SOURCE: Nussbaum, Felicity A. “Being a Man: Olaudah Equiano and Ignatius Sancho.” In Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, edited by Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, pp. 54-71. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

[In the following essay, Nussbaum considers how Sancho and another eighteenth-century Black writer, Olaudah Equiano, engaged and revised prevailing gendered stereotypes of male Blackness.]

I offer here the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant.

Olaudah Equiano

Aphra Behn's description of Oroonoko's partially classical, partially African features has become quite familiar to students of Restoration and eighteenth-century England. The royal slave's ideal physique, Roman nose, piercing eyes, and finely shaped mouth are reminiscent of the most elegant Greek and Roman statues, except for the blight of his color: “His face was not of that brown, rusty black which most of that nation are, but a perfect ebony, or polished jet. … The whole proportion and air of his face was so noble, and exactly formed, that, bating his colour, there could be nothing in nature more beautiful, agreeable and handsome.”¹ In addition, Oroonoko's greatness of soul, his civility and refinement, suggest that his ability to be a wise ruler equaled that of any European prince. These elements of physical and mental perfection testify to his humanity and to his manliness, both of which are at issue in a century which drew frequent and facile parallels between Africans and pets such as parrots, monkeys, and lapdogs, and when the black male bodies most often known to Europeans were either commodities to own or showpieces to exhibit.

Another well-known fictional man of color in the early eighteenth century, Robinson Crusoe's Friday, similarly embodies perfect symmetry and conveys “something very manly in his Face.” His savagery is mitigated by “the Sweetness and Softness of an European in his Countenance too, especially when he smil'd.”² Like Oroonoko, his features are distinguished from most blacks or negroes since his color is nearly indescribable—“not quite black, but very tawny”—and his well-shaped nose is small above thin lips. Again the combination of civility and barbarism yokes a European gentleness with an ostensibly generic manliness that seems untethered to geography, and yet tenuously connected to a distinctive coloring. European manliness appears to be strangely incongruous when it derives from a black or tawny body. It is difficult to conceive of a coherent black masculinity in the face of these popular representations, as fractured as they are between the ugly and the perfectly formed, the savage and the princely, the soft and the manly. These fictional characters, and the real men who lived in their shadows, combine the highest status with the lowest rung on the chain of being, noble and slave, refined and fierce, tangled together in emblematic figurations which both replicate our understandings of British manhood in the period and threaten to expose the myths of a white masculinity uncertain of its nationalist moorings and seeking to justify its imperial violence.

It may seem somewhat odd to analyze issues of masculinity in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative (1789) and Ignatius Sancho's Letters (1782) before abolition. Both works were written, one might argue, when the question of the humanity of Africans superseded all other elements worthy of consideration, including gender and sexuality. Equiano (1745?-1797), Sancho (1729-1780), and the other thousands of black men living in London, Bristol, and Liverpool in the later eighteenth century struggled to establish their humanity regardless of social class against the overt and virulent racism of slavery's defenders such as Edward Long, author of The History of Jamaica (1774) and Philip Thicknesse in A Year's Journey Through France, and Part of Spain (1778) who did not believe that blacks are “in all respects human creatures” but are instead “men of a lower order.”³ Free blackmen in London and elsewhere faced a press teeming with racial hatreds in the midst of abolition debates. One treatise claimed that “the negro-race seems to be the farthest removed from the line of true cultivation of any of the human species; their defect of form and complexion being, I imagine, as strong an obstacle to their acquiring true taste (the product of mental cultivation) as any natural defect they may have in their intellectual faculties.”⁴ Unlike the fictional Oroonoko or the actual African princes who visited England, Equiano and Sancho could not easily claim a status sufficiently elevated to allow them to be treated deferentially in spite of their color and their geographical origins. A published review of Equiano's popular Narrative in The Gentleman's Magazine grudgingly acknowledges that he, unlike most men of his rank, deserved to be “on a par with the general mass of men in the subordinate stations of civilized society, and so prove[s] that there is no general rule without an exception.”⁵ Yet the poem on the title page of The Royal African: Or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe testifies to the equality of all mankind and invokes Othello, Oroonoko, and Juba as justification for the belief that the visiting dignitary of the title, the black prince, demonstrates the universal truth that “human Nature is the same in all Countries, and under all Complexions.”⁶ In short, public consensus concerning the nature of actual African men had not jelled and instead vacillated erratically from proslavery racism, through benevolent amelioration bolstered by Enlightenment humanism, to abolitionist sentiments. The few standard dramatic and narrative fictions that portrayed black men carried a cultural weight out of all proportion to the limited range of imagined masculinities that they offered.

The cultural construction of black male subjectivity rests, according to W. E. B. Du Bois' theory of “double consciousness,” upon a simple if powerful bifurcation of possible identities, an oxymoronic opposition between being loyal to nation or to negritude: “It is a peculiar sensation, this color-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness. … The history of the American Negro is the history of the strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self.”⁷ This influential theory is often invoked with reference to black manhood to characterize the impossibility of maintaining a coherent masculine subjectivity in the face of racism. The struggle to form a consistent identity as a black man in the later decades of the eighteenth century is less, I suggest, one of achieving an indigenous or national purity carved from the hybridity of being both African and Briton, but rather a more complex consciousness that is variously constituted across regions. Equiano and Sancho intermingle their British affiliations with African ones before marginal, hyphenated, or even national designations were available to them. As Hazel Carby and other critics have recently pointed out, “Identities, like cultures, are negotiated not hermetically and in isolation, but in relation to others … and … those identities shore up, respond to, and react against the cultures that the operating individuals identify with and against.”⁸ The presence of black men in England paradoxically threatened an emerging national masculinity steeped in racism and homophobia even as they helped to shape its increasingly colorbound parameters. Gender and sexuality have been among the most prominent quandaries in relation to black identity, integrally interwoven into questions of natural rights, and Equiano generically employs the masculine gender in a manner typical of the later eighteenth century in references to the rights of man, to the rights of freemen, and to his countrymen. The plight of black women would seem to be subsumed within those of black men within those political arguments. In The Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), published in response to Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, Mary Wollstonecraft radically challenged the inclusiveness of a similar linguistic usage, and thus the idea of being conscious of gender differentiation in regard to political rights was not unthinkable when Equiano published his Narrative a few years earlier in 1789. In short, black men were crucial to the formation of gender and sexual difference in England in that marginalized persons often provide the negative terms that help the dominant culture define itself.

