Olaudah Equiano

12/29/2024

A documentary of Olaudah Equiano by the BBC

12/05/2024

12/05/2024

Igbo people are everywhere, our DNA has flowed into every race there is.

11/21/2024

This is nice, everyone of us forcefully carried away from our motherland should have the right to call Africa a home. Having a citizenship of an African country is just the first step towards reconnection.

God bless the people of Ghana.
Could Nigeria do the same?

11/12/2024

Resignation is a noble path in times like this.

Having sought the gracious permission of His Majesty The King, I have decided to resign as Archbishop of Canterbury.

The Makin Review has exposed the long-maintained conspiracy of silence about the heinous abuses of John Smyth.

When I was informed in 2013 and told that police had been notified, I believed wrongly that an appropriate resolution would follow.

It is very clear that I must take personal and institutional responsibility for the long and retraumatising period between 2013 and 2024.

It is my duty to honour my Constitutional and church responsibilities, so exact timings will be decided once a review of necessary obligations has been completed, including those in England and in the Anglican Communion.

I hope this decision makes clear how seriously the Church of England understands the need for change and our profound commitment to creating a safer church. As I step down I do so in sorrow with all victims and survivors of abuse.

The last few days have renewed my long felt and profound sense of shame at the historic safeguarding failures of the Church of England. For nearly twelve years I have struggled to introduce improvements. It is for others to judge what has been done.

In the meantime, I will follow through on my commitment to meet victims. I will delegate all my other current responsibilities for safeguarding until the necessary risk assessment process is complete.

I ask everyone to keep my wife Caroline and my children in their prayers. They have been my most important support throughout my ministry, and I am eternally grateful for their sacrifice. Caroline led the spouses’ programme during the Lambeth Conference and has travelled tirelessly in areas of conflict supporting the most vulnerable, the women, and those who care for them locally.

I believe that stepping aside is in the best interests of the Church of England, which I dearly love and which I have been honoured to serve. I pray that this decision points us back towards the love that Jesus Christ has for every one of us.

For above all else, my deepest commitment is to the person of Jesus Christ, my saviour and my God; the bearer of the sins and burdens of the world, and the hope of every person.

11/09/2024

If you have ever heard a Spaniard pronounce “Espanol”, especially the uneducated Spaniard, even with all your education, you would appreciate, and also understand how my people got confused along the way.

All you may probably hear is “Panyo”. Interestingly, Spain has the “ny” sound as the Igbo, so….

It could be recalled that the Igbo people first arrived what is presently known as Equatorial Guinea in the 18th and 19th centuries mostly as workers in the plantation fields.

The first Igbo large diaspora community in Africa, outside the geographical enclave known today as Nigeria was in “Panya.” It was so popular that almost every family has somebody in that country.

Later they moved to Fernanda Po, which is present day Sao Tome e Principe. To work in the sugarcane plantations owned by the Portuguese.

Most of those who first arrived there were from Arochukwu, some were labour hands, and later traders, and they settled in the islands. That opened the doors for more Igbo from different parts of Igboland as the Japa syndrome caught up and their neighboring Efik, and Ibibio joined them and today they have fused into the Igbo community in that country.

Those who went in the 20th century went as farm hands. It was basically slave type labour. Tough work that was excruciating with low wages. It was exploitation at its best. Add to that, they introduced women of easy virtues, and liquor to deaden their humanity.

That's why most of our people who returned from there came home empty. And many never found their feet. That's an aspect of our untold history of pain and tears.

But many refused to return especially those who were second generation Igbo, whose fathers went there earlier. They lived and naturalised there fusing into the local population.

This is not about Ebanga.

This is history and Geography class.

Kelechi Deca

08/10/2024

These are three things our people should not deny: kidnapping and selling their kins to slavery, banishing their kins as outcasts for life, and throwing away their twins at birth.

08/10/2024

Olaudah Equiano was the first black abolitionist and a renowned writer.

At the age of 11, He was captured by slave traders from his hometown in Isseke, present day Anambra State and sold into bo***ge to the British colony of Virginia.

He was given the name Gustavus Vassa by one of his many owners, and was forced to serve several masters, among them was a British Naval officer
Whom he traveled between four continents with.

These journies helped him to produce the most popular and vivid slave narrative of his era.

He purchased his freedom in the year 1777 at the age of 32, after having mastered reading, writing and arithmetic.

He settled in England, and soon became a leader of the emerging anti-slavery movement.

He presented one of the first petitions to the British Parliament calling for the abolition of slavery.

In 1787, He became the first person of African ancestry to hold a post in the British Government when he was appointed to the post of Commissary for Stores to the Expedition for Freed Slaves. This venture created the country, "Sierra Leone".

He worked with leading British abolitionists to see that the Parliament abolish Slave Trade.

In 1789 he wrote and published his autobiography titled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African.
His narrative soon became the first “best seller” written by a black Briton. Among those who purchased copies of his narrative were the Prince of Wales and eight dukes. He also embarked on a lecture tour of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland to promote his book particularly among the growing number of abolition committees it spawned.

