Content area
Full Text
OTTOBAH CUGOANO'S groundbreaking narrative Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain, By Ottobah Cugoano, A Native of Africa (1787) has been described as both "radical" and "assimilationist" by leading Cugoano scholar Vincent Carretta (1998: 83; 1999: ix). Evidence for both descriptions abounds and positions Thoughts and Sentiments at the tense crossroads between modernity and tradition that characterized the sociopolitical atmosphere of late eighteenth-century Britain.
Thoughts and Sentiments was radical enough for London reviewers to refuse to circulate and review the narrative. Most notably, it was radical because its author, Ottobah Cugoano, a former African slave who was the first African to write his own abolitionist narrative in the English language, proposed a triadic vision simultaneously calling for the "abolition [of ] [...] the slave trade," the "universal emancipation of slaves" in the West Indies, and the worldwide "abolition of slavery" (Cugoano 1787: 104, 120, 130). Cugoano was not the first to imagine a world without slavery, as many individuals within various Christian religious circles, including the Quaker John Woolman and the Evangelical Granville Sharp, had previously condemned the institution of slavery based on its violation of the precepts of Christianity. In his spiritual autobiography, A Journal of the Life, Gospel Labours, and Christian Experiences of That Faithful Minister of Jesus Christ, John Woolman (1774), John Woolman wrote, "I believed slave-keeping to be a practice inconsistent with the Christian religion," implying the need for the abolition of slavery (Woolman 1774: 23). Within the emerging British abolition movement of the 1780s, abolitionists such as Olaudah Equiano and William Wilberforce worked toward the more immediate goal of abolishing the slave trade 1 with the hope that this action would stimulate the gradual abolition of slavery. Cugoano's direct call for the abolition of the institution of slavery (a feat that would not be realized in the British Empire until 1838), his condemnation of British imperialism, and the fact these demands and criticisms emanated from a former African slave now residing in Britain, a nation that had grown wealthy based on the commercial practices of the slave trade, marked Thoughts and Sentiments as radical even by abolitionist standards.
At the same moment,...