Who counts as human? More precisely, who counts as the kind of human to whom I owe obligations, and who, when encountered, elicits a response of care? Conversely, who lies beyond my circle of concern? And how should I respond to them? Are they strangers to be hosted, enemies to be feared, or barbarians to be civilized or enslaved?

Since Diogenes the Cynic, different humanisms have attempted to answer such questions through appeals to a universal humanity. These traditions—whether Stoic, Christian, liberal, Marxist, or Islamic—claim that all people, regardless of location, condition, or culture, share a common humanity. In doing so, they contest the boundaries of care by challenging who is and who is not “one of us.”

And yet movements to universalize humanity cast a shadow. Each universalizing discourse harbours a contradiction: In naming “humanity,” it almost always smuggles in a local portrait of the human, one that includes some and excludes others.

The Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter offers one of the most incisive accounts of this contradiction as it has played out within Western humanism. Her claim is not simply that the West failed to live up to its humanist ideals, but that those ideals themselves were repeatedly constructed around a narrow image of the human. The figure at the centre of these ideals changed over time, but in each instance the exclusions only hardened.

In the late medieval period, the decisive distinction was theological: saved versus unsaved, Christian versus pagan. With the rise of early modern philosophy, this gave way to a new standard—rational versus irrational—which Wynter calls “Man1.” By the nineteenth century, this was further transformed into what she calls “Man2”: the modern, bourgeois, ostensibly scientific image of the human as biologically “evolved,” naturally selected, and so best fit to rule. What counts as fully human was no longer defined by God or reason but by evolutionary development.

For Wynter, this process marks a story of disenchantment as authority moves from the church to the nation-state to the market. Contrary to triumphalist stories of secularization, this is for Wynter not a story of progress but of decline: theology, for all its limits, was more self-aware at points of transcultural encounter, recognizing its contingency in the face of other peoples and other gods. Modern humanism, by contrast, presents its image of the human as self-evident and universal while encoding the norms and interests of a particular ethnicity and class.

The result is what Wynter calls “provincial universals”: accounts of humanity that claim to include everyone while in fact sorting people into a hierarchy of worth. However, those who fail to conform to the reigning image of the human—whether labelled as unsaved, irrational, backward, or biologically unfit—are not cast outside humanity altogether. They are simply rendered the wrong kind of human. To fall into this category is to be consigned to what Wynter evocatively names an “archipelago of otherness,” marked by poverty, degradation, and exploitation.

Here a central moral paradox of modern racial slavery comes into focus. Slavery did not depend on denying that Africans were human. It depended on recognizing their humanity in a way that made it exploitable. Enslaved Africans were acknowledged as capable of work and discipline, yet denied moral standing, political agency, and reciprocal obligation. Racism was the ideological system that made this arrangement appear natural, orderly, and even benevolent—a form of care administered by supposedly superior, “fully human” peoples.

In this sense, modern scientific racism was not an aberration from humanism but one of its most revealing expressions. As William David Hart observes, Western humanism often functioned as a performative contradiction: Blackness became the constitutive outside against which “the human” was defined. This logic is visible in David Hume’s infamous claim that no civilization had ever emerged from non-white peoples, and in Edward Long’s eighteenth-century portrayal of plantation slavery in Jamaica as a civilizing and morally ordered system.

The consequences were catastrophic. As Frantz Fanon later put it, this racialized metaphysics of the human licensed “an avalanche of murders” and the systematic exploitation of non-Western peoples and places. And, as Hannah Arendt warned, racism ultimately signalled not the strength but the decay of Western civilization itself. A world that defines the human by domination and exclusion corrodes the moral foundations on which any genuine humanism depends.

Christianity’s Surrender

Christianity, at its best, answers the questions I began with differently. Every person, especially the one beyond our communal or civic bounds, is a potential neighbour to be loved. They bear the image of God, and in loving them we express our love for God. This is the lesson of the good Samaritan: The circle of care must be extended at the point of encounter, especially to the afflicted, the oppressed, the stranger, and the enemy.

