Chapter Eighteen
Diasporan Voices of the African Past: James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, and Ignatius Sancho
as Sources of African History
Maurice Jackson
Robin Law has produced a rich history of the African past.One of his signal contributions has been to show the importance of studying the European travel narratives, whatever their contradictions.[1] Law has shown that documented European narratives on Africa fall into "three broad categories." First, the writer’s personal recollections and experiences, such as those of soldiers and officers, traders, and other members of various expeditions like the Royal African Company. The second category included “ethnographic work” which offers more general accounts of the folklores, lifestyles, institutions, and customs of the indigenous African peoples. The third category includes “explicitly historical works.”[2]
Philip Curtin also distinguished between different types of writers relating to Africa.[3] They were: 1) writers reporting from West Africa, i.e., British publicists, 2) biologists, 3) men of letters, 4) travel writers. According to Curtain, “from the mid-15th to the mid-18th century, several hundred different travellers left some account of their voyage to Guinea.” He further notes, “many of these journals and reports had dropped from sight by the 1780s, but about 20 different works had come to be accepted as a cannon of West African knowledge.”[4] Today, however, the works of men of African descent published in the 1780s must be added to any categorical documentation of the “cannons of West African knowledge.” They must be recognized as true sources of the African and European past. By reading them, and the accounts and sources they use, one can trace, with a good deal of precision, the evolving view of Africa and of Africans held by formerly enslaved Africans and passed on to Europeans and Americans.
James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw
James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, An African Prince, As Related by Himself, underwent twelve editions between its initial publishing in 1771 and 1800. [5]“By representing himself as ‘an African Prince,’” in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Gronniosaw implicitly ties his narrative to the literary tradition of the ‘Noble Savage.’”[6]
Gronniosaw’s work was first published when the author, who was born in what was then called Guinea but is now present-day Nigeria, was sixty years old. Like Ottobah Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, he married a white woman.[7] Like Phyllis Wheatley, he had come to the attention of the Countess of Huntingdon, the philanthropist and an associate of George Whitefield and of John Wesley the Methodist founder. In fact he dedicates his book to “To the Right Honorable The Countess of Huntingdon”and signs it “And obedient Servant, James Albert.” Gronniosaw’s Narrative appeared the year before Benezet’s work on Guinea, but eight years after his Short Account of Africa, first published in 1762.[8] Benezet, in fact, owned a copy of the Gronniosaw narrative.[9] Both Benezet and Gronniosaw cited the work of the minister Richard Baxter (A Call to the Unconverted to Turn and Live 1658), who in the seventeenth century was an early opponent of slavery and the slave trade. Gronniosaw wrote that his master had given him a copy of Baxter’s work and that “he began to relish the book” and “took great delight in it.”[10] His mistress had given him a copy of John Bunyan’s Pilgrims Progress and like Benezet he had read Michel Adanson’s Voyage to Senegal and Willem Bosman’s New Description of the Guinea Coast. [11] Gronniosaw had been the slave of Dutch masters in New York.[12] He spoke Dutch and “may have encountered Bosman at the Fort of Elmina” where a Dutch slave ship brought the kidnapped African to the mainland colonies. He “knew Bosman’s work in the Dutch Language” as he spoke the language, as well as English.[13]
Of the most well known tracts written by Africans, Gronniosaw's was the most moderate. Perhaps he assumed that the mere writing of a narrative by a former slave was proof enough of his humanity and his desire for his people’s freedom. Although he was a convert to Calvinism, Gronniosaw, like Equiano and Cugoano, also admired the evangelical style of George Whitefield and wrote about seeing him speak. As Adam Potkay and Sandra Burr explained “the basic drama we find in the lives of Gronniosaw, [John] Marrant, and [Olaudah] Equiano—uncertainty, despair, quickening, and regeneration—reflects not only Whitefield’s influence, but that of the Puritan world of letters that Whitefield inherited, [including Richard] Baxter’s A Call to the Unconverted (1658) [and John] Bunyan’s Holy War (1682) of which Gronniosaw read.”[14] Walter Shirley, who was a cousin of the Countess of Huntingdon, a close associate of Whitefield, wrote the preface to his narrative. The countess had inherited Whitefield’s slaves and the rest of his property when he died in 1770.[15] Like Equiano, he developed a style of the “talking book,” where in certain scenes the book “speaks to him.”
