An A-level pupil found the lost grave of the Black abolitionist Olaudah Equiano’s daughter, revealing a story of love and solidarity in 18th-century rural England.
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797), also known as Gustavus Vassa, escaped enslavement to become a celebrated author and campaigner in Georgian England. His memoir, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, was a bestseller.
His book tour brought him to Cambridgeshire, where he would marry and have two children with Susannah Cullen, an Englishwoman from Ely. They settled in Soham, supported by a local network including abolitionist friends, safe at a time when reactionary “church and king” mobs were targeting reformers.
The couple’s first daughter, Anna Maria Vassa, died when she was three and the exact location of her grave was lost to time.
However, after going to Cambridge’s Magdalene College library to borrow a signed Equiano letter for the Black Atlantic exhibition in 2021, Prof Victoria Avery, of the Fitzwilliam Museum, found long-forgotten, unheralded research by Cathy O’Neill. O’Neill had found and photographed the likely location of Anna Maria’s plot in the churchyard of St Andrew’s, in the Chesterton area of Cambridge, while doing her A-levels in 1977.
This October, while working on an article about Equiano’s Cambridgeshire family for Women’s History Review, Avery – with the help of the vicar of St Andrew’s, the Rev Dr Philip Lockley, and “perfect” light conditions – was finally able to wrap up the academic mystery. Avery confirmed that eroded lettering on the stone said “AMV – 1797”, confirming it as Anna Maria’s footstone, thanks to O’Neill’s previous research.
“In the moment of discovery there was a deep sense of her being found,” Lockley said.
It is part of a growing consciousness of the historical connection between the Equiano family and that corner of Cambridgeshire. Since the 1990s, the 700-year-old church has had an annual day in remembrance of Anna Maria Vassa and the significance of her father. In October 2022, a community project in the wake of Black Lives Matter renamed a bridge after Equiano.
The Church of England has welcomed Cambridgeshire’s Equiano connection as a story of “liberation, justice, love and mercy”, and St Andrew’s, which held a commemoration event this month, now plans to install a stained glass window commemorating Equiano’s family to further engage the community.
“People connect with it in a way you wouldn’t necessarily know as a piece of history,” Lockley said. “We’re such an area where new people are coming all the time but are really interested to hear of these long roots and connections into Black history and it being a part of Cambridge’s links to the campaign against the slave trade and enslavement.”
While the location of Anna Maria’s grave remained obscure for centuries, an epitaph on St Andrew’s north wall dating back to the time of her death celebrates her and describes her father’s enslavement, his marriage to her mother and local sorrow at Anna Maria’s death.
The epitaph commemorates her as a “child of colour … her father … torn from his native fields” who “through various toils, at length to Britain came, espous’d, so Heaven ordain’d, an English dame,” describing how “village children” mourned Anna Maria’s death.
The epitaph was written by Equiano’s friend, the abolitionist Edward Ind, whose younger brother, Thomas Ind, was Anna Maria’s guardian when she died, Avery believes.
Avery said Equiano’s marriage spoke “of bravery and true love”, adding: “We know from newspaper articles published at the time of their marriage that the wedding took place with a great assembly of people, presumably active abolitionists among them, who wished Olaudah and Susannah well on their marriage day.”
Explaining why the couple settled in Cambridgeshire rather than London, where Equiano leased “gracious” apartments, Avery said she believed they were safer in the countryside from the violent, post-French Revolution reactionary backlash that was targeting reformers in England at the time.
She said: “Olaudah, for much of their short marriage, is constantly on the move, earning an income and carrying on abolitionist activity. I think he realises Susannah and the kids need to be out of the line of fire.
“Within Cambridge, Ely, Soham, there were groups of like-minded men and women who loved him, believed in the [abolitionist] cause, supported him, his marriage and provided a supportive environment for the young Vassa family. The great tragedy is that Susannah dies so shortly after the birth of their second daughter, Equiano dies just over a year after that. Anna Maria dies shortly after.”
Equiano’s other daughter, Joanna, survived to adulthood and is buried in Stoke Newington. The artist Joy Labinjo, from Stoke Newington, reimagined what the family looked like for her work, An 18th-century Family, which now forms part of the Fitzwilliam Museum’s collection.