The modern tragedy is that Western Christianity, as it spread across the globe, often surrendered to the logic of racism. From the fifteenth century onward, Western forms of Christianity became entangled with a racialized imagination that trained believers to see some people as fully human and others as human-in-the-wrong-way—objects to be improved, a resource to be extracted from, or a chaotic population to be managed. “True humanity” was increasingly defined not by fellowship but by autonomy: The rational, self-directing individual, supposedly advanced and best fit to rule, was one shaped by winning a competition among persons and nations. It was an anthropology most fully realized in the intertwined projects of capitalism and colonialism, an anthropology in which conflict, not cooperation, was the basis of human relations.

Black liberation theology arises precisely at this point of failure, asking what a theology might look like that fully confronted the ways a “racial nomos” shaped Western Christian belief and practice. My hope here is to extend that challenge to Christian humanism, a tradition of moral and political theology reaching from Gregory of Nyssa, through Erasmus and Bartolomé de las Casas, to C.S. Lewis, Jacques Maritain, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Can this tradition sustain a form of humanism capable of confronting what British social theorist Paul Gilroy calls “the racial figuration of the human”?

The question at stake today is not whether Christianity has ever been implicated in the racial ordering of the world. It has. The question is whether, within the very world that made Man2 seem inevitable—within the circuits of trade, empire, and the plantation system—there were Christians who learned to speak another grammar of the human. To see that possibility, we have to look for it where modernity was made: not in the self-glorifying narratives of the nation-state or the subtle abstractions of the university, but in the routes, cross-pollinations, and interdependencies of what Gilroy calls “the Black Atlantic.”

Baptism and Bondage

The Black Atlantic names more than a geography. It names a world brought into being through forced movement, violent exchange, and coerced intimacy—a world in which race was made, markets were developed, and Christianity was both weaponized and transformed. In this world, theology and political economy did not develop in isolation. Each was forged on the anvil of the other. Scripture travelled alongside commodities. Baptism accompanied bondage. The language of salvation was pressed into service by empire, even as it was seized, reworked, and turned back against empire by the enslaved and colonized.

The Atlantic system that birthed the modern world also generated a counter-public: a dispersed, improvisational network of ships, maroon spaces, congregations, songs, and stories through which people of African descent, in alliance with many others, resisted their designation as irrational, inferior, and expendable. Forcibly cut off from the stabilizing claims of land, family, and religion, they fashioned new forms of identity and solidarity under conditions of extreme constraint. In the process, they reimagined what it might mean to be human and modern at the same time, outside the shackles imposed on them by European civilization.

Christianity played an ambivalent but decisive role in this counter-world. It was undeniably implicated in the moral legitimation of slavery and racial hierarchy. Yet it also became a site of creative re-signification: a language through which suffering was named, judgment was pronounced, hope was sustained, and alternative futures were envisioned. In these Atlantic crossings, faith was creolized: translated across cultures, contested in practice, and re-inhabited in ways that did not simply reproduce either European Christianity or African religious forms. What emerged was a Christianity shaped by survival and constructive improvisation, by moral address from below. It is from within this turbulent, creolized Christian world that Olaudah Equiano’s voice emerges.

The Man Who Would Not Be Named

Equiano was born either in the lower Niger River basin in what is now Nigeria or in colonial South Carolina, his life unfolding across the circuits of the Black Atlantic. Enslaved as a child, he spent years serving aboard British naval and merchant vessels, moving mostly between Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Over time he learned to read and write, acquired naval and commercial skills, and eventually purchased his freedom. By the latter part of his life, he had settled in London, married an Englishwoman named Susanna Cullen, raised a family, and become a central figure in the early abolitionist movement.

