 79–81Google Scholar. Once in the Americas, many African slaves were worked to death within a few months.

38 Much of this genocide against Native Americans, for instance, was exercised in the years leading up to the Civil War: see Stannard, David, The American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

39 Zachernuk, Philip S. has examined this problem in the work of Nigeria's black intelligentsia under colonialism: see his Colonial Subjects: An African Intelligentsia and Atlantic Ideas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

40 This assessment of life in Africa as one leading to eternal doom—assuming no intervention from Christian missionaries—compelled African Christians to express gratitude for having been enslaved because, according to Christian theology of the afterlife, any cruelty and suffering involved paled in comparison to the eternal torment they would have suffered had they continued an unchristian life in Africa. Moses, Wilson Jeremiah compares this idea in a number of early modern African writers: see his The Wings of Ethiopia: Studies in African-American Life and Letters (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1990), 146–151Google Scholar.

41 In the Achina region of Nigeria, ancient religious artifacts, many of which have been passed down for centuries and are privately owned, are increasingly stolen and destroyed by Christians in an attempt to purify their society of “satanic” influences. The result is a major crisis for both the survival and free practice of African religions and the preservation of religious objects of cultic and artistic value that are centuries old: Mbachu, Dulue, “Christianity vs. the Old Gods of Nigeria,” The Guardian, 4 September 2007Google Scholar.

42 There is no compelling reason to doubt Equiano's willingness to establish Christianity in the place of indigenous religions. He describes in the autobiography his efforts to convert a member of the Mosquito nation in the Caribbean upon his eventual return to Jamaica. Equiano was unsuccessful in this bid, however: see his Interesting Narrative, 1:181–183.

43 Pennington, James W. C., A Text Book of the Origin and History, &c. &c. of the Colored People (Hartford: L. Skinner, 1841)Google Scholar; Lewis, Robert Benjamin, Light and Truth, From Ancient and Sacred History (Augusta: Severance and Dorr, 1843)Google Scholar.

44 Equiano, Interesting Narrative, 1:25.

45 See Morris, Gilbert N. M. O., “Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797),” in African American Authors, 1745–1945: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, ed. Nelson, Emmanuel S. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2000), 151–153Google Scholar.

46 See Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992)Google Scholar.

47 Especially pertinent here is Philip Zachernuk's argument that the construction of Africa was practiced no less by African writers than by European colonial authors. Zachernuk identifies Edward Said's critique of representing the Orient as a clear signal to take seriously the inventive nature of colonial discourse, whether generated by colonizers or the colonized: Zachernuk, Colonial Subjects, 32, 33. See also Said, Edward W., Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979)Google Scholar.