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Created: 20th September, 2022

Hello, I’m Catherine Johnson and I’ve been asked to tell you something about my latest book, Journey Back to Freedom, a biography of Oluadah Equiano. Barrington Stoke have done my words proud, and together with a beautiful cover and page footers courtesy of illustrator Katie Hickey, have produced a really beautiful book.

Why did I want to write about Equiano? Well, as a writer of lots of historical fiction for young readers – much of it set in the 18th century – his name came up an awful lot over years of research.

 

I grew up in North London in the last century, and I never thought of myself, really, honestly, as English, as belonging. My father was Jamaican and my mother, Welsh speaking Welsh. I was, as it seemed then and as it seemed from the reactions gleaned in my everyday life, an outsider. But I loved history -and the frocks - I loved Leon Garfield’s children’s stories, many of which were televised. As much as I loved reading I also grew up on television and we would play the TV shows we’d seen in the playground of my primary school. I was never allowed a decent role in these games, as this was long before inclusive casting!

I loved writing at Primary School – and history too. One project I can still remember involved a massive sheet of black sugar paper detailing Cortez’s conquest of the Aztec Empire in cut out gold paper. And I started so many home-made books – never finished – and enjoyed so many poems, especially short funny ones by authors like Edward Lear and Ogden Nash.

I loved story time at school and can still remember re reading Emil and The Detectives by Erich Kastner, and Half Magic by Edward Eager, after listening to them in school. I spent a lot of time in the library too and read every one of Tove Jansson’s Moomintroll books. But I had a love of writing squashed by exams and it wasn’t until I had children that  I was lucky to find a way back to writing, and luckier still to be published and to eventually make a kind of living at a job I love.

 

After writing several books for young readers I discovered Peter Fryer’s Staying Power, one of the first accessible histories to explore the history of black and Asian people in Britain. This was like a light going off in my head; suddenly I realised I could write stories with heroines that were brown and wore empire line frocks and bonnets, and how much people, like me and my family, were bound up in our Island history. And really, I have never looked back.  Writing helped me see that Black Britons are as important a part of our Island story as Vikings, Huguenots, Angles or Normans.

As well as coming across Oluadah Equiano in very many books, I had often walked past his daughters’ grave in Stoke Newington. My interest was piqued! Equiano lived in the latter half of the 18th century, my favourite period of history! He was born, probably in modern day Nigeria, an Igbo boy. He was kidnapped, aged eleven, sold and enslaved many times over before finding a way to buy his freedom and live a life in Britain as a preacher, abolitionist, and writing the first bestseller by a black author in Britain.  He was irrepressible, suffering the hell of the Middle Passage, as well as enduring a different kind of hell in battle on board ship as a boy sailor in the British Navy during the Seven Years War.

In later life, he worked hard at a variety of trades including merchant and barber and preacher. He strived and failed to be ordained in the Church of England. He served on the Committee for The Relief of the Black Poor, donors included the Duchess of Devonshire and politician and future Prime Minister William Pitt.  And, until he realised the utter folly of the idea, Equiano worked as Quartermaster on the initiative to begin a free settlement in Sierra Leone, Africa.

He wrote his book to shine a light on the inhumanity of the slave trade, and it is still, two hundred and fifty years later, still in print.

 

I think it’s vital to state that Black British history is not something that should only pop up every October, it’s all our history, every one of us.  Alongside Wilberforce and Clarkson, we need to find out about the Sons of Africa; Equiano, Sanchez and Cugoano. Alongside the Industrial revolution we should be looking at where the finance for the factories and railways came from to give our Empire a head and shoulders start. I’m all in favour of young people understanding why and how we became the country we are now and reading about Equiano and others is vital.

Our history isn’t like the lid of a tin of Quality Street, it’s a million times more interesting! There are so many brilliant characters and so many ways of being British; William Cuffay, John Ystumllyn, Robert Wedderburn, Emperor Severus Septimius, William Darby/Pablo Fanque and Mary Seacole are just some of the people from the past who prove this point.

 

Discover Journey Back to Freedom by Catherine Johnson, published by Barrington Stoke...