In 1789 Equiano published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Appearing just months before the French Revolution, the book was an immediate success. It went through nine editions in his lifetime, circulated widely through libraries and reading societies, and was quickly translated into several European languages. Equiano retained the copyright and actively promoted the book through public lectures and speaking tours, ensuring both its reach and his independence. This was no private memoir. It was a public intervention addressed to Parliament, the churches, and the moral conscience of the British nation.

At the heart of The Interesting Narrative is a story of conversion—indeed, several. Equiano recounts his conversion to Christianity, his gradual incorporation into an English mercantile way of life, and, crucially, his conversion to abolitionism. He does not present himself as an unambiguous hero. He narrates his own complicity in the slave trade after gaining his freedom. It is a refusal of innocence that speaks from lived entanglement in the world he condemns.

The question of who Equiano is—and how he should be named—runs through the book. He was given multiple names over the course of his life: Michael, Jacob, and finally Gustavus Vassa, the name imposed by one of his enslavers. “Olaudah Equiano” appears on the title page of The Interesting Narrative, yet he rarely used that name in legal documents and is known to have bristled when addressed by it in person. Scholars have long debated which name is “authentic.” But the debate itself is misplaced. Equiano never resolves the question of his identity because he does not allow it to be resolved. His narrative intentionally leaves his identity open-ended.

This refusal is an invitation to a different kind of relation. Equiano neither expects nor demands recognition within the reigning image of Man2. Nor does he simply reject that image from the outside. Instead, he inhabits its languages—Christian, humanist, commercial—and transforms them. In doing so, he turns the gaze back on his readers. The question his narrative presses is not whether Africans can either be civilized or become Christian, but whether a civilization that depends on bondage can still claim either name.

Refusing the Master’s Grammar

At the heart of The Interesting Narrative lies a profound refusal: Equiano will not allow his humanity to be settled on the terms offered by those who claim mastery over him. The unsettledness of his name is not accidental; it is a theological and political stance. To demand a single “true” name is to demand a single, stable, legible self, one that is fully knowable within and through the grammars of domination. Equiano will not comply. He remains deliberately in excess of every category meant to contain him.

Scripture has a grid for this. It is full of people who receive new names because they receive a calling: Abram becomes Abraham; Jacob becomes Israel; Simon becomes Peter; Saul becomes Paul. Naming in the biblical tradition is never merely descriptive; it signals vocation, struggle, and transformation. Likewise, Equiano’s truest identity is secured not by blood, soil, or social function but by God’s address. And in that light, he also refuses what Matthew Elia calls “the position of the Christian master,” the assumption that Christian faith authorizes dominance. The measure of the human is not the power to classify or rule but the capacity to respond faithfully to God and neighbour. In a world obsessed with fixing, sorting, and ranking the human, Equiano insists on something more demanding: a humanity that cannot be possessed, only lived and discovered together.

Scripture as Counter-Anthropology

In Equiano’s time and place, to speak from the Bible was to speak from the centre. In the Protestant Atlantic world he inhabited, Scripture was the deepest source of moral and cultural authority, the shared text through which claims about truth, humanity, and order were made and contested. To speak biblically was not to retreat into private piety or sectarian argument. It was to enter the public arena at its most fundamental level, where judgments about persons, peoples, and power were authorized.

Scripture, in this sense, was not neutral ground but occupied terrain. The Bible had been pressed into the service of slavery and racial hierarchy. The so-called curse of Ham was invoked to naturalize African enslavement; Pauline exhortations to obedience were read as timeless endorsements of the plantation order. One widely circulated tract of the period, Scriptural Researches on the Licitness of the Slave-Trade, sponsored by Liverpool merchants, argued that slavery was not only compatible with Christianity but demanded by it. The Bible, in other words, was a contested moral technology, one that had to be reclaimed or surrendered.

Equiano chose reclamation. He did so, however, not by offering a detached exegetical rebuttal or appealing to abstract principles. Instead, he read Scripture figurally, placing his own life inside the biblical story and inviting his readers to see themselves there as well.

