The Slave Ship (16 page)

In stark contrast to Gronniosaw and Karfa stood the Africans who traded on the coast as described by Captain John Newton: “they are so quick at distinguishing our little local differences of language, and customs in a ship, that before they have been in a ship five minutes, and often before they come on board, they know, with certainty, whether she be from Bristol, Liverpool, or London.” A great many Africans, especially among the Fante on the Gold Coast, worked on canoes and some actually on board the slave ships for extended periods, so they knew them intimately, not only by national differences but by local ones. A few had actually worked transatlantic voyages, so they knew perfectly how to make these big machines “move forward” through the water. But whether the path to the ship ended in wonder or familiarity, the feeling would soon turn to terror.
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For captives the process of expropriation in Africa shattered the life-governing institutions of family and kinship, village, and in some cases nation and state. Many experienced dispossession from their native land as theft. As Africans repeatedly explained to one slave-ship sailor during his voyages of the 1760s, they were “all stolen,” although in many ways. Ukawsaw Gronniosaw went through an individual enslavement that began in free choice. Louis Asa-Asa chronicled the experience of family and village through violent pillage as seen through the eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy. The Gola warriors followed a collective, military, and national path to the ship. The latter two experienced the coffle, an odd and ever-changing social body. It might exist for several months, during which time members died and were sold, as others were added along the journey to the coast. All were subjected to violent discipline and the threat of death, and indeed a lot of people died along the way. The captives fought back—against Africans, to remain in Africa—but rarely with success. They were the vanquished, the wretched of the earth.
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Things could get worse and did. To board the sinister ship was, as the Gola warriors discovered, a terrifying moment of transition, from African to European control. Much of what the captives had known would now be left behind. Africans and African-Americans have come to express the wrenching departure through the symbol of the “door of no return,” one famous example of which exists in the House of Slaves on Goree Island, Senegal, another at Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. Once the enslaved were taken beyond the point of no return, transition turned to transformation. Shackled and trapped in the bowels of a slaver, unable to go home again, the captives would now have no choice but to live in the struggle, a fierce, many-sided, never-ending fight to survive, to live, of necessity, in a new way. The old had been destroyed, and suffering was at hand. Yet within the desolation lay new, broader possibilities of identification, association, and action.
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CHAPTER 4

Olaudah Equiano: Astonishment and Terror

When Olaudah Equiano first laid a child’s eyes on the slave ship that would carry him across the Atlantic, he was filled “with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror.” Born in Igbo land (in present-day Nigeria), he would slave in the Americas, gain his freedom working as a deep-sea sailor, and in the end become a leading figure in the movement to abolish the slave trade in England. The astonishment and terror of the slave ship, he wrote in his autobiography of 1789, “I am yet at a loss to describe.” But the slave ship was central to his life story, as to millions of others’, so he described it as best he could.
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Carried aboard the vessel by African traders in early 1754, the eleven-year-old boy was immediately grabbed by members of the crew, “white men with horrible looks, red faces, and long hair,” who tossed him about to see if he was sound of body. He thought they were “bad spirits” rather than human beings. When they put him down, he looked around the main deck and saw first a huge copper boiling pot and then nearby “a multitude of black people of every description chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow.” Fearing that he had fallen into the hungry, grasping hands of cannibals, he was “overpowered with horror and anguish.” He fainted.

When Equiano came to, he was filled with dread, but he would soon discover that the parade of horrors had only just begun. He was taken down to the lower deck, where a loathsome stench promptly made him ill. When two members of the crew offered food, he weakly refused. They hauled him back up to the main deck, tied him to the windlass, and flogged him. As the pain coursed through his small body, his first thought was to try to escape by flying over the side of the ship, even though he could not swim. He then discovered that the slave ship was equipped with nettings to prevent precisely such desperate rebellion. Thus the original experience of the slave ship and the ensuing memory of it were suffused with violence, terror, and resistance.

