London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City. Sukhdev Sandhu

four carrots (given to them as a gift) to last them four days. As there was no fire the carrots had to be eaten raw. To make them digestible for her infant child, Gronniosaw’s wife chewed them before passing on the mulch to her baby. Gronniosaw himself went without.

      Help arrived unexpectedly from a local attorney, and shortly afterwards they decided to move to Norwich where weaving work was easier to find. However, hours were long, wages irregular, their landlady was inflexible about rent payments, and their three children contracted smallpox. When one of the daughters later died of fever, the Baptists refused to assist with the burial. Nor did the Quakers help. The Gronniosaws had begun burying her in the garden behind their house when a parish officer relented. Even then, he declined to read a burial service for her.

      The narrative ends with Gronniosaw, aged sixty, pawning his clothes to pay off his family’s debts and medical bills, and moving to Kidderminster where he tries to make a living by twisting silks and worsteds:

      As Pilgrims, and very poor Pilgrims, we are travelling through many difficulties towards our HEAVENLY HOME, and waiting patiently for his gracious call, when the Lord shall deliver us out of the evils of this present world and bring us to the EVER-LASTING GLORIES of the world to come. – TO HIM be PRAISE for EVER and EVER, AMEN.³⁷

      Gronniosaw’s brief narrative is a depressing start to the history of black English literature. He had headed for England believing it to be a cruelty-free nation. London, in particular, appealed to him because he was ‘very desirous to get among Christians’.³⁸

      In the years following his arrival in London, Gronniosaw’s life mirrored that of many of his black compatriots in a number of respects: his enduring marriage to a white woman; the poverty and bereavement which dogged them at every turn; their need to scuttle constantly between different parts of England. Scholars have tried and failed to assemble a detailed biography of Gronniosaw. This isn’t surprising. In his enforced mobility, his dependence on handouts, his inhabitation of seedy lodging houses and freezing cottages both in London and on the edges of other English towns, Gronniosaw, like so many ex-slaves in the eighteenth century, relied both on his long-suffering family and on his sorely-tested religious faith for survival. The pilgrimage motif on which the narrative ends tempers Gronniosaw’s despair with what is only a partially convincing vision of future repose. The journey across the Atlantic to America, the passages to England and, finally, to London, may have been fruitless. However, when earthly cities are so inhospitable to the transplanted African, it’s understandable if the goal of migrating to a heavenly city becomes the only redeeming alternative.

      Gronniosaw is still a largely unknown figure. The same cannot be said of Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797). Born (or so he claimed) to Ibo parents in Essaka, a village in what is now Nigeria, he was the youngest son of an aristocratic, slave-owning family. At the age of eleven he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. After surviving the Middle Passage, he found himself working in a plantation house in Virginia before being sold to Michael Pascal, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Pascal christened him Gustavus Vassa after a sixteenth-century Swedish freedom-fighter, a name which, as personal inscriptions and his letters to the press reveal, Equiano used for most of his life.

      Coming to England for the first time in 1757, Equiano stayed in Falmouth and London where he slowly learned to read and write. He spent much of the next five years aboard British ships fighting the French in the Mediterranean. At the end of 1762 he was sold to Captain James Doran who, five months later, sold him on to a Quaker merchant named Robert King. Equiano worked for four years as a small goods trader in the West Indies and various North American plantations; the money he earned during this period allowed him to purchase his freedom for forty pounds in 1766. The following year he returned to London where he practised hairdressing before his maritime twitchings got the better of him and pushed him towards the oceans where he adventured away the next few years serving under various ship captains. An intensely ambitious man of ‘roving disposition’, he was the first black to explore the Arctic when he joined Lord Mulgrave’s 1773 expedition to find a passage to India, sailing on the same ship as a young Horatio Nelson.³⁹

      Equiano spent much of the final two decades of his life campaigning against the slave trade. In 1783 he was responsible for notifying the social reformer Granville Sharp about the case of the 132 Africans who had been thrown overboard from the Liverpool slave ship, the Zong, for insurance purposes. The incident, though hardly unprecedented in the miserable annals of slave history, provoked mass outrage and was later the subject of one of Turner’s finest paintings, ‘Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming on’ (1840). His growing status amongst London blacks was rewarded by his appointment in November 1786 as Commissary of Provisions and Stores for the 350 impoverished blacks who had decided to take up the Government’s offer of an assisted passage to Sierra Leone. It made him the first black person ever to be employed by the British Government, but the job did not last long. Angered by the embezzlement perpetrated by one of the official agents, he notified the authorities but was dismissed from his post. The affair did not curtail his political activities: he fired off letters to the press, penned caustic reviews of anti-Abolitionist propaganda, and became an increasingly effective speaker for the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade as well as the more radical London Corresponding Society.

      Equiano published his autobiography in 1789. Over the next five years it ran to nine editions and was translated into Dutch, Russian and German. He was a canny businessman and held on to the copyright of his book after its initial publication by subscription. This meant that he reaped all of the profits that accrued to him when he toured the United Kingdom inveighing against slavery and hawking his narrative. By the time he died in 1797, his literary success allowed him to leave an estate worth almost a thousand pounds to Susan Cullen, the white Englishwoman he’d married in 1792, and their two daughters, Anna Maria and Johanna. It was a far cry from the single half-bit with which he had bought a glass tumbler on the Dutch island of St Eustatia, a transaction that had kicked off his career as a small trader.

      Over the course of the last two decades Equiano has become one of the most famous black Englishmen to have lived before World War Two. His memoirs were issued in 1995 as a Penguin Classic and have sold tens of thousands of copies on both sides of the Atlantic. Films, documentaries and cartoons have been based on his adventures. His life and travels have inspired a growing amount of academic research into eighteenth-century maritime culture. Of the millions of people who flocked during 2000 to the Millennium Dome in Greenwich a good proportion would have seen a video about him that was screened in the ‘Faith Zone’ there.

      This level of fame is in part a belated – and hence amplified – recognition of his distinction in being the first African to write rather than dictate his autobiography, an achievement which confounded pro-slavery ideologies and led various newspaper critics to question the book’s authenticity. The Interesting Narrative is also one of the earliest slave narratives, a genre more normally associated with nineteenth-century American figures such as Frederick Douglass. It offers a rare – and, for a black writer, unprecedented – account of life below the deck of a slave ship. Long before the golden period of anti-imperialist activity in the metropolis – the first half of the twentieth century when Marcus Garvey, Kwame Nkrumah and George Padmore railed against colonialism – Equiano, in tandem with a cabal of black revolutionaries who had named themselves the ‘Sons of Africa’, fought tirelessly for the abolition of slavery. His autobiography is also, inadvertently, a fascinating account of life in black London in the final decades of the eighteenth century.

      To Equiano the capital seemed a place of liberty, a shelter from the storms that slavery had rained down upon him since he was a young boy. Throughout the time he was chained below deck or toiling in plantation fields, London lingered stubbornly in his imagination as a city that, far off and possibly unreachable, might be an asylum from the immiseration in which he and his fellow blacks found themselves. It was a dream, one that inspired hope. He had seen friends dashed to pieces in battles at sea. He had seen female slaves raped, men tied to the ground and castrated before having their ears chopped off bit by bit. In Georgia he himself had been randomly bludgeoned and left for dead by