Somewhere on his first Atlantic voyages, a boy of about twelve who had been kidnapped in West Africa and sold in Virginia tried to make a book speak to him. He knew that the white men around him spent hours in their books. He concluded, reasonably, that books must hold conversations.
I had often seen my master and Dick employed in reading; and I had a great curiosity to talk to the books, as I thought they did; and so to learn how all things had a beginning: for that purpose I have often taken up a book, and have talked to it, and then put my ears to it, when alone, in hopes it would answer me; and I have been very much concerned when I found it remained silent. — Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789)
Twelve years later he could write the sentence you have just read. Twenty-nine years later he was on tour with a book of his own — lecturing in British cities, signing copies, quoting his own life back at the parliament that had made him a commodity.
His name was Olaudah Equiano, and for most of his life he was called Gustavus Vassa. He is usually discussed as a great abolitionist. He is equally worth studying as one of the most thoroughly documented autodidacts of the eighteenth century — a man who was legally kept ignorant, who assembled an education out of borrowed hours, borrowed books and borrowed teachers, and then used that education to argue that no one could be kept in ignorance who wanted to learn.
Essaka: A Childhood Before the Ships
By his own account he was born around 1745 in Essaka, a village in the Igbo region of what is now Anambra State, Nigeria. He was the youngest of six surviving sons in a household that owned slaves itself, which is a fact he recorded without blinking and which matters to the honesty of his book. The family was not poor or marginal. His father was a man of standing, and Equiano's memory of the community that took him — its laws, its music, its marriage customs, its method of catching the sun's altitude at night — fills the opening chapters of the Narrative, written four decades later and in a language he had to learn as an adult.
At about eleven, alone in the family compound, he and his sister were seized by kidnappers, separated, and sold. He changed owners repeatedly as he was marched and traded toward the coast. Six months after the kidnapping he reached the sea and was put aboard a European slave ship with 244 other Africans. The passage, the crowding, the smell, the men who he believed intended to eat him — the Narrative's account of it is the origin of the English-language literature of the Middle Passage, and it was written by somebody who had to build the words for it.
In Virginia he was bought by Michael Henry Pascal, a Royal Navy lieutenant, who renamed him Gustavus Vassa after a sixteenth-century Swedish king. It was his third name. The boy objected and asked to keep his previous one, Jacob. He writes that his objection "gained me many a cuff", and that he eventually gave in. He used Gustavus Vassa for the rest of his life in every official record. He kept Equiano for his book — the only place where he could name himself.
The Education Nobody Was Paying For
Pascal took him to England and to war. Equiano was present at the siege of Louisbourg in 1758, the Battle of Lagos in 1759 and the capture of Belle Île in 1761, serving as a powder monkey alongside his duties as a valet, and it was in this unpromising setting that his education actually began — in fragments, taken from whoever was nearby.
On the ship Namur there was a school on board, and he learned a little reading and writing there. The captain's clerk on the Ætna taught him to write properly and gave him "a smattering of arithmetic as far as the rule of three" — the practical arithmetic of proportion that ran the trade of an empire. His ambition, he wrote, was blunt and financial: he wanted to be able to read and write, "and thereby getting money to enable me to get a good education".
Daniel Queen and the Nights Spent in the Bible
The most important teacher of his youth was a shipmate, not a schoolmaster. Daniel Queen, about forty, well educated, messed with him aboard the Ætna, and took him on as a project:
He taught me to shave and dress hair a little, and also to read in the Bible, explaining many passages to me, which I did not comprehend... I used to tell him of this resemblance; and many a time we have sat up the whole night together at this employment. In short, he was like a father to me. — The Interesting Narrative (1789)
Equiano could not pay for instruction, so he paid in what he had. He won half-pence at marbles, earned small sums shaving the crew, and used the money to buy Queen sugar and tobacco. Then he tested his own reading against the text: noticing, as he read the Bible, that the laws and customs it described resembled the ones he remembered from Essaka, and telling Queen so. The habit that shows up here — read a hard book, compare it against what you know, argue about it with another person — is the same habit that produced the Narrative.