Inevitably then, racialized expectations of masculinity in the period compete with black men's attempts to possess sufficient personal authority to shape their own destinies, which were often elusive even after gaining or purchasing manumission. To enact a recognizable notion of black masculinity inevitably reinscribed the racial fictions of popular culture even as black men resisted impersonating white men's versions of what a black man should be. I want to argue, then, that Equiano and Sancho generate original enactments of black manhood as newly free black subjects in spite of functioning under the pall of characters such as Othello and Friday, of visiting African princes and Oroonoko, and that both former slaves refuse to be limited to the incommensurable elements they are assumed to embody, or in particular, to allow virility, especially in relation to white women, to stand as the primary measure of their person. Both Equiano and Sancho are acutely aware that British culture interprets black masculinity as conveniently distinct from white masculinity in order to subject black men to unjust and inconsistent moral measures because of their complexion, and thus to maintain their inequality.

If national identity at the end of the eighteenth century was largely predicated on the assumptions of white metropolitan privileged men—what Kathleen Wilson has called “a critical, objective, manly, and hence white male subject”⁹—how then were former slaves like Equiano and Sancho to locate a masculinity and a British identity which did not simply replicate fictional stereotypes? How was a black man in England to shape a masculinity when male sociability rested on imperialism, commerce, and trade, the very trade to which he was subject and which made of him a commodity? In the early eighteenth century large numbers of blacks were kidnapped from Africa as boys and flaunted as prized young servants who were ornaments to their masters and especially to their mistresses, making the problem of how a black manhood was to be imagined and lived by a first generation of Africans who grew to maturity in England particularly vexing.¹⁰ It is the black boy rather than the black man who prevails in English high culture of the period, a child who is converted to an object d'art and a status symbol who represents colonial wealth.¹¹ During the early portion of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Equiano is, after all, narrating his childhood, and to expect a mature masculinity to issue from the person described in that portion of his autobiographical tale would be ludicrous.¹² Though the status of black male servants attending women surely must have changed rather abruptly after they had reached puberty, Equiano is baptized and becomes a favourite of the eldest Miss Guerin. In fact, much more than Sancho, Olaudah Equiano has been interpreted as exemplifying the entire gendered spectrum from a “mother's boy” (suspected of homosexual leanings) to a manly warrior.¹³

Forged in part in the image of God, Equiano's manliness in his own account exudes the dignity, courage, and discipline of the Old Testament prophets. Several recent critical assessments of Equiano imply that he is exemplary of a rugged African masculinity made in the image of such heroes. Folarin Shyllon, for example, found that Equiano “stood uncompromisingly for black manhood, dignity, and freedom.”¹⁴ Paul Edwards similarly thinks of the Narrative as depicting a universal epic quest for the lost father or mentor after Equiano was abducted from his family as a child,¹⁵ since Equiano finds a master in Richard Baker and later is befriended by Daniel Queen who teaches him the Bible—and to dress hair. Closely attached to another father figure in Captain James Doran, Equiano occupies the somewhat anomalous posture of black man who wields power over others when he becomes a “sable captain” who acts as a kind of “chieftain” (144) among the people for whom he is responsible. His connections to these and other older white Englishmen suggest an intense male bonding which either ignores color or covets the adoption of male authority. Equiano also presents himself as possessing a kind of muscular, sinewy masculinity which manifests itself in naval battles during the Seven Years' War as well as in his ability to withstand the mistreatment of slave owners and captains. Yet Equiano also adopts a modest posture on the first page of his Narrative indicating that, though he counts himself among the most fortunate of slaves, he is no better than the common man, “neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant” (31).

Neither Equiano or Sancho emphasizes his manliness as a gendered characteristic, a fact worth remarking since England was increasingly constructing a manly national identity after the Seven Years' War. National fears about the loss of territory during the military conflict seemed to fuel British anxieties about metaphorical emasculation in the later eighteenth century. The British empire “was now represented as the antidote to aristocratic ‘cultural treason’ and effeteness, the bulwark and proving ground for the true national character and (middle class) potency and virtue.”¹⁶ Since a passion for liberty was synonymous with manliness, citizenship was also a function of maleness; Equiano, both the subject and object of empire, is a patriotic and active citizen who seeks to change national policy. He reports growing comfortable with the English and that he “relished their society and manners, wished to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners” (77), though he also gives vent to considerable ambivalence toward England's imperial vision. Well-versed in the doctrines of civic humanism, he shows a real cultural fluency in these principles when, as Adam Potkay has argued, in Equiano's early sketch of Eboe manners, he presents his native people not only as “the descendants of Abraham, but also as the true heirs of Cincinnatus—small farmers and militiawarriors, utterly unacquainted with the ‘luxury’ of modern Europe.”¹⁷ But he also reveals his social class aspirations when, though thoroughly lacking the self-deprecatory quality of Sancho, Equiano is embarrassed by poor horsemanship which would disqualify him to participate in the gentlemanly sport. Equiano's quandary is nothing less than the maddeningly puzzling conundrum of presenting in narrative a convincingly manly African who is neither noble or savage, prince or slave, in spite of cultural expectations to the contrary, while at the same time demanding that he be accepted as a full citizen when the proper color of a citizen was unquestionably white.