He married an Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, in 1792. The couple had two daughters.

Equiano died in 1797, ten years before the slave trade was abolished and 36 years before Parliament outlawed slavery throughout the British Empire.

08/10/2024

Todaay we are invited to remember three men who were hugely influential in the abolition of the slave trade in this country: Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce and Olaudah Equiano. Clarkson was a local man with connections in Wisbech, Wilberforce is perhaps best known of the three. Equiano certainly had the closest personal connection to the horrors of slavery: he was himself a freed slave. He wrote about his experiences in his biography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, a work which has been continuously in print since it first appeared in 1789. In his own life he was known by the name of his former owner, Gustavus Vasa. He was born in Africa (in modern Nigeria) and worked for years on a ship. His owner was considered an enlightened slaver because he allowed Equiano to buy his freedom.
There is a local connection with Equiano too: he was married in 1792 in Soham, near Ely, to a local girl, Susannah Clarke. They moved to London where Equiano campaigned fearlessly to end the evils of slavery; a campaign which culminated in the abolition of slavery bill in 1807, though sadly he died a decade before it was passed. It is a shocking fact that modern-day slavery still exists and it is good to be reminded about those early campaigners who worked to ensure human dignity for all people.

08/10/2024

Olaudah Equiano led a tumultuous life. Born around 1745 in the Kingdom of Benin (now Southern Nigeria), he was kidnapped and sold into slavery aged 11. He survived the transatlantic journey to Barbados, from where he was bought and sold several times.

Equiano was eventually able to buy his freedom, after which he settled in London (a city he'd visited as a young man, while under enslavement of an officer of the Royal Navy). It was here that he entered the history books by campaigning for the abolition of slavery and later writing a stirring autobiography: "The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African".

Image: Image by Allan Harris under creative commons licence

08/10/2024

08/10/2024

Now that the Church of England is to pay £100 million in compensation for its "shameful" links to slavery back in 1704 and that UK parish churches, cathedrals, and dioceses also have to "address" their own connections with the slave trade, I wonder if that is the best approach. Reading the story of one of my kinsmen, Olaudah Equiano, who experienced the atrocities of slavery, made me ponder what good £100 million could possibly do considering the treatment our ancestors received. In Barbados' Bridge Town, which served as the main port for the slave market where people from the Gulf of Guinea and the Bight of Biafra were sold to eager buyers, he wrote about his ordeal.

‘’I remember in the vessel in which I was brought over, in the men's apartment, there were several brothers, who, in the sale, were sold in different lots; and it was very moving on this occasion to see and hear their cries at parting. O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain? Must every tender feeling be likewise sacrificed to your avarice?
Are the dearest friends and relations, now rendered more dear by their separation from their kindred, still to be parted from each other, and thus prevented from cheering the gloom of slavery with the small comfort of being together and mingling their sufferings and sorrows? Why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters, or husbands their wives? Surely this is a new refinement in cruelty, which, while it has no advantage to atone for it, thus aggravates distress, and adds fresh horrors even to the wretchedness of slavery.”

May I ask again: what amount of money can compensate the dead, the disfigured, the crushed, and the dehumanized? Did your God teach you this? The God you presented to us loves and cherishes justice, but you have long lived in injustice; you taught us mercy, but you were unmerciful. You closed your ears to the cries of our fathers, and today you want to pay tribute to their offspring, who have been forever dispersed around the world. O, ye nominal Christians! Attend to the questions of the sons of Africa ; learned you this from your God, who says to you, "Do unto all men as you would that they should do unto you.”?

08/10/2024

Meeting George Whitefield for the first time

“One Sunday morning while I was here, as I was going to church, I chanced to pass a meeting-house. The doors being open, and the house full of people, it excited my curiosity to go in. When I entered the house, to my great surprise, I saw a very tall woman standing in the midst of them, speaking in an audible voice something which I could not understand. Having never seen anything of this kind before, I stood and stared about me for some time, wondering at this odd scene. As soon as it was over I took an opportunity to make inquiry about the place and people, when I was informed they were called Quakers.

I particularly asked what that woman I saw in the midst of them had said, but none of them were pleased to satisfy me; so I quitted them, and soon after, as I was returning, I came to a church crowded with people; the church-yard was full likewise, and a number of people were even mounted on ladders, looking in at the windows. I thought this a strange sight, as I had never seen churches, either in England or the West Indies, crowded in this manner before. I therefore made bold to ask some people the meaning of all this, and they told me the Rev. Mr. George Whitfield was preaching. I had often heard of this gentleman, and had wished to see and hear him; but I had never before had an opportunity.

I now therefore resolved to gratify myself with the sight, and I pressed in amidst the multitude. When I got into the church I saw this pious man exhorting the people with the greatest fervour and earnestness, and sweating as much as I ever did while in slavery on Montserrat beach. I was very much struck and impressed with this; I thought it strange I had never seen divines exert themselves in this manner before, and I was no longer at a loss to account for the thin congregations they preached to.”
Olaudah Equiano