London, a Baptism, and the Miss Guerins
In London, Pascal sent him to wait on the Miss Guerins, Elizabeth and Mary, who had been kind to him before and who now arranged for him to go to school. He attended a schoolmaster he liked so much that he was "no small grief" to leave him. The Guerins taught him to read themselves "and took great pains to instruct me", and it was through their insistence that he was baptised at St Margaret's, Westminster, on 9 February 1759, aged about fourteen.
A detail from that period is worth holding on to, because it is the closest thing in the record to evidence about his starting point. When his origins were later questioned, his godparents — cousins of Pascal — testified that when Equiano arrived in London they had had to help teach him English. Somebody who needed help with English at fourteen wrote one of the great prose works of eighteenth-century English at forty-four.
Sold Again, and the Arithmetic of Freedom
In December 1762, Pascal sold him to James Doran, captain of the Charming Sally, at Gravesend, and Doran carried him to Montserrat and sold him to Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia. King asked what he could do. Equiano's answer is a résumé of a self-taught life in one sentence: he knew something of seamanship, could shave and dress hair, could refine wines, "and that I could write, and understood arithmetic tolerably well as far as the Rule of Three".
King hired him out of the ordinary slave's work and let him trade on his own account — fruit, tumblers, small merchandise — and in 1765 promised that for the price King had paid, £40, he could buy his freedom. He earned it and bought it in 1766, aged about twenty-one. He then found that in the colonies a free Black man was still liable to be kidnapped back into slavery: while loading a ship in Georgia he came close to it. He sailed for England.
Twelve Pounds a Year, and Evening School
What he did with freedom is the part of the story that most resembles a modern learner's schedule. He had saved thirty-seven guineas in wages. He found the Miss Guerins, now at May's Hill in Greenwich, told them what had happened to him, and asked them to recommend him to a trade. They suggested hairdressing; he apprenticed in Coventry Court, off the Haymarket.
Almost immediately he packed his evenings. A neighbour in the same court taught the French horn and gave him lessons until he "soon learned all the three parts"; he later recorded that he took them partly because he disliked idleness and the evenings were long. He also engaged the Reverend Mr. Gregory, who kept an academy and an evening school in the same court, to improve his arithmetic, which Gregory did "as far as barter and alligation" — the two hardest commercial rules, the point at which arithmetic becomes algebra in words. In February 1768 he hired himself to Dr Charles Irving in Pall Mall, and negotiated to keep attending his schools in the evenings, which he described as "a great blessing".
The cost was real, and he did the sums. His wages were twelve pounds a year, two thirds less than he had earned at sea, and the fees of his "three preceptors" plus his own expenses ate the thirty-seven guineas down to one. His solution was to go back to sea to earn money to be educated — which is the whole economic logic of self-education stated by someone who had no other option.
The Arctic, and a Prince Who Learned His Letters in Eleven Days
He sailed again. In 1773, aboard HMS Racehorse, he joined an expedition toward the North Pole — the voyage on which he began keeping a journal and nearly burned the ship, writing by candlelight in a store-room full of tow and aquafortis, when a spark caught and the whole place went up in flame. He survived and kept writing.
Two years later, on a voyage to the Mosquito Coast of Central America, he became the teacher. A young prince named George, about eighteen, was travelling to England and back, and Equiano set out to instruct him.
I taught him in the compass of eleven days all the letters, and he could put even two or three of them together and spell them. I had Fox's Martyrology with cuts, and he used to be very fond of looking into it, and would ask many questions about the papal cruelties he saw depicted there, which I explained to him. — The Interesting Narrative (1789)
Notice the method, because it is the method that had worked on him: an illustrated book, real pictures of real things, a teacher who answers questions, and eleven days of attention. Equiano had been the boy who put his ear to a silent book. Now he was the man who made books answer for somebody else.
The Book That Was Also an Argument
Back in London in the 1780s, Equiano became a leading member of the Sons of Africa, the small group of free Africans who worked with the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade. In 1783 he was the person who told the abolitionist Granville Sharp about the Zong massacre, in which 132 enslaved Africans were thrown overboard so that the shipowners could claim them on insurance. He was appointed Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the Black Poor going to Sierra Leone in November 1786; he resigned over financial mismanagement, in a quarrel that cost him a position and kept his name clean.