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano
Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (ca.1757–1791) was perhaps the second most influential African writer of the day, after Olaudah Equiano. Cugoano arrived in England around the time of the Somerset decision, in June 1772, and learned of the debates surrounding the decision. As an African, Cugoano wrote, “and we that are particularly concerned would humbly join with all the rest of our brethren and countrymen in complexion [in] imploring and earnestly entreating the most respectful and generous people of Great Britain.” As an Englishman or an Afro-Brit, Cugoano denounced the Christian theory of the great chain of being and challenged those who argued “that an African is not entitled to any competent degree of knowledge, or capable of imbibing handy sentiments of probity; and that nature designed him for some inferior link in the chain fitted only to be a slave.”[16] He added a Biblical phrase that had been used by men like George Fox, “an instructive question, by the prophet could not have been proposed as this, Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Then, may ye also do good that are accustomed to do evil. Jer [emiah] xiii.”[17]
As Christopher Brown put it, “Cugoano took an unusually broad view of the problem of slavery. Most British antislavery writers avoided sweeping critiques of the imperial project when trying to win support for slave abolition. Cugoano, by contrast, described the exploitation of Africans as symptomatic of the larger crimes attending European expansion, a point that he developed through lengthy quotations from William Robertson’s History of America, which detailed Spanish depredations in the Indies.”[18]
Cugoano’s narrative, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species,…by Ottobah Cugoano, a Native of Africa was first published in 1787 and again in 1791. Like Equiano, Sancho, and Gronniosaw's s he made sure that his African heritage was mentioned prominently in the title. He wrote that “the worthy and judicious author of Historical Account of Guinea, [Anthony Benezet] and others, have given some striking estimations of the exceeding evil occasioned by that wicked diabolical traffic of the African slave trade; wherein it seems, of late years, the English have taken the lead, or the greatest part of it, in carrying it on..”[19] Cugoano was in many ways the more radical of the African writers and the most philosophical. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. argues that Cugoano’s “text wrestles with several other eighteenth-century works on slavery, some named and some unnamed, including David Hume’s 1754 version of his well-known essay ‘of National Characters,’ and…. Anthony Benezet’s Some Historical Account of Guinea.” [20]
Cugoano also used Benezet’s figures to calculate the number of slaves in and passing through Barbados, and gave the Quaker credit for having “computed that the ships from Liverpool, Briton and London have exported from the coast of Africa upwards of one hundred thousand slaves annually: and that among other evils attending this barbarous inhuman traffic, it is also computed that the numbers which are killed by the treacherous and barbarous methods of procuring them, together with those that perish in the voyage, and die in the seasoning, amount to at least an hundred thousand, which perish in every yearly attempt to supply the colonies.”[21]
The Liverpool sources that Cugoano referred to was “a book printed in Liverpool” that Benezet used called the “Liverpool Memorandum-book.” For him it was “an exact list of the number of vessels employed in the Guinea trade and the number of Slaves imported in each vessel brought into Liverpool which amounted to upwards of thirty thousand, and from the number of vessels employed by the African Company in London and Bristol.” Benezet did not have access to the commercial records later used by Thomas Clarkson, but based on the Memorandum Book, he estimated in his Caution and a Warning to Great Britain, which Cugoano apparently also had, that “One Hundred Thousand Negroes [are] purchased and brought on board our ships yearly from the coast of Africa, on their account.”[22]
Cugoano like Equiano was moved by a long passage that Benezet first wrote in A Caution and a Warning and amplified in Some Historical Account of Guinea, which was devoted exclusively to the “usage of the Negroes, when they arrive in the West Indies” that:
When the vessels are full freighted with slaves, they sail for our plantations in America, and may be two or three months in the voyage; during which time, from the filth and stench that is among them, distempers frequently break out, which carry off commonly a fifth, a fourth, yea sometimes a third or more of them; so that taking all the slaves together, that are brought on board our ships yearly, one may reasonably suppose that at least ten thousand of them die on the voyage. And in a printed amount of the state of the Negroes in our plantations, it is supposed that a fourth part, more or less, die at the different islands, in what is called the seasoning. Hence it may be presumed, that at a moderate computation of the slaves who are purchased by our African Merchants in a year, nearly thirty thousand die upon the voyage, and in the seasoning. Add to this, the prodigious number who are killed in the incursions and intestine wars, by which the Negroes procure the number of slaves wanted to load the vessels. How dreadful then is the slave-trade, whereby so many thousands of our fellow creatures, free by nature, endowed with the same rational faculties, and called to be heirs of the same salvation with us, lose their lives, and are truly and properly speaking, murdered every year! For it is not necessary, in order to convict a man of murder, to make it appear that he had an intention to commit murder. Whoever does, by unjust force or violence, deprive another of his liberty, and, while he hath him in his power, continues so to oppress him by cruel treatment, as eventually to occasion his death, is actually guilty of murder. It is enough to make a thoughtful person tremble, to think what a load of guilt lies upon our nation on this account; and that the blood of thousands of poor innocent creatures, murdered every year in the protection of this wicked trade, cries aloud to heaven for vengeance. Were we to hear or read of a nation that destroyed every year in some other way, as many human creatures as perish in this trade, we should certainly consider them as a very bloody, barbarous people…Injustice may be methodized and established by law, but still it will be injustice, as it was before; more insensible of the guilt, and more bold and secure in the perpetuation of it.”[23]
