The Interesting Narrative

"The choice of my books is not connected with racism directly but with the way I write history. History is exciting. I chose Olaudah Equiano because it’s an extraordinary source. He is an African slave who was first kidnapped in Africa, by other Africans, then sold to Europeans and sent to British America. He had an extraordinarily adventurous life, going back to Europe, sailing in the Mediterranean. He managed to buy his freedom, but was threatened several times with being kidnapped and put back into slavery. Recently the film 12 Years A Slave showed this reality — that was based on the testimony of another former slave, a freeman who was kidnapped. I chose Olaudah Equiano, firstly, because it was perhaps the major document of the abolitionist campaign in England. It had an enormous impact. It showed how a former slave could be highly sensitive, emotional, articulate, with the right values, and it created a totally different dynamic for the abolitionist movement when it was first published in 1789. But it’s also a very rich document from a human point of view. For me this was very important. I used it in my book on racism to show what the consequences of slavery and racism must be considered at an individual level. We have to integrate emotions into history. History is made of sources, and primary sources are very important. I tried to build my book on racism upon primary sources. That was a big challenge, how to write a book covering ten centuries, largely on primary sources. Equiano is one extraordinary example. I just mean how people felt. Our big challenge as historians is to understand not only big structures — the framework of daily life, institutions, what shaped behaviour, but how people felt. What were their emotions? Were they sad? Were they outraged? Were they in love? Were they experiencing friendship? Did they hate other people? The emotions we have nowadays were always there, but the big challenge for a historian is to understand how emotions were expressed and to put them back into the picture. This narrative of Equiano couldn’t be better. He really established friendships with people, he was the object of hate, people tried to kidnap him, he had fights. It’s a very lively story of a human being, and for a historian, this is a dream."

"He was shipped from Africa. This is a famous book. It was quite famous when it was first written, in the late 18th century, but it has had a renaissance from the 1960s onwards. The crucial thing about this book—and this is why I’ve listed it first—is that it gives you the lived experience of enslavement and it neatly pieces together pretty much every chapter in the story of the rise and fall of slavery, and it also covers the geography of the slave trade. What you have is the whole life cycle of enslavement, freedom, re-enslavement in his case, and direct participation in the abolitionist movement. Equiano came from West Africa. We have the story of him being captured. We have the graphic account of the experience of getting on the slave ship, the middle passage itself across the Atlantic; what it’s like to experience plantation slavery in the Caribbean; what it’s like to experience plantation slavery in colonial North America; what it’s like to be freed; what it’s like to live as a black person in London in the 18th century and, what’s more, a black person who, through his skill as a writer, becomes quite wealthy, marries into an English family and becomes a very important lobbyist for the abolitionist cause. “The great challenge with the history of the slave trade is to come across books which actually describe the lived experience of being an enslaved person” And he founds an entirely new genre of writing, the slave narrative. He does all of these things in this one text and he summarizes every aspect of the story in the text. The great challenge with the history of the slave trade is to come across books which actually describe the lived experience of being an enslaved person. There’s some wonderful, sophisticated economic history on the slave trade, some of it Nobel Prize-winning , but much of that has been criticized for putting the actual lived experience of enslavement to one side. It’s absolutely essential if you’re going to read about the slave trade, I think, to find stories and accounts that take you to that lived experience before you go into the historiography and the theory of how you might assess, for example, the economic significance of the slave trade to the development of America , or the development of the Caribbean or the development of West Africa or Britain. Equiano’s the best place to go to for that and he established a genre of writing that enables you to get a sense of that lived experience right through the 18th and 19th centuries. He pioneered the idea that writing a slave narrative was the best way of communicating what it was actually like to be an object. The crucial caveat about Equiano is whether he’s accurately telling his personal story, or whether he’s actually gathering together the testimony and experiences of other people in his situation. Many people have dug into claims advanced in his narrative and have found that, actually, he wasn’t in that place when he said he was and he didn’t beat that person when he said he did. But, nonetheless, he establishes a very important narrative of self-improvement. It’s a story about self-education and that becomes quite telling in lots of other famous slave narratives, including that written by Frederick Douglass , where the crucial moment of self-emancipation is the discovery of how to read and write. In Equiano’s narrative there are various sympathetic white characters including a group of sailors who help him learn to read and write. But the crucial thing is he’s very keen to play up the idea that he taught himself as a way of liberating himself. One of the great perils of being a black person in the Atlantic economy was that you might (if you had been enslaved) generate enough resources to buy your own freedom, but if you were living in a port town, facing onto the Atlantic, you could rapidly be restored to slavery. Being taken back into slavery is one of the acute tragedies of Equiano’s narrative. As I said before, one of the important aspects of his narrative is that he can talk about the experience of being an enslaved person in the Caribbean and about the experience of being an enslaved person in colonial North America, and that’s because he’s taken back into slavery. His re-enslavement took place in London in 1762 having been freed by his first owner, the English naval officer, Michael Pascal. He becomes a very effective convener of people. He clearly had considerable social skills and social capital in London. He famously attended some of the important trials in the Guildhall and elsewhere. He’s clearly somebody who delivers something very important for the abolitionist campaign, which is, again, all about his personal experience of these things. The best way to gather together middle-class sympathy for the enslaved population was to hear from people who’d experienced this themselves and he fulfilled that role very effectively."

"This is a unique and really special book, a full-length autobiography of a man who experienced every aspect of what slavery was. Equiano was born in the 1740s in what is now Nigeria. He was captured and taken to Virginia. Yet by all sorts of cleverness and cunning he managed to buy his own freedom. When working as a sailor in the Caribbean he used the opportunity to engage in trade between the islands using the tiny amount of money he had to buy and sell goods. Through his own entrepreneurship and the help of others he managed to raise the money to buy his own freedom. Then he went to Britain and became heavily involved in the abolitionist crusade. He wrote his narrative partly as a biography but also partly as a campaigning tool for the battle against slavery. The abolitionist movement was a movement of oratory and Equiano read passages from this book in tours across Britain. He spoke in Bristol, where I live, and travelled the country talking about the experiences of slavery. The meetings of the abolitionists had a real religious fervour to them and this Igbo Nigerian, who had been a slave and seen the horrors of slavery at first hand, must have been an extremely powerful figure to turn up in Bristol or Bath and amaze an audience with his eloquence and charisma."