 Olaudah Equiano
(1745–1797)
Born in what is present-day Nigeria, Equiano
was eleven years old when he and his sister were kidnapped. Sold separately, he was placed on a slave ship headed for the West
Indies. After experiencing the horrors of the Middle Passage, Equiano
arrived in Barbados and was soon transported to Virginia, where he was
purchased by a British captain for service onboard his ship; thus he was
spared the harsh plantation life most slaves were sentenced to upon
their arrival in the New World.
Equiano remained a slave for almost ten years, serving
on various vessels engaged in commerce and sometimes in naval warfare
along the coast of Europe and in the Mediterranean. He crossed the
Atlantic many times on voyages to the American colonies and the
Caribbean islands. All the while, the young slave worked on his own at
profit-making ventures, in order to accumulate enough money to buy his
freedom—which he was able to do despite many troubles and false hopes.
Equiano became a free man on July 10, 1766.
He continued his life at sea for many years, sailing
on exploratory expeditions to the Arctic and Central America and on
numerous seagoing business enterprises, including the transporting of
slaves. During
this time, Equiano witnessed the deepest cruelties of slavery and its
dire effects on men and women in several areas of the world. He became a
kind of Gulliver, traveling to distant places and observing the strange
and awful practices of people in many lands.
Equiano’s friends in England and
on the sailing vessels taught him to read and write and introduced him
to Christianity. In his later years, Equiano settled in England, where
his Christian faith deepened and where he furthered his education.
Equiano was