Equiano clearly recognizes the economics of the British interest in Africa; and just as Wollstonecraft will later claim that vindicating the rights of woman will snap the chains that bind men, Equiano argues that freeing slaves will benefit the British oppressors: “A commercial Intercourse with Africa opens an inexhaustible Source of Wealth to the manufacturing interests of Great Britain.”¹⁸ Equiano believes that slavery is an investment in an inhuman system of commerce, but that African would clearly benefit from the civilizing influences of British manufactures and culture, its “Fashions, Manners, Customs, &c. &c.” (333). At times he even seems to disassociate England from the evils of slavery as when he vilifies the West Indies as a site of horror and inequity as distinct from the British isles. Equiano demands “an humane and generous Treatment of Negroes, and indeed of all barbarous Nations in general, [and] that we must expect such Discoveries, as well as reap greater Advantages in Trade, than other nations.” Abolition and its attention to slavery served partly as a distraction from other aspects of brutality on foreign shores as empire served to unify an English nationalism.¹⁹

While Equiano's heroic fighting in the Battle of Gibraltar (1759) and throughout the war offers him the opportunity to display his considerable fighting abilities—and he gains confidence when he knows that his ships will be entering the war (70)—the Narrative seems to give no hint of self-doubt in these matters of masculine prowess but only of the injustice with which he is treated.²⁰ The conventional rules of commerce do not apply to a man of Equiano's color since the money he earns can be withheld, his word refused to be accepted against a white man's, and by his own account he “suffered so many impositions in the commercial transactions in different parts of the world.” Equiano's manliness is constantly compromised because his status as a freeman is not secure, though he never voices doubt that he is a rational and intelligent being. As a black man he is, of course, an object of exchange rather than the possessor of property, and the idea of the precariousness and unpredictability of exchange afforded to a black man is a regular refrain, “for, being a negro man, I could not oblige him to pay me” (128). A new, though illegal, slavery could be imposed at almost anytime, arbitrarily, no matter how high Equiano's own estimation of himself (220). The identity as a slave is, however, an assignation that Equiano never accepts as an accurate one, and he repeatedly and courageously asserts his humanity throughout the account of his life as he deals with the material reality of the status he refuses to accept.

In the ethnography which Equiano offers of his native Benin in the early pages of the Narrative, a portion heavily indebted to Benezet's travel accounts, he proudly presents his country's people as “warlike” (32). This is particularly pertinent to a discussion of manliness since during the later eighteenth century Britons measured manhood in part by the willingness to serve in the military.²¹ To be a warrior is not, however, necessarily synonymous with masculinity for an Ibo since, according to his testimony, women too were warriors.²² The manliness he describes as typical of his native people also incorporates endeavors in the arts since he testifies that both sexes were dancers, singers, poets, and musicians, though the women as well as the men participate in military action throughout the African nations that Equiano visits. The rites of manhood, ichi or painful ritual scarification, however, were quite distinct from the requirements for women, and he reports that women and slaves ate separately from the men.

Oyeronke Oyewumi in particular has questioned the applicability of Western notions of gender, construed as unequal relations of power based on sexual characteristics, to West African societies (though her research concentrates on the Yoruba rather than the Ibo).²³ In fact Equiano would seem to be remarkably sensitive to these matters when he remarks that Ibo women joined the men in fighting and in tilling the soil, though their more typical occupations involved basket weaving, dyeing, sewing, and making earthen vessels. He does observe, however, that African women cultivate the crops while men fish and make canoes (26). Clearly the “head of family” is masculine, and the pipesmoking Creator whom the Ibos worship is referred to with masculine pronouns, as are the priests and healers of the tribe. Equiano boasts that in his Ibo tribe, scarification gave evidence of his father's extraordinary manliness, though later Equiano rejoices that he himself had not been similarly marked or had his teeth filed to points since those disfiguring features would have distinguished him as an exotic other in the non-African world (69). Like most European travel narratives, which measure the level of civilization by the position of women, the Narrative seems eager to avoid accusations of Benin as primitive. At the same time, the typical division of labor between men and women, between public and the private spheres, generally characteristic of eighteenth-century Europe does not precisely correspond to the men and women of eighteenth-century Africa, at least as Equiano reports it.

Equiano further maintains that the qualities of cleanliness, strength, beauty, and intelligence are universally distributed among his people without regard to gender. A distinction is made, however, regarding modesty: “Our women too were, in my eyes at least, uncommonly graceful, alert, and modest to a degree of bashfulness; nor do I remember to have ever heard of an instance of incontinence amongst them before marriage.” All African woman are not the same, he is quick to add, and he remarks in disgust upon the lack of modesty in another tribe in another part of the continent to which he was taken (54). Thus the chastity of women is to be guarded, especially against enslaving men, even among warrior women. Similarly, he associates femininity with modesty, or its absence, when regarding the remarkably slender white women of Falmouth who seem to command less respect than the African women he had known. Yet notably there is not a hint of misogyny or satire against women, white or black, in The Interesting Narrative, nor does Equiano's language reflect the common eighteenth-century associations of femininity with commerce and luxury. These are not the metaphors by which he lives or those by which he conceptualizes his life. His language is all politeness to “his kind patronesses, the Miss Guerins” (79), who recommend him as apprentice to a hairdresser, and to his former hostess in Guernsey and her daughter. Rather, Equiano's animus is reserved for the savage, brutal, and cannibalizing whites. Always aware of women and their fate from the screams of slave women in the ship's hold, to their strife even while pregnant in the fields, for him the worst aspects of slavery are typified in the injustices done to black women including a cook whose jaw is cruelly muzzled with irons.