In 1789 he published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself. It went through nine editions in his lifetime and was a bestseller by 1792, published in Russia, Germany, Holland and the United States. He sold it the way modern authors do — by touring. In 1791 and 1792 he travelled the British Isles giving readings and signing copies, and in Belfast in October 1791 he was hosted by Samuel Neilson of the Society of United Irishmen, connecting abolitionist networks with radical reform ones.
His argument for why slavery and mass illiteracy were the same project is the reason his book was dangerous:
You stupify them with stripes, and think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance; and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them. — The Interesting Narrative (1789)
Ten years after his death, the Slave Trade Act 1807 committed the Royal Navy to suppressing the Atlantic slave trade. In 2007 Equiano's life became part of the English National Curriculum. He is commemorated in the Church of England with a Lesser Festival on 30 July, a crater on Mercury carries his name, and in 2022 Cambridge renamed a bridge for him.
The One Honest Complication
In 1999 Vincent Carretta of the University of Maryland, editing a new edition of the Narrative, found two documents that trouble the story: the register of St Margaret's, Westminster, which records his baptism with the description "a Black, born in Carolina, 12 years old", and a 1773 ship's muster. Carretta argued that Equiano may have been born in the American colonies, and that the African childhood was shaped for literary and political effect.
Other historians are not persuaded. The Narrative contains dozens of checkable details — dates, ships, officers, battles, prices — that Carretta confirmed against other records, and Adam Hochschild's response is the one usually quoted: autobiographies may distort or exaggerate, but "seldom is one crucial portion of a memoir totally fabricated and the remainder scrupulously accurate". Nigerian scholars have pushed back hard against the claim. The question of where he was born remains genuinely open; what is not open is that a man who could not read at fourteen became the author of the most widely read first-person account of slavery in the English language before 1800.
Marriage, Death, and a Legacy Left to a School
In April 1792, in Soham, Cambridgeshire, he married Susannah Cullen, a local woman; the original marriage register survives in the Cambridgeshire Archives. They had two daughters, Anna Maria and Joanna. Susannah died in February 1796, aged thirty-four; Equiano died on 31 March 1797, and Anna Maria died that July at three. His burial place at Whitefield's Tabernacle is lost. His register entry reads "Gustus Vasa, 52 years".
His will left half of his estate to the Sierra Leone Company for a school, and half to the London Missionary Society — a man who bought his own education one half-penny at a time, trying to buy it for other people at the end.
What a Learner Can Take From Equiano
- Assemble the education from whoever is present. He had no school system, so he used a captain's clerk, a shipmate, two sisters who sent him to school, an evening academy across the street, a horn player, and a merchant who let him trade. Fragments from seven people added up to literacy.
- Put a hard book in front of yourself and argue with it. He read the Bible at night with Queen and told him where the text matched what he knew from Essaka. Reading with something to compare against is comprehension, not recitation.
- Sell your hours carefully when you cannot pay in money. He bought instruction with marbles half-pence and sugar until he had wages. His arithmetic eventually reached barter and alligation, on top of a twelve-pound salary, financed by going back to sea.
- Recognise the ceiling of translation and the value of real material. His writing was formed by the Bible, Fox's Martyrs, the sea and the letters he wrote in public newspapers — not by grammar tables.
- Teach the letters to somebody else. The eleven-day lesson to Prince George is the best evidence in the book that he understood what he had learned: he could decompose reading into letters, and produce a picture book, and answer questions about it.
- Use the language as evidence. His entire polemical strategy was to write prose so good that it refuted the claim that Africans were "incapable of learning". The book was the argument.
Equiano began by putting his ear to a book and waiting for it to speak. He ended as the man books answered to. Between those two facts lie a school in Westminster, a Bible read all night on a fireship, arithmetic done at an evening academy after a full day of hairdressing, and a decision — made repeatedly, by a person who was not legally a person — that his own ignorance was a debt somebody owed him, and that he would collect it.