Cugoano wrote very eloquently what few before him—black or white—had been able to conceptualize. Paraphrasing the biblical story of Adam and Eve, he wrote, “That all mankind did spring from one original, and that there are no different species among men. For God who made the world, hath made of one blood all the nations of men that dwell on all the face of the earth.”[24] He then wrote that there “are no inferior species, but all of one blood and of one nature, that there does not an inferiority subsist, or depend, on their colour, features or form, whereby some men make a pretence to enslave others.” Using the language of the Scottish moral philosopher George Wallace whom he had read about in Benezet’s works, he concluded, “it never could be lawful and just for any nation, or people, to oppress and enslave another.”[25] In short, as Christopher Brown concluded, “his Thoughts and Sentiments represented the most radical antislavery publication printed in Britain before 1788.”[26]Cugoano and Equiano were both mentioned in Abbé Grégoire’s An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties. Grégoire cited six “Negroes and Mulattoes”: “Cugoano, Othello, Phillis Wheatley, Julien Raymond, Ignatius Sancho, Gustavus Vasa.”[27]
Cugoano confronted color in religious and philosophical terms. “I must again observe,” he told his readers, “that the external blackness of the Ethiopians, is as innocent and natural, as the spots in the leopards; and that the difference of color and complexions, which it hath pleased God to appoint among men, are no more unbecoming unto either of them as the different shades of the rainbow are unseemly to the whole.” He accepted Africans, Afro-Brits, and later, Englishmen as his “countrymen.” For Cugoano, “colour does not alter the nature and quality of a man…whether he was black or white. Whether he was male or female, whether he was great or small or whether he was old.”[28] Cugoano therefore was able to reconcile his past heritage and African identity with his current condition and status. Roxann Wheeler has observed, “although Cugoano’s references to skin color often try to reconcile the apparently intractable differences embodied in the black/white binary, he also intimates that complexion should function as a visible reminder of shared origins, despite language and other cultural variations.”[29]
Cugoano’s work offers a more radical and polemical argument against slavery than Equiano’s.[30] He seems to have read the tracts of Granville Sharp and other British antislavery and radical publications.[31] It does not seem coincidental that the title of his work, Thoughts and Sentiments of the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Human Commerce of the Human Species, should so closely resemble Thomas Clarkson’s An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, which was published in London one year earlier. Nor should it be ignored that the title coincided with Benezet’s A Caution and a Warning to Great Britain and Her Colonies.[32]. In Thoughts and Sentiments, Cugoano borrowed from Benezet’s style in A Caution and a Warning to Great Britain ofposing questions to the British. He lamented, “were the inhabitants of Great Britain to hear tell of any other nation that murdered one hundred thousand innocent people annually, they would think them an exceedingly inhuman, barbarous, and wicked people.” Like Gronniosaw and later Equiano, Cugoano sought to give a positive portrayal of Africa as it existed before the arrival of the Europeans. He told his readers, “as to the Africans selling their own wives and children nothing could be more opposite to every thing they hold dear and valuable; and nothing can distress them more, than to part with any of their relations and friends. Such are the tender feelings of parents for their children.” Those “brought away from Guinea,” he asserted, “are born as free, and are brought up with as great a predilection for their own country, freedom and liberty, as the sons and daughters of fair Britain.”[33] Benezet had used similar language in A Caution and a Warning to Great Britain, Some Historical Account of Guinea and in one of his last works,Short Observations on Slavery. In this work, subtitled Introduction to some Extracts from the writing of the Abbé Raynal on that important subject, Benezet resorted to the third person. Here he recreated the scene of a man “frequently dropping tears,” on the Philadelphia dock when fondling his master’s children, “the cause of which was not known till he was able to be understood.” Benezet went on to describe the “dejection and grief” of the father and wrote of the “tender parents: all of who are real friends of LIBERTY.”[34]
Cugoano combined the ideas of Thomas Clarkson, Benezet, James Ramsay, and from William Robertson’s History of America in his work.[35]Benezet had offered a plan for gradual emancipation and for the education and training of blacks once freed. However, Cugoano went farther than most early abolitionists in his demands for justice. Quoting from Granville Sharp’s 1776 tract The Law of Retribution he wrote ‘that there is an absolute necessity to abolish the slave trade, and the West India slavery; and that to be in power, and to neglect even a day in endeavoring to put a stop to such monstrous iniquity and abandoned wickedness… endangers a man’s own eternal welfare’ and his ‘temporal dignity.’[36]