In honor of the 225th anniversary of the publication of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, Howard University held a panel discussion over the weekend where scholars gathered to celebrate modern day African-American scholarship, which they say can trace its roots and inspiration back to Equiano.
In the preface to his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African, Written by Himself, Equiano wrote: “I am not so foolishly vain as to expect from [this book] either immortality or literary reputation.”
Yet, the former slave and self-made man achieved just that.
Equiano’s narrative, widely read in colleges and universities across the nation, describes an early childhood in an Igbo village in present day Nigeria. According to the author’s account, he was kidnapped at age eleven and transported to the West Indies via the Middle Passage where he was sold into slavery. Eventually, he was able to save enough money to purchase his own freedom.
Scholars agree that Equiano’s extraordinary life was the catalyst for an extraordinary work.
“There is no book like his,” said Harvard University’s Dr. Werner Sollors in an e-mail to Diverse. “He is among the first full Western autobiographers, publishing only shortly after Rousseau and Franklin wrote, and he gives modern readers a full sense of his individual interiority, his religious beliefs, his power of observation (the first snow!) and his political passion as well as of the particular strictures on Black subjectivity in England, but most especially in the English colonies.” Sollors is currently the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard.
In addition to celebrating Equiano’s autobiography, the Howard panel also honored present-day scholars and individuals whose contributions have helped to memorialize Equiano’s work.
