‘The Stamp of Their Own Iniquity’: Ottobah Cugoano on the Mark of Cain, Noah’s Curse, and Enslavers

Recently, Nyasha Junior has argued that interpretations of Cain by Black interpreters should not be understood as merely a reaction or corrective to anti-Black aetiological theories about the mark of Cain (Gen. 4:15). Surveying a range of 19th- and early 20th-century Black interpreters, Junior showed how they used the story of Cain to account for the violence that they believed is inherent in white people. In this article, I provide further evidence for this reading of Cain’s violence as an aetiological explanation for white violence. I analyse Ottobah Cugoano’s discussion of Cain in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery: and Commerce of the Human Species (1787) as a further example of this type of interpretation within African diasporic writings. In unmooring the mark from racial origins and linking it closely to racial violence, in part through a connection that Cugoano makes with Noah’s curse of his grandson Canaan in Genesis 9, elements of Cugoano’s argument anticipate the 19th- and early 20th-century Black interpreters who, as Junior discussed, argue that white people resemble Cain in their inherently violent tendencies.