A Black Missionary in the Center of the Slave Trade: The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque

In 1779, a man named Olaudah Equiano penned a letter to the Bishop of London. Equiano became known throughout the Atlantic world for his battles against transatlantic slavery, and he was also a “self-made man” whose later autobiography would be astonishingly popular. Yet in his letter, he seems to have neither abolitionism nor autobiography in mind. Equiano was instead writing to become a missionary to Africa. He received assistance when one of the governors of a British outpost in West Africa wrote a letter in support of Equiano’s application. In explaining the benefits of ordaining him, the governor invoked the legacy of a previous black missionary in Africa, one who was well known throughout the eighteenth century but has been mostly forgotten today: Philip Quaque. Equiano, that exemplar of the eighteenth century’s self-made man, was actually being touted as a second coming of Philip Quaque.

Published as part of the University of Georgia’s outstanding “Race in the Atlantic World” series, Vincent Carretta and Ty M. Reese’s The Life and Letters of Philip Quaque—an edited collection of letters by and about Quaque—brings much-needed attention to this important but overlooked figure in the Black Atlantic. Born into an elite Fetu family around 1741, Quaque was sent to England as a child for a religious education. He was accompanied by two other Africans, but one of them died from disease while the other apparently went insane. By 1766, Quaque had finished his religious training, married an English woman, had been ordained in the Anglican Church, and had begun a career as a missionary at Cape Coast Castle (in present-day Ghana), one of the linchpins of the British slave system. Quaque was employed by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts as well as by the Company of Merchants Trading in Africa, and this reality—working for both a missionary society and a collection of slave traders—was the most important factor that shaped his life and work. He stayed in Africa for fifty years, and, although his mission was ultimately a failure, his correspondence offers an unprecedented view into African missionary work, coastal African society, the dynamics of the slave trade, West African religion, the culture of the slave traders, and the relationship between slavery and Christianity.

The contributions this edited collection makes to the field are threefold. First, Carretta and Reese bring their uniquely complementary expertise to the project, as Carretta is well known for his pathbreaking work on Black Atlantic writers (especially Equiano), and Reese is an expert on coastal West Africa. The authors’ introduction discusses Quaque as a black Anglican missionary, but it also situates Quaque in the local social developments and political power struggles of coastal Africa, as well as in the wider, transatlantic network of Christian evangelicals. Quaque never crossed the Atlantic, but his letters certainly did, and the authors identify Quaque as an “Atlantic creole,” a black evangelist who was equally conversant in both African and English worlds. Although Quaque was not as celebrated as his contemporaries Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, or Ottobah Cugoano, like those counterparts, he was an “early Black Atlantic exemplar of epistolary art, rhetorical skill, and verbal self-fashioning” (2). Quaque’s letters demonstrate, however, that these skills rarely translated into evangelical success, or even social respect. English slave traders distrusted him, his Anglican sponsors second-guessed him, and his potential African converts shunned him. After half a century, Quaque had only a few baptisms to show for his efforts.

Second, the publication of these letters will greatly assist researchers working in the Black Atlantic, missionary history, and coastal African history. A sampling of Quaque’s letters has been edited before, and several scholars, including Travis Glasson, Reese, and myself, have recently published articles on Quaque, connecting him to African educational efforts, English Methodism...