Other aspects of mid-eighteenth-century British assumptions about black manhood are revealed unwittingly when the young Equiano confronts in close succession a white girl, white boys, and a black boy. Fearing being betrothed to a little white girl because such an obligation would take him away from his benevolent master, he reveals similar worries after a shipmate's daughter shows extraordinary attentiveness to him. In a wellworn phrase that echoes the trope of the Ethiop washed white, he documents becoming “mortified at the difference in our complexions” (69) when a white female playmate's face is made rosy with washing. The substitution he seems to desire is to possess for himself the red and white female beauty that is conventionally British. When Equiano longs to change his skin color, then, it is in relation to white womanhood, though he also wishes to escape from the compromisingly romantic potential of white femininity into male companionship.

Encounters with white femininity, even in children, create fears that he will be coerced into marriage; meetings with white boys lead to combat; and bonding with a black boy seems based on color in spite of his not recognizing its “naturalness,” especially since he knows that there are differences among African nations. Coerced by the ship's company into fighting as a spectacle for shipmates with a white boy on board ship, Equiano gains a bloody nose, though he defines it as “sport.” On the Isle of Wight he famously encounters a black boy who is servant to a gentleman: “This boy having observed me from his master's house, was transported at the sight of one of his own countrymen, and ran to meet me with the utmost haste. I not knowing what he was about, turned a little out of his way at first, but to no purpose; he soon came close to me, and caught hold of me in his arms as if I had been his brother, though we had never seen each other before” (85). At this point Equiano does not recognize that sameness of complexion is supposed to be sufficient to bind boy to boy, man to man. Once he accepts the cultural force of that brotherhood, their friendship subsequently blossoms. Thus in the space of a few short pages, Equiano uncannily releases the culture's anxieties about black men in these consecutive vignettes. These incidents acculturate him to fabular ideas of Africanness, blackness, and black manliness while also reinforcing his own determinedly strong sense of self.

In sum, Equiano exemplifies the way that blackness, and in particular black maleness, artificially melts the incoherence of diverse African religions, customs, and tribes into a false unity through a perceived similarity of complexion. This fact becomes poignantly clear in Equiano's tale when others imagine that a young African woman must be his lost sister, though he immediately recognizes that the slave girl is from a different area of the Gold Coast. It is certainly undeniable that he seems proud of choosing his own countrymen when purchasing slaves for Doctor Charles Irving (205), again demonstrating that he is highly aware of the variations among African nations. It was, of course, useful for Equiano and Sancho to employ inaccurate and inexact epithets such as “Aethiopianus” or “unlettered African” as generic terms in order to draw together Ibos, Guineans, and other blacks in England who shared an interest in the abolition of slave trade. Equiano, for example, described the African slaves thrown alive into the ocean from the slave ship Zong as his countrymen; and as a leader in seeking justice, he talks of the Black Poor as “my countrymen” on several occasions. Sancho calls himself “an African” or a “Negur” (74) and refers to his “brother Moors” (75), yet when asked to write in behalf of a fellow black who is seeking a position, Sancho notes that sharing a similarity of color is not sufficient to merit a recommendation. His mocking self-description runs the national gamut in claiming French, African, and English influences on a “merry—chirping—white tooth'd—clean—tight—and light little fellow;—with a woolly pate—and face as dark as your humble;—and Guineyborn, and French-bred—the sulky gloom of Africa dispelled by Gallic vivacity—and that softened again with English sedateness” (60).²⁴ Though color may constitute a politics, neither Sancho nor Equiano conveys that the shade of complexion alone composes a predictable and consistent identity. The emergent European categories for “race” in the later eighteenth century, more plastic and permeable than contemporary categories, do not provide sufficient variety to match the black men's understandings of difference.²⁵

A growing empire meant encountering various and confusing gendered and racial differences that had to be integrated into existing paradigms or new ones had to be invented. Exotics and savages were invariably assigned epithets that reflected assumptions about their relations to each other and to European sexuality. Stereotypic blackness is often associated with hypersexualized virility, a fact which makes all the more curious Catherine Obianuju Acholonu's search for Equiano's African origins to argue that the historical Equiano may have been sold because he was insufficiently manly. The charge of “effeminacy” arises largely because, as the youngest son of seven children, he has an unusually close relationship to his mother in Benin who lovingly tutored him and from whom he remembers being inseparable. His inordinate fondness for her kept him close by her side at the market, when sleeping, and even during the forbidden period of menstruation. When describing the sublime pleasure of their visiting his grandmother's tomb together in the gloom of night, he becomes nostalgically euphoric. Equiano ignores, I am arguing, the conventional European gender restrictions that might label such behaviors as womanish or perversely feminine. Especially intimate with his sister with whom he was kidnapped, he laments that “the only comfort we had was in being in one another's arms all that night, and bathing each other with our tears” (47), encircled around the man who owned them. Seeking his sister throughout the narrative, he worries in an apostrophe that her innocence and virtue might have been trammeled. He also exhibits sentimental sympathy for the oppressed of which he is a part, and he openly cries when Captain James Doran, his master, refuses to take him to London. He reveals his intimacy with his mother and sister, his closeness with male friends on board ship, and other friends who were oblivious to color or sex, seemingly without embarrassment or elaborate protestations of manliness. He notes in particular that violent acts are committed against “the poor, wretched, and helpless females” (108), and he readily recognizes that European culture does not judge a white woman to be equivalent to a black woman. Clearly then, Equiano's autobiographical posture is often that of a public hero, an independent spirit and adventurer, who possesses a reassuringly secure masculinity which, in its lack of brutal aggressiveness and apparent asexuality, does not arouse white male anxieties or feminine libido.

