Memoralizing Slavery and the Slave Trade through Personal Accounts
by Paul Lovejoy

The ways in which slavery and the slave trade have been remembered owe a lot to the personal narratives of enslaved Africans and their Creole offspring. This paper examines and compares the personal accounts of several Africans whose accounts of the “Middle Passage” and life under slavery in the Americas have survived through the written word. While there are relatively few eyewitness accounts of the Middle Passage, those that survive are not very informative of the conditions of crossing. The paper looks at the accounts of Venture Smith, who was taken from Anomabu in West Africa to New England in 1739, Gustavus Vassa, alias Olaudah Equiano, who spent time in Virginia in 1754 before an enslaved life at sea that lasted to 1766, and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, who was taken from Ouidah in West Africa to Brazil in 1845. Despite the power of the slave trade imagery, it is argued that these accounts do not exploit this potential, but rather understate the conditions of voyage and dismiss events of passage as “normal,” without definition.