This becomes clear from The Interesting Narrative’s frontispiece, where Equiano presents himself holding a Bible open to the Acts of the Apostles, the text that narrates the birth of the church through boundary-crossing encounters between Jew and Gentile, insider and outsider, centre and margin. Acts is also a story of conversion and calling, of the gospel travelling along imperial roads and maritime routes, unsettling established orders as it goes. By placing Acts at the threshold of his book, Equiano signals how he wants his life to be read. His Atlantic crossings echo Paul’s missionary journeys. His suffering, confinement, and exposure to death mirror apostolic trials. And echoing Paul in Rome, his arrival in London, the metropole of his empire, becomes the setting for a prophetic address to a people convinced of their own righteousness.

Equiano repeatedly aligns himself with figures in Scripture who are drawn into God’s redemptive purposes, many of whom occupy liminal or excluded positions. Alongside Paul, he identifies with the Ethiopian eunuch of Acts 8, the African court official who encounters Scripture, receives interpretation, and is baptized without precondition. The eunuch’s story offered a powerful counter to claims that Africans were latecomers to Christianity or incapable of true faith. It also inverted assumptions about who instructs whom. In Acts, it is the Ethiopian who reads Isaiah, who asks the decisive theological question, and who carries the gospel southward. By placing himself in this lineage, Equiano reminds his readers that Africans were present at Christianity’s beginnings, and that they can still be its teachers.

Throughout The Interesting Narrative, Scripture functions as a mirror held up to Christian Europe. Equiano repeatedly appeals to the Golden Rule—Do unto others as you would have them do unto you—not as a sentimental maxim but as a standard of judgment. Addressing slaveholders and their apologists, he asks with devastating simplicity, “Learned you this from your God?” The question is not whether slavery is economically useful or culturally entrenched, but whether it can survive exposure to the character of Christ. In Equiano’s hands, Scripture does not comfort the powerful; it interrogates them. He is speaking not as a victim seeking recognition but as a theologian exercising judgment, addressing Christian Europe from within its own rule book and calling it to account.

This mode of reading performs a radical reversal. Those who presume themselves to be insiders—white, European, Christian—are shown to have failed the test of faithfulness. Meanwhile, those marked as outsiders—African, enslaved, despised—appear as bearers of spiritual maturity and moral wisdom. Equiano consistently positions the oppressed as those who recognize Christ in the stranger and the suffering, while planters and merchants take their place alongside the priest and Levite who pass by on the other side. The biblical story is not abandoned; it is re-inhabited from below.

Crucially, this scriptural imagination does not produce withdrawal or quietism. It authorizes public speech. Equiano writes as one who has been addressed by God and therefore has something to say to the world. His testimony reverses the usual order of recognition: The formerly enslaved speaks; the empire listens. In this, he challenges not only the moral legitimacy of slavery but also the epistemic hierarchy that renders African voices untrustworthy or unintelligible. To testify is to claim standing as a knower, to insist that one’s experience bears truth.

What emerges from this scriptural practice is a distinctively Christian humanism, one centred not on rational capacity or biological development but on participation in Christ. For Equiano, Christ is the true human: the one in whom humanity is revealed, restored, and made available anew. To become fully human is not to approximate European norms of civilization but to be conformed to Christ’s way of life, a way of life marked by humility, mutuality, and care for the least. This conviction allows Equiano to affirm multiple cultural forms of life without collapsing them into a single civilizational ideal. Humanity is one in Christ even as its cultural expressions are many.

In this sense, Equiano does not merely argue against racialized accounts of the human; he abolishes them. By rooting human dignity in God’s creative and redemptive action, he relativizes all claims grounded in nation, race, or economic progress. None of these can claim final authority over what it means to be human. That authority belongs to God alone and is disclosed most clearly in the crucified and resurrected Christ.