It is difficult to ascertain the extent of Equiano's “effeminacy” as judged in eighteenth-century terms, especially since the term was loaded with nationalist prejudices and implications. When Acholonu queries Mazi Ambrose Osakwe, a native medicine man in contemporary Nigeria, as to whether a son's habit of following his mother so closely would have been considered excessively feminine, he confirms that both parents would have been displeased by this behavior. Acholonu postulates, with the agreement of those she questions, that it was in fact Equiano's close adherence to his mother that would have led his family to send him away.²⁶ She also provides strong hints of an impenetrable family secret that would explain Equiano's enslavement. Later she seems to reverse her conclusions, however, in indicating that though she “believed at first that Olaudah was singled out for sale because of his effeminate nature,” she finally believes that Equiano was regarded fondly by his father and may have been sold by brothers or other relatives.

Effeminacy is a charge seldom lodged against black men, though Julius Soubise, a contemporary of Sancho who was born a slave in Saint Kitts, and who became the riding and fencing master to the Duchess of Queensberry is a famous counterexample. Soubise, I suggest, was most probably named by the Duchess of Queensberry after Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise (1715-1787), a hero of the Seven Years' War and later a fashionable French courtier in the court of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour. Soubise's perfumed rooms, high fashion, and extravagant lifestyle were true to the French stereotypes associated with his name, and he allegedly boasted of his sexual conquests which gave rise to titillating stories of racy behavior. According to the sparse and somewhat suspect biographical information that is extant, Soubise (whom Sancho counseled to live a regular life, perhaps because Soubise's behavior led Sancho to remember his own sexual wanderings) lived for a time with “the sons of persons of rank” in quarters lavishly decorated with flowers and became “one of the most conspicuous fops of the town.”²⁷ Styling himself the Black Prince and the son of African royalty, his pretensions to high social rank and habits of the rich sparked his caricature as Mungo Macaroni. African princes might have been expected to be linked by social class with aristocratic corruption and its attendant luxury, most frequently figured as a troubling contaminant to British masculinity entering from France, the Mediterranean, or the East; but effeminacy was seldom associated with African men, in part perhaps because few Africans in Britain rose above the laboring classes and the poor, and as African princes they were instead linked with being military leaders.

There is considerable evidence of increasing white apprehension about black male sexuality as greater numbers of freed slaves, largely male, enter Britain and develop some economic mobility, however limited it might be, in the later eighteenth century. Equiano and Sancho are of course fully aware that the two most influential representations of the black man were the noble Africans Othello and Oroonoko, each of whom was married to a white woman.²⁸ Equiano, like most African men in England in the eighteenth century, took a white English wife in spite of strong cultural objections to intermarriage and his own early association of whiteness with deformity (17).²⁹ In addition, as we have noted, Equiano negatively distinguishes white masculinity from black, in part by calling attention to the lack of morality of slaveowners in their raping of young slave girls and his inability to help them. Equiano is quick to recognize the double standard for black men who are tortured and castrated for sex with white women, even prostitutes, “as if it were no crime in the whites to rob an innocent African girl of her virtue; but most heinous in a black man only to gratify a passion of nature, where the temptation was offered by one of a different color, though that the most abandoned woman of her species” (104). Rather than alluding to the sexual characteristics of women slaves, he confines gender difference to their inequitable treatment to suggest that in the New World such issues rest on white men's perverse notions of their right to power rather than African men's respect for women's modesty. These arguments in behalf of a black male equality, and even their moral superiority to white men, are obviously intended to arouse abolitionist sentiments in Equiano's readers in claiming not only slavery's inhumanity, but that the color of virtue may be black.

The character of Othello carried enormous cultural valence for all black men in the eighteenth century whether or not they married white women—and the majority did exactly that because of the relative scarcity of black women in England.³⁰ In the fifth edition of his Narrative published in 1792, the year of his marriage, Equiano ventriloquizes Othello's words to justify his action. Like the Shakespearean hero, he claims that love is the only witchcraft he applied in wooing a Desdemona. He protests that his “round unvarnished tale” (13), like the witchcraft of love, is the only magic and conjuring he used to win her, and thus by analogy the autobiography becomes a narrative love letter to the white feminized reader. In short, Equiano “becomes” Othello in order to sell his text even as he emphasizes his distance from the superstition and seduction inherent in the analogy.

Sancho too encountered the white mentality which could not recognize the disparity between his person and that of the murderous dramatic character. When The Gentleman's Magazine (January 1776) reprints Sancho's letter to Sterne urging his support of abolition, he is figured as possessing a white heart under a black exterior: “though black as Othello [he] has a heart as humanized as any of the fairest about St. James's.”³¹ Othello's words leap immediately to his consciousness as a tragic figure swayed by evil forces. When his friend John Meheux provides food and clothing in response to his petition, the weeping Sancho “quoted Othello, the fictional Moor whose life was wrecked by a planted handkerchief, and who, although ‘unused to the melting mood,’ wept at the sight of Desdemona's corpse. It is the shared experience of being black, socially buffeted and on the verge of ruination because of (a lack of) cloth that connects these two characters across the centuries” (59).³² Yet Sancho's most characteristic mode of dealing with entrenched cultural inscriptions is a sharp satiric humor finely attuned to the race and social class of the accuser. On another occasion Sancho is confronted by a rude white man who, thinking only of Shakespeare's tragic hero when seeing a black man, calls out “Smoke Othello!” William Stevenson recounts that Sancho responded vehemently with “manly resentment” at being identified in such a manner: “‘Aye, Sir, such Othellos you meet with but once in a century,’ clapping his hand upon his goodly round paunch. ‘Such Iagos as you, we meet with in every dirty passage. Proceed, Sir!’”³³ In this exchange Sancho calls attention to the incongruity of imagining Othello with a paunch and reflects racism back onto the white man by identifying him as a malevolent Iago-like creature. He is self-mocking as well in telling Meheux that he should choose more wisely than picking a blackamoor as a friend since all such “from Othello to Sancho the big—we are either foolish—or mulish—all—all without a single exception” (180). Such satire may possibly coat Sancho's feelings of inadequacy, but more likely it engages the offender at his level while demonstrating his superior trickster mode and his improvisational abilities with mimicry.³⁴ When hailed as Othello, Sancho thinks of Iago's trickery and Equiano ponders cultural fears about miscegenation; each keeps Othello high in his consciousness, yet each resists too intimate an association with that identity.

