User:Pcooperterpmail/sandbox

Controversy about origins

Decades after The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African, was published and newly edited in 1967 by Paul Edwards a debate was sparked on the validity of the origins of Equiano’s story.

In 1999, Vincent Carretta published findings of two records, a baptismal record and a naval muster roll, he found question Equiano's account of being born in Africa. Carretta believes that his findings are possible evidence that Equiano had borrowed his account of Africa from others. According to Carretta, Carretta goes on to say the timing of the publication of The Interesting Narrative was not an accident, noting “the revelation that Gustavus Vassa was a native-born Igbo originally named Olaudah Equiano appears to have evolved during 1788 in response to the needs of the abolitionist movement.”

Carretta explains that Equiano presumably knew what parts of his story could be corroborated by others, and, more importantly if he was combining fiction with fact, what parts could not easily be contradicted.

“Equiano’s fellow abolitionists were calling for precisely the kind of account of Africa and the Middle Passage that he supplied. Because only a native African would have experienced the Middle Passage, the abolitionist movement needed an African, not an African-American, voice. Equiano’s autobiography corroborated and even explicitly drew upon earlier reports of Africa and the Middle Passage by some white observers, and challenged those of others.”

Paul E. Lovejoy disputes Carretta’s claim that Vassa was born in South Carolina because of Vassa’s knowledge of the Igbo society. Lovejoy refers to Equiano as Vassa because he never used his African name until he wrote his narrative. Lovejoy believes Vassa's description of his country and his people is sufficient confirmation that he was born where he said he was, and based on when boys received the ichi scarification, that he was about 11 when he was kidnapped, as he claims, which suggests a birth date of ca. 1742, not 1745 or 1747.

Lovejoy thoughts on the baptismal record are that Vassa couldn't have made up his origins because he would have been too young. Lovejoy goes on to say that

“If Carretta is correct about Vassa's age at the time of baptism, accepting the documentary evidence, then he was too young to have created a complex fraud about origins. The fraud must have been perpetrated later, but when? Certainly the baptismal record cannot be used as proof that he committed fraud, only that his godparents might have.”

Lovejoy also believes that Equiano’s Godparents, the Guerins and Pascals, wanted people to think that Vassa was creole born, and not a native African, because he had mastered English so well by then or for other reasons relating to perceived higher status for creoles.

In 2007, Carretta wrote a repsonse to Lovejoy’s claims about the Equiano’s Godparents saying, “Lovejoy can offer no evidence for such a desire or perception.” Carretta goes on to say, “Equiano’s age on the 1759 baptismal record to be off by a year or two before puberty is plausible. But to have it off by five years, as Lovejoy contends, would place Equiano well into puberty at the age of 17, when he would have been far more likely to have had a say in, and later remembered, what was recorded. And his godparents and witnesses should have noticed the difference between a child and an adolescent.”