The Christian Imagination by Willie James Jennings

Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in a place he called Igbo, an area of Africa that is now southeastern Nigeria and that entered the consciousness of the Western world during the slow and steady ascension of the British nation to military and financial dominance [1] By the year of his birth, the British had been involved in the slave trade for almost two hundred years, ever since the anti-Catholic sentiment and action of Queen Elizabeth I and the unquenchable greed of the ruthless merchant John Hawkyns. Impatient with Portuguese and Spanish Atlantic domination and angry about arbitrary papal rule that had divided the world up between its two ecclesial servant-nations, the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I sent Hawkyns to Africa with her blessing.

[1]: Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 7ff. Paul E. Lovejoy, "Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, the African," Slavery and Abolition 27: 33 (December 2006): 317–47, 321ff. Whereas Lovejoy defends Equiano's claim to African birth, Carretta disputes it. See Vincent Carretta, "Response to Paul Lovejoy's ‘Autobiography and Memory: Gustavus Vassa, Alias Olaudah Equiano, the African," Slavery and Abolition 28: 1 (2007). Whether he was actually born in Africa or, as the literary scholar Carretta suggests, in South Carolina may be an important matter as we consider the effect of his narrative, but what is far more important for us at this moment is not where he was born, but when and where he lived.