Ignatius Sancho's letters date largely from the 1770s, a period of time when foppish effeminacy is tightly bound to foreign influences, and homophobia reigns. Sancho's friend Soubise was similarly haunted and taunted by the shadow of an Othello imagined to be a romance hero: “The duchess's maids [of the Duchess of Queensberry], who had little more to do than read novels, romances, and plays, lackadaisically called him the young Othello.”³⁵ Like Sancho, he was known as a womanizer, and after being charged with too much familiarity with the Duchess's maidservant, he was sent to India to teach the skills thought to be too elevated for a black in England who had boasted of being the son of an African prince: “Why, Mrs. GAD, I'll tell you who he is: it is not Omiah [the Tahitian visitor to England Omai]; no, nor the Prince of—of—Oroonoko, who was here some years ago:—he is a Prince of Ana—Anna—madboe, who is come here to make peace or war with the Premier, and the rest of the great folks, for not having properly protected his father's Forts and Settlements. Remember the story of Zanga [in Edward Young's Revenge], and we must tremble.” Mrs. Gad worries about the “dark design” she associates with any blackman, especially the vengeful Zanga, and she wonders whether he might turn out to be a Prince of France (like the hero of the Seven Years' War, for whom he was most probably named): “The name of S——se is known all over the world. He was a little tanned in the wars in Flanders; but our present Prince here has, if we are not much ill-informed, somewhat tarnished his reputation, if not his complexion, in the wars of VENUS, even in this Metropolis.” She goes on to repeat the gossip of his having frequented the “nunneries” or houses of prostitution in King's Place because his constitution was full as warm as his complexion. The whores, regardless of his complexion, allegedly admired him, as Desdemona admired Othello, for “his manly parts and abilities.” Soubise's shenanigans are gleefully reported in order to confirm salacious expectations of black men and the attraction they hold for white women: “As to me, I acknowledge a Black man was always the favourite of my affections; and that I never yet saw either OROONOKO or OTHELLO without rapture.” Thus Soubise, even as the plaything of gentlewomen's maids, is supposed to resemble the infinitely expandable well-known black characters simply because of a resemblance of complexion.

Unlike Equiano, Ignatius Sancho married a black woman, the West Indian Anne Osborne, apparently an unusual phenomenon in England in the eighteenth century, to curb his wildness and habituate himself to a wife whom he characterizes as “pretty well, pretty round, and pretty tame!” (38). It also seems possible that Sancho may have had less access to potentially marriageable white women than Equiano because his lesser situation as a butler, grocer, and merchant would not have been commensurate with middling expectations. Sancho had no objection to miscegenation, though his utopian vision of a raceless society is confined to the afterlife: “We will mix, my boy, with all countries, colours, faiths—see the countless multitudes of the first world—the myriads descended from the Ark—the Patriarchs—Sages—Prophets—and Heroes! My head turns round at the vast idea! We will mingle with them and untwist the vast chain of blessed Providence—which puzzles and baffles human understanding” (86). In particular Sancho seems driven by class concerns since he barely scrapes by with his large family, and he exhibits a certain class-consciousness in suggesting that every wealthy person should willingly relinquish the family plate. There can be no pretence of African nobility here, and Sancho goes to the opposite extreme in condemning some of his race as “Blackamoor dunderheads” (182).

It is this appeal to sentimentality and its attendant social rank that most distinguishes Sancho from Equiano, a characteristic which has made him subject to critics who prefer to represent him as more manly.³⁶ His self-presentation as a man of sentiment is perhaps a kind of social reaching: “My soul melts at kindness—but the contrary—I own with shame—makes me almost a savage” (45). An admirer of Sir Charles Grandison, a man of sentiment and fashion, he also wants to separate himself from “the whole detail of eastern, effeminate foppery” (204) characteristic of the British aristocracy at mid-century, but he acknowledges his soft and malleable character: “My fortitude (which is wove of very flimsy materials) too oft gives way in the rough and unfriendly jostles of life.” A review of the first edition of the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho claims that the collection “presents to us the naked effusions of a negroe's heart, and shews it glowing with the finest philanthropy and the purest affections.”³⁷ While this is an obvious appeal to readers who wish to engage in sentimentality, it also echoes a slavery history in which slaves were regarded while stark naked and chosen for their physical strength. According to Sancho, a viable masculinity includes sensibility to the slaves' sufferings, a view he shares with Ottobah Cugoano: “Every man of any sensibility, whether he be a Christian or an heathen, if he has any discernment at all, must think that for any men, or any class of men, to deal with their fellowcreatures as with the beasts of the field … that those men, that are the procurers and holders of slaves, are the greatest villains in the world.”³⁸ He jauntily reveals his libertine streak and passion for gambling, yet he also insists that he is a family man. Jekyll's biographical sketch commends his “domestic virtue,” a phrase usually reserved for women (7).

Sancho signals in his frequent allusions to his color and to racial stereotypes his recognition that African authenticity is partially a performance doomed to predictable reviews even before its opening night.³⁹ He refers to himself as “a poor, thick-lipped son of Afric” (216) whose seven children, the Sanchonettes, were compared to little monkeys. At least one critic has argued that Sancho bore a “diseased psyche” twisted into believing he was the Caliban-like monster the society had assumed he was,⁴⁰ but alternatively we might regard Sancho as parodying himself or his children as dogs or monkeys precisely in order to insist on his humanity, and on his masculinity as well. Sancho's letters describing himself as “a coal-black, jolly African” (210) and a “Black-a-moor” (118) exhibit a playfulness and self-deprecating humor which is lacking in Equiano. These references from the accomplished author and musician, friend of Sterne, and spokesperson for abolition are often tinged with an ironic recognition that such designations are culturally imposed.

