The Story of Olaudah Equiano gives us a glimpse slave life beginning for capture in Africa to slavery in the North American colonies.
Equiano was living an idyllic life in his homeland in the Kingdom of Benign, which is now part of Nigeria. When he was just 11yrs old, he was captured by slavers as he was playing when his parents were away working. He would never see them again.
Slavers usually scoured Africca looking for younger people to capture and sell to white Europeans that had ships moored along the African coast waiting for Africans to sell into slavery in the European colonies.
On the slave ship, the 11yr old Equiano, was so scared he wouldn’t eat. He said, in his narrative, that a white man came down and flogged him for refusing food. That is when he knew that his life would never be the same.
He made a stop in Barbados before getting to Virginia to be sold into slavery. In his narrative he writes about the horror of getting separated from people from his country and the loneliness of no one to talk to as these horrific events are happening.
One he arrived in Virginia he was bought by Henry Pascal, who was in the Royal Navy. During the Seven Years War, called the French-Indian War in the United States, Pascal took Equiano with him to England where Pascal was going to fight in the war. Pascal used him as a valet where he saw many major battles of the war and fought in some of the battles himself.
He later gets sold to a a Quaker from Pennsylvania, which defeats the narrative that all Quakers were against slavery.
He eventually buys his freedom in 1766 from a Pennsylvania Quaker, who wanted Equiano to remain as a business partner, but he made the smart decision to leave the North American colonies for England, which was smart considering the Revolutionary War was on the horizon and he may have gotten resold into slavery after the war.
He later becomes a famous abolitionist in England and promotes the end of slavery. HIs autobiography is partially credited with England’s decision to abolish the slave trade in 1807, which led to their abolishment of slavery in 1833.
The most interesting part of his autobiography, is his movement from a young child from Africa into the depth of commoditization and devalued as a human by getting deeper into the depths of the slave trade.
His narrative humanizes the slave trade as slaves were regulated to commodities during this time. When he wrote his narrative sometime in the late 1700s, very little was written by slaves.
Many could not read and write, along with racism and commodification of black people kept their writings from the archives, so there is scarce information available from the words of slaves discussing and writing about their experience.
I highly recommend this book for a first person account of the horrors of slavery.
