The veracity of the story Olaudah Equiano tells in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African has been questioned by Vincent Carretta, who maintains that Equiano was born not in Africa but in the Carolinas, which means that the author’s story of his childhood and kidnapping in Africa is fictive. While I find Carretta’s argument convincing, I would like to point out that Equiano gained the ability to create fictions the way he learned other skills such as reading, writing, and sailing: as an appropriation of what recent German media theorists call ‘cultural techniques,’ a term that Bernhard Siegert defines as “practices and procedures for the production of culture that we can situate at the intersection of the humanities and technical sciences and which can more generally be understood as the condition of the possibility of culture.” This essay reads Equiano’s life story through the lens of media theory and asks what new insights such a reading gives us on this classic slave narrative.

Keywords: Olaudah Equiano; cultural techniques; slavery; German media theory; fictionality