In October 2004, an American academic revealed that a previously unnoticed grave in Abney Park cemetery marked the last resting place of a woman called Joanna Equiano.

The existence of Joanna’s headstone, by now barely legible, was marked by a modest commemoration in Abney Park on Good Friday in 2005. So far, so unremarkable. Until you learn that Joanna was the second daughter of the first black activist in British history: Olaudah Equiano – former slave, hairdresser and one of the first and most remarkable and passionate campaigners for the abolition of slavery in the British empire.

Joanna’s father ’s story is an extraordinary one (and, by some, still contested). Apparently born in south-eastern Nigeria in the mideighteenth century (although this has recently been challenged by certain scholars who argue that he was born in North America) and captured by slave traders, Equiano endured the horrors of the middle passage and arrived in Barbados, still a child and already a slave, at the age of little more than eleven. Precision in these matters is impossible: bureaucrats were singularly uninterested in recordkeeping when it came to slaves. They were, after all, expendable.

Bought by a British naval lieutenant, one Michael Pascal, Equiano was shipped to England in 1757, befriended and partially educated by Pascal’s relatives in London, and later compelled to serve in military campaigns in Canada and the Mediterranean, still effectively enslaved.

Eventually, and with great difficulty and after many setbacks, Equiano secured his freedom in 1766, in Montserrat, continuing his adventures as a free able seaman. After much further travel, including a notable trip to the Arctic in 1773, he finally settled back in London in 1777, where he became briefly involved in the illstarred Sierra Leone resettlement scheme – a disastrous plan to transport members of London’s destitute black population to Africa. The scheme itself ended in tragedy. Equiano, sacked for insubordination, and deeply disillusioned, then turned his full attention to the campaign to abolish slavery. In 1787, and by now a devout Methodist, Equiano determined to devote the remainder of his life to the abolitionist cause, embarking on lengthy speaking tours and becoming a tireless campaigner and publicist for abolition.

In 1789 Equiano’s extraordinary autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life Of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African was published, to considerable acclaim. The response was remarkable: the book went through eight editions in Britain in his lifetime and a further six in the twenty-two years after his death. It was, apparently, the last book read by John Wesley before his death.

Perhaps more importantly, it was the first passionately convincing argument for the abolition of slavery from the pen of a former black slave to reach a wide (white) readership. In the words of Peter Fryer, eminent historian of black history, it was nothing less than ‘the most important single literary contribution to the campaign for abolition’. It was a profound catalyst in the anti-slavery campaign. 

In 1792, Equiano – by now received by MPs, cabinet members and even the prime minister of the day – paused to marry Susan Cullen in the small (and later notorious) village of Soham, in Cambridgeshire, south east of Ely. How he came to be there, and how he first encountered Susan, is not known. What is known, is that the couple had two daughters – Anna Maria (born in 1794) and Joanna (born in 1795, and baptised in Soham in 1795). Anna Maria died in 1797, and is buried in Chesterton in Cambridgeshire.
Equiano himself died (somewhere in London) in 1797, leaving a substantial bequest for his surviving daughter, Joanna: the whereabouts of his grave remains unknown.

How Joanna came to be buried in Stoke Newington is also still a mystery. Did she carry on her father’s work? Did Equiano himself settle here, and pursue his antislavery campaign in the company of the many other dissidents and abolitionists known to have lived in the area?

Slavery was abolished in England ten years after Equiano’s death, in 1797. By 1807 – in the British Commonwealth at least – it had (officially) ceased to exist. In the US, it would take another half a century before slavery was formally abolished. And rather longer before it eventually disappeared – apparently (or allegedly) for good.

One of the best histories of black people in Britain is Staying Power by Peter Fryer, available from Pluto Press (www.plutobooks.com)