Though Sancho mocks himself as fat, jolly, and ugly, he never impersonates or parodies the highly sexualized barbarian. More culturally adept than Equiano in adopting conventional attitudes toward women and the relationship between the sexes (“our sex are cowards” [65] or “Time shrivels female faces”), he mockingly reserves his right to demean the sex (62). On women's equality, he is fawningly conventional and chivalrous: “Could I new-model Nature—your sex should rule supreme—there should be no other ambition but that of pleasing ladies.” Sancho presents himself as erotically driven, guilty of an impossible relationship that leads to his ouster from the safe haven provided by three women and a self-confessed womanizer; on the other hand, Equiano does not hint of any such desires and does not talk about himself as a sexual being with one rare exception after he is freed and wishes to go to London: “Some of the sable females, who formerly stood aloof, now began to relax, and appear less coy, but my heart was still fixed on London, where I hoped to be ere long” (138). For him sexuality involves white slaveowners brutally preying upon and ravaging African slave women when they “commit violent depredations on the chastity of the female slaves” (104) who thus disgrace themselves as Christians and as men. He does, however, speak openly in response to James Tobin's racist writings in The Public Advertiser, 28 January 1788, about the irrationality of confining masculine desire to women of the same color and the hypocrisy of forced and furtive liaisons between French planters and their black slaves. Equiano publicly questions the open resistance to the union of black men with white women, while the brutalizing of black women by white plantation owners is ignored.

Sancho's early experience with white women, unlike Equiano's, was difficult since his mistresses treated him badly and considered forcing his return to the West Indian slave plantations. Instead he was taken into service as a butler by the Duchess of Montagu who left him a generous legacy in 1751. The ostensible reason for his dismissal was a sexual offense, a mark of his virility that proved threatening to his chaste mistresses. According to Jekyll's biography, “Indignation, and the dread of constant reproach arising from the detection of an amour, infinitely criminal in the eyes of three Maiden Ladies, finally determined him to abandon the family.”⁴¹ But Jekyll's account is itself racist, and it portrays Sancho—who documents his financial struggles—as luxuriating in the pleasures most often associated with aristocrats and nabobs. According to Jekyll, Sancho's passionate love of cards and women were inbred because of his geographical origins: “Freedom, riches, and leisure, naturally led a disposition of African texture into indulgences; and that which dissipated the mind of Ignatius completely drained the purse.” Sancho positions himself clearly in opposition to “an effeminate gallimawfry” (48) and wants to participate in rescuing “this once manly and martial people from the silken slavery of foreign luxury and debauchery” (48). Here he firmly distances himself from the English, though elsewhere he identifies himself as a man of London rather than of the empire.

In sum, Sancho refuses to adopt an English masculinity based on commercial excess, or on foreign effeminacy, or even consistently as a man of feeling. When he speaks of the love for his country, he means England, though he signs a paper “Africanus” (114) and writes a set of dances called “Mungo's Delight,” an obvious reference to the character in the popular operatic play by Charles Dibdin and Isaac Bickerstaffe, The Padlock (1768).⁴² At a time when British manliness is most associated with economic man and imperial designs, Sancho wonders at the pursuit of commercial growth and trade. He is “more and more convinced of the futility of all our eagerness after worldly riches” (77), and “Trade is duller than ever I knew it—and money scarcer—foppery runs higher—and vanity stronger;—extravagance is the adored idol of this sweet town.” He cautions his friend Jack Wingrave to “despise poor paltry Europeans—titled—Nabobs” (129). The conquering British, he suggests, taught the natives of the East and West Indies bad behavior, not the opposite. He urges racial intermixture on Christian principles: “Blessed expiation of the Son of the most high God—who died for the sins of all—all—Jew, Turk, Infidel, Heretic;—fair—sallow—brown—tawney—black—and you—and I—and every son and daughter of Adam” (93), and he wants to knit the British empire together. Yet it was empire itself that demonstrated the limits of nationalist thinking, just as it was black masculinity that threatened to make British masculinity into a caricature of itself.

Defined in negative terms, black manhood meant not being a boy, not being a beast or monster, not being effeminate or a woman. Neither Sancho or Equiano found foppishness a way to negotiate a black manhood that would not simply replicate the racial fictions of the pervasive representations of Othello and Oroonoko on the one hand or of the imperial white mercantilist man on the other. By the end of the century negative attitudes toward miscegenation and the fetishization of the sexual potency of black men had begun to coalesce and prevail. Being a (black) man involved skewing, twisting, and violating expectations based on the small but massively influential sampling of characters such as Friday, Zanga, Othello, and Oroonoko. Equiano and Sancho are remarkable in circumventing the monstrous racial fictions that erroneously and egregiously mapped the domestic and imperial regions of black masculinity to forge themselves instead into viable subjects who offered compelling alternatives to reigning notions of white British manhood in the later eighteenth century. In a culture struggling to reconcile masculinity with sentiment while avoiding effeminacy, it was the very palpable presence of these real alternatives to national molds which made these black men at once both threatening and appealing to white women and white men alike.

Notes

1. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, The Rover and Other Works, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin Books, 1992), 80-81. I have added the italics.

2. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner, ed. J. Donald Crowley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), 205.

3. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica 3 vols. (London 1774), and Philip Thicknesse, A Year's Journey Through France, and Part of Spain, 2nd ed. with additions (London, 1778)2: 102.

4. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste, and of the Origin of our Ideas of Beauty (London 1785), 26.

