Maryland professor disputes parts of Equiano's 18th-century tale of Middle Passage

In his eloquent autobiography, Olaudah Equiano describes in gripping detail his boyhood in Africa, his capture by slave traders and the hellish Middle Passage voyage in a slave ship across the Atlantic. The book became a sensation in 18th-century Britain and greatly aided that nation's abolition movement. But now a book written by a scholar at the University of Maryland, College Park says Equiano was almost certainly born in South Carolina, not Africa. And the vivid account of Equiano's boyhood in a vale among the Igbo people, and of his violent capture at age 11, is probably fiction, said Vincent Carretta, an English professor

His conclusions, contained in Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man scheduled to be published next month by the University of Georgia Press, have sparked a fierce debate among scholars.

"I think 'devastating' is not underestimating some people's reaction to this notion," said Philip Morgan, a Princeton University history professor who has written about 18th-century slavery.

Some experts disagree with Carretta's conclusions, saying Equiano's account is too detailed and accurate to be a work of fiction. But others back Carretta's scholarship.

Carretta, a former fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University, draws upon recently discovered documents, such as British baptismal and naval records that indicate a birth in the Carolina colony. Other documents show that Equiano was a Royal Navy officer's slave for 10 years before winning his freedom and becoming a free sailor based in England - never taking part in the Middle Passage.