Equiano, better known in his own day as Gustavus Vassa, was the first person to write extensively about the slave trade from the perspective of the enslaved. He penned what was at the time perhaps the greatest literary work of the abolitionist movement and what has in recent years become history’s most famous description of the slave ship and the Middle Passage. But now a controversy surrounds his birthplace and hence the authenticity of his voice. Was he born in Africa as he claimed? Or was he born in South Carolina, as suggested by the literary scholar Vincent Carretta, and then later in life invented for himself African origins in order to oppose the slave trade with greater moral authority?
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The matter will continue to be debated, but for present purposes it does not matter. If Equiano was born in West Africa, he is telling the truth—as he remembered it, modified by subsequent experience—about his enslavement and voyage on the slave ship. If he was born in South Carolina, he could have known what he knew only by gathering the lore and experience of people who had been born in Africa and made the dreaded Middle Passage aboard the slave ship. He thus becomes the oral historian, the keeper of the common story, the griot of sorts, of the slave trade, which means that his account is no less faithful to the original experience, only different in its sources and genesis. All who have studied Equiano—on both sides of the debate—agree that he spoke for millions. He wrote his autobiography, and within it his account of the astonishment and terror of the slave ship, in the “interest of humanity.” He was “the voice of the voiceless.”
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Equiano wrote that he was born “in the year 1745, in a charming fruitful vale, named Essaka,” which was possibly Isseke, near Orlu in the Nri-Awka/Isuama region, in central Nigeria.
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He was his family’s youngest of seven children who “lived to grow up.” His father was a man of consequence, some combination of lineage head (
okpala
), wealthy man (
ogaranya
), respected elder (
ndichie
), and member of the council (
ama ala
) that made decisions for the village as a whole. Equiano was to follow in his father’s footsteps and, with some dread, to receive the marks of distinction: the
ichi
scarification on the forehead. He was especially attached to his mother, who helped to train him in the arts of agriculture and war (gun and spear, which he called “javelin”), and to his sister, with whom he would share the tragedy of enslavement. Equiano indicated the prosperity and standing of the family by noting that his father had “many slaves.” (He hastened to add that this slavery, in which slaves lived with and were treated like family, was nothing like the cruel system of the same name to be found in the Americas.) His village was located so far from the coast that “I had never heard of white men or Europeans, nor of the sea.”
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Equiano was born during a time of crisis, when change swept through his homeland and indeed swept up the young boy himself. The first half of the eighteenth century witnessed drought and famine in Igbo land and, even more seriously for the long term, the slow collapse of the Nri civilization, of which Equiano and his village were a part. This helped to open the way for the expansion into the region of the Aro, warlord traders from the south who called themselves
umuchukwu,
“children of god,” who used marriage, alliance, intimidation, and warfare to build an expansive trading network. They funneled thousands of slaves down the three riverine systems—the Niger, the Imo, and the Cross—to the mercantile city-states of Old Calabar, Bonny, and New Calabar. Over the years 1700-1807 more than a million would be enslaved throughout the broader region, the Bight of Biafra. Some would be sold locally; many would die on the way to the coast. Almost nine hundred thousand were packed onto mostly British ships, and after Middle Passage mortality more than three-quarters of a million were delivered to New World ports. Somewhere between a third and three-fourths of those enslaved and shipped out of the region (the proportion is in dispute) were from Igbo land. Of the hundreds of thousands, Equiano would be one.
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Equiano came from a society in which lands were owned and worked in common. Nature was fruitful and benevolent: the soil was rich, he explained; agriculture was productive. Manners were simple and luxuries few, but they had more than enough food and, moreover, “no beggars.” In his village, men and women worked “in a body” in the common fields and in other work—building houses, for example. Using hoes, axes, shovels, picks (which Equiano called “beaks”), they cultivated numerous crops, most important among them the yam, which was boiled, pounded, and made into
fufu,
their staple foodstuff. According to the historian John Oriji, the Igbo were in this period the “world’s most enthusiastic yam cultivators.” They also produced and consumed cocoyams, plantains, peppers, beans and squashes of various kinds, Indian corn, black-eyed peas, watermelon, and fruit. They cultivated cotton and tobacco, raised livestock (bullocks, goats, and poultry), and practiced manufacture. Women spun and wove cotton, making garments, and as ceramic potters they fashioned pipes and “earthen vessels.” Blacksmiths forged implements for war and husbandry, while other metalworking specialists crafted delicate ornaments and jewelry. Most produce was consumed locally, where trade was by barter and money was “of little use.” Yet the economy was not isolated or autarkic, as goods, mostly agricultural, were traded around the region.
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Equiano’s family and extended kin were, like all others, organized as a patrilineal clan (
umunne
), governed by a male head of household and collectively by a council of elders. Because land was communally owned and farmed, class divisions were limited, but the village did feature a clear division of labor and distinctions of status, as exemplified by Equiano’s own father. Equiano also referred to various kinds of specialists—the priest, the magician, the wise man, the doctor, and the healer, who sometimes were all the same person, the
dibia,
a medium of the spirit world and object of respect and fear in Igbo society. At the other end of the social order were slaves, those captured in war or found guilty of crimes (he mentions kidnapping and adultery). In the end, distinctions were minor and a rough equality prevailed. The village also had a great deal of autonomy, and indeed it—not class, nation, or ethnicity—was the primary source of identity for all its members. Equiano recalled that “our subjection to the king of Benin was little more than nominal”; in truth there was probably no subjection at all, to the king of Benin or anyone else. The people of his region prided themselves on a fierce localism and resistance to political centralization. They would long be known for the proverb
“Igbo enwegh eze,”
which means “The Igbo have no king.”
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Of his people Equiano wrote, “We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets.” Ritual occasions were marked by elaborate ceremonies of artistic and religious performance, often to summon and gratify ancestral spirits. The Igbo believed that the line between the worlds of humans and spirits, or the living and the dead, was thin and porous. Indeed spirits both good and evil, although invisible, were always present in Igbo society, promising to help or threatening to hinder, depending on how they were treated. Feeding the spirit through sacrifice (
aja
) was essential to good fortune. The
dibia
communicated directly with the spirits, linking the two worlds. The Igbo also believed that premature death was caused by malevolent spirits and that the spirits of the dead would wander and haunt until properly buried. These beliefs would have serious implications aboard the slave ship.
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By the time Equiano was eleven years old, slave trading and raiding in his native part of Igbo land had already grown extensive, as his autobiography reveals, in ways numerous and subtle. When the adults of the village went to work on the common, they took arms in case of an attack. They also made special arrangements for the children they left behind, bringing them together in a single place, with instructions that they keep a lookout. Wandering strangers inspired fear, especially if they were traders called the Oye-Eboe, whose name meant “red men living at a distance.” These were the Aro, “stout, mahogany-coloured men” from the south. They carried on legitimate, consensual trade, and indeed Equiano noted that his own village sometimes offered them slaves in exchange for European trade goods—firearms, gunpowder, hats, and beads. Such traders encouraged raids of “one little state or district on the other.” A local chief who wanted European wares therefore “falls on his neighbours, and a desperate battle ensues,” after which those taken prisoner would be sold. The Aro also seized people on their own. Their main business, Equiano found in retrospect but apparently did not fully understand as a child, was to “trepan our people.” Ominously, they carried “great sacks” with them wherever they went. Equiano would soon see one of them from the inside.
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