This is why The Interesting Narrative cannot be reduced to a plea for sympathy or reform. It is a theological summons. Through Scripture, Equiano calls his readers to re-examine their lives, their institutions, and their understanding of God. He asks them to consider whether their civilization reflects the gospel it professes or stands under its judgment. To read his book attentively is to be placed in the dock.

From Testimony to Collective Action

The Interesting Narrative, at the end of the day, is less a book to be read than a call to be answered. It is a speech act that seeks to reconfigure how people see, judge, and act in the world. Testimony, for Equiano, is never merely expressive. It aims to do something.

This is why the genre matters. Equiano writes neither a treatise nor a philosophical refutation of slavery. Nor does he offer a purely sentimental appeal to pity. Instead, he fuses multiple forms—spiritual autobiography, captivity narrative, picaresque adventure tale, travelogue, rags-to-riches saga, abolitionist tract, and jeremiad—into a single, unsettling whole. The result is a work that refuses to stay in its place. It moves between the personal and the political, the theological and the economic, the confessional and the agitational. Its very form enacts the boundary-crossing humanism it proclaims.

This hybridity reflects Equiano’s conviction that slavery is not merely a moral failure or a theological error but a total social fact, one that deforms persons, corrupts institutions, and distorts the habits of everyday life. To confront such a system requires more than argument; it requires the re-education of perception and desire. Equiano writes in order to make his readers envision the world differently: to see the enslaved as neighbours, to see the market as a site of moral relation and not just commercial transaction, to see their own prosperity as produced through brutality.

Yet his testimony does more than summon others to action. It models the kind of agency that is required if a different world is to come into being. Again and again, he narrates moments in which his capacity to act—to learn to read, to trade, to organize, to speak—becomes the condition not just of his survival but of shared flourishing. Conversely, when his agency is denied, when he is robbed, cheated, restrained, or prevented from learning navigation, not only is he diminished, but those around him are placed in danger. Ships are imperilled. Crews descend into chaos. In Equiano’s telling, tyranny is not merely unjust; it is incompetent. It corrodes the practical wisdom on which shared life depends.

His personal witness was a summons to a particular form of collective action, a form he embodied. He lectured widely, organized networks of correspondence, collaborated with fellow “sons of Africa” and white abolitionists alike, petitioned Parliament, and strategically used print culture to mobilize public opinion. In doing so, he helped pioneer a new form of politics: the modern social movement.

The early abolition movement was neither a state project nor a sectarian campaign. It was translocal, democratic, and morally driven—a loose federation of churches, reading societies, households, and meeting halls linked by letters, pamphlets, sermons, and stories carried along the same maritime routes that trafficked human bodies. Its power lay not in coercion but in persuasion, not in sovereignty but in solidarity. It sought to change laws by first changing hearts, habits, and horizons of moral concern.

This form of politics embodied Equiano’s Christian humanism. Human flourishing, he believed, does not arise from isolated virtue or heroic self-mastery. It depends on the quality of relations that bind people together and on the social and material conditions that enable those relations to be just, reciprocal, and free. Slavery violated these conditions at every level. It deprived the enslaved of the means to cultivate virtue, then blamed them for the vices such deprivation produced. Against this logic, Equiano insisted that character cannot be abstracted from political economy. Formation in the virtues requires material and social security, education, and the possibility of participation in shared life.

In this sense, Equiano anticipates a question later posed by philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre: “What kind of human being do I need to become, if in struggling for the replacement of capitalism and imperialism by a more humane order I am to achieve my own good? What virtues do I need, if I am not to be open to corruption at certain points?” Equiano’s answer is not theoretical but lived. The virtues he commends—courage, truthfulness, perseverance, hospitality—are cultivated not in retreat from the world but through engagement with it, alongside others, in common cause.