5. Review of Olaudah Equiano's Narrative, Gentleman's Magazine, June 1789, I: 539.

6. The Royal African: Or, Memoirs of the Young Prince of Annamaboe (London: c. 1749).

7. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1982). Susan M. Marren sees the limitations of binary models and finds Equiano's conflict arises “between his commitment to speaking as an African for his fellow Africans and the necessity of speaking as a white Englishman to make himself credible in eighteenth-century England,” as both “the illiterate, suffering child-slave and as the articulate freedman and visionary who offers his narrative to readers” in “Between Slavery and Freedom: The Transgressive Self in Olaudah Equiano's Autobiography,” PMLA 108 (1993), 104.

8. See Hazel Carby, “The Canon: Civil War and Reconstruction,” Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989): 42-43 and Race Men (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), and Nicholas Thomas, In Oceania: Visions, Artifacts, Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). Srinivas Aravamudan usefully coins the term “tropicopolitan” to describe the fictive colonized subject and the actual person who is both the “object of representation and agent of resistance,” Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688-1804 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1999), 4.

9. Kathleen Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity in the English Provinces, c. 1720-1790,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29.1 (1995): 75.

10. See Gretchen Gerzina, Black England: Life before Emancipation (London: John Murray, 1995), 53.

11. David Dabydeen, Hogarth's Blacks: Images of Blacks in Eighteenth Century English Art (Dangaroo Press, 1985), 87, 88.

12. Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987) usefully interprets his slave narrative as a conflict between the “uninitiated, native” young African and the adult Christian convert.

13. Wilfred D. Samuels, “Disguised Voice in The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African,” Black American Literature Forum 19 (1985): 64-69; and Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano (Owerri, Nigeria: AFA Publications, 1989).

14. Folarin Shyllon, “Olaudah Equiano: Nigerian Abolitionist and First National Leader of Africans in Britain,” Journal of African Studies 4 (1977): 433-51, 451.

15. Paul Edwards, “‘Master’ and ‘Father’ in Equiano's Interesting Narrative,” Slavery and Abolition 11 (1990): 216-226; and Valerie Smith, Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative.

16. Kathleen Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity,” 85.

17. Adam Potkay, “Olaudah Equiano and the Art of Spiritual Autobiography,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27.4 (Summer 1994), 677-92.

18. “Letter from Gustavus Vassa, Late Commissary for the African Settlement, to the Right Honourable Lord Hawkesbury,” in Interesting Narrative, p. 333.

19. Kathleen Wilson, “Citizenship, Empire, and Modernity,” 69-96.

20. Wilfrid Samuels, “Disguised Voice,” has argued that Equiano presents the Seven Years' War as “an avenue for regaining the power, valor, honor, and respect—in short, the humanity—of which he had been robbed by his abduction into slavery,” though I am not convinced that Equiano ever accepts this demeaning cultural assessment as his own.

21. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 283-320.

22. Katalin Orban, “Dominant and Submerged Discourses in The Life of Olaudah Equiano (or Gustavus Vassa),” African American Review 27.4 (1993): 655-64, confronts the stereotyping inherent in the claim that Equiano's heroic performance in the war is typical of African men: “One might want to ask whether all the heroes of the Seven Years' War epitomize the traditional African man.”

23. Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). I would argue, however, that elements of uneven relations of power based on gender seem to persist in Equiano's account.

24. Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1998). All subsequent quotations from this text will be cited parenthetically.

25. Felicity Nussbaum, “Women and Race: ‘A Difference of Complexion,’” in Women and Literature in Britain, 1700-1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 69-88.

26. Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, The Igbo Roots of Olaudah Equiano, 50, 90, 101.

27. Henry Charles William Angelo, Reminiscences of Henry Angelo, with Memoirs of his late Father (London 1828), I. 349.

28. Aphra Behn's Imoinda, Oroonoko's wife, was of course black, but in Thomas Southene's popular stage play frequently produced throughout the eighteenth century, Imoinda is a white woman.

29. Equiano and his wife, Susanna Cullen, were parents to two mixed-race daughters, Anna Maria and Johanna.

30. Vincent Carretta notes that marriages in which both parties were African were extremely uncommon in eighteenth-century England in Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, 250 n14.

31. Cited in Vincent Carretta, ed. Introduction to Ignatius Sancho, Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, xv.

32. Introduction to Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, ed. Reyahn King (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997), 9.

33. William Stevenson, 14 September, 1814, in John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century vol. 8 (London 1815).

34. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,” October 28 (1984): 125-133, is the classic text on the concept of mimicry as camouflage that “mimics the forms of authority at the point at which it deauthorizes them” (132).

35. Henry Charles William Angelo, Reminiscences, I. 347.

36. See Paul Edwards, “Introduction” in Ignatius Sancho, Sancho's Letters, with Memoirs of his Life by Joseph Jekyll Esq. M.P., 5th ed. (London: William Sancho, 1803) facsimile edition, ed. Paul Edwards (London: Dawsons, 1968), 6-7, and Keith A. Sandiford, Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in Eighteenth-Century Afro-English Writing (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1988), 75-76, cited in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83. For these critics, sentimentality would seem to compromise Sancho's masculinity and associate him with the aristocratic, the foreign, and the effete.

37. Caryl Phillips, foreword to Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997).

38. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, ed Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 1999), 25.

39. Though [Joseph Jekyll], “The Life of Ignatius Sancho,” in Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho reports “it is during this period [after 1751] that he may briefly have taken up employment as an actor in Garrick's theatrical company,” I am not aware of any other evidence to support this. See Edwards and Rewt, p. 2.

40. André Dommergues, “Ignatius Sancho (1729-180), the White-Masked African in The History and Historiography of Commonwealth Literature, ed. Dieter Riemenschneider (Tübuingen: Narr, 1983), 195.

41. See [Joseph Jekyll], “The Life of Ignatius Sancho,” in Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, 6.

42. Jane Girdham, “Black Musicians in England: Ignatius Sancho and his Contemporaries,” Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, ed. Reyahn King et al (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997), 115-24.

Epigraph from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustauvus Vassa the African. Written by Himself (London 1789).