Some social theorists describe this mode of action as a politics of “re-existence”: the creative work of refusing the identities imposed by domination and forging new ways of being human under conditions designed to make such life impossible. Equiano’s abolitionism exemplifies this politics, as it does not wait for recognition from above but rather generates new publics, new solidarities, and new moral vocabularies from below. In doing so, it treats humanity itself as a commons—something realized not through either sameness or mastery but through shared responsibility and mutuality amid difference.

What Equiano offers, then, is not only a critique of slavery but also a positive vision of democratic life grounded in Christian conviction. He shows how theology can animate political action without collapsing into ideology, and how faith can generate institutions of resistance without sanctifying domination. His witness reminds us that the struggle over what counts as human is never settled by argument alone. It is decided, again and again, in how we organize our lives together, and in whether we are willing to be converted by the voices we have been conditioned not to hear.

A Humanism Fit for Our Time

Olaudah Equiano bequeaths to us a form of Christian humanism forged under severe and grotesque pressure, a humanism born not from confidence in civilization’s progress but from fidelity amid its failures.

At its centre stands a christological claim: that Christ is the true human, and that participation in the life of Christ—not race, nation, reason, or economic development—is the ground of human dignity. This claim relativizes every civilizational project that seeks to define the human in its own image. It also refuses despair. Even in a world structured to produce non-persons, Equiano insists that humanity can still be spoken, practiced, and shared, even at the point where shared humanity is most brutally fractured.

True humanism, for Equiano, is necessarily agonistic. It does not imagine harmony without struggle, nor a movement toward communion without conflict. Equiano knows that appeals to shared humanity are always contested, always at risk of capture by forms of oppression. Yet he also knows that abandoning such appeals leaves the field open to the logics of domination, unjust status, and exclusion. The answer is not to give up on universals but to fight for better ones grounded in lives lived faithfully in relation to specific people in particular places.

Equiano’s Christian humanism is also democratic. It locates moral authority not in elite institutions or sovereign command but in testimony, persuasion, and common action, first and foremost in solidarity with the least, the lost, and the last. It trusts that truth can travel along informal networks—through stories, songs, letters, and shared practices—and that people, when addressed as moral agents, can respond. This is why the abolition movement mattered so deeply to Equiano. It was not only a campaign against slavery; it was also a rehearsal of a different way of being human together.

At the same time, Equiano’s vision is resolutely this-worldly. He refuses any separation between salvation and social life. To deny people the conditions necessary for flourishing—freedom, education, security, participation—is both a political injustice and a theological one. Slavery threatened both bodies and souls. Conversely, the work of justice becomes part of the work of salvation, a way of participating here and now in God’s eschatological ordering of creation.

Seen from this angle, Equiano’s witness speaks with unsettling clarity to our own moment. Once again, powerful forces are at work narrowing the definition of the human—sorting lives by productivity, supposed biological hierarchies, or cultural belonging. Once again, religious language is being recruited to sanctify exclusion, baptize unjust hierarchies of status, and theologize catastrophizing stories of civilizational difference. And once again, many are tempted either to retreat into private virtue or to baptize the logic of domination in the name of order.

Equiano offers a different path. He reminds us that Christian humanism, if it is to be worthy of the name, must be willing to listen to voices formed at the edges of power, to submit cherished identities to judgment, and to risk conversion. It must be practiced, not merely professed. It must be lived in the awkward, demanding work of building common life across difference.

In the end, Equiano does not ask us to admire him. He asks us to attend—to Scripture, to suffering, to testimony, to the slow labour of moral repair and building unexpected solidarities. His life poses a question that remains urgent: Will we continue to define the human by mastery and exclusion, or will we allow ourselves to be re-formed by a vision of humanity grounded in communion, shared responsibility, and care?

A formerly enslaved African once stood at the heart of an empire and spoke, with calm insistence, about what it means to be human. The power of his witness lies not in its novelty but in its faithfulness. The question Equiano leaves us with is not whether such a humanism is possible. It is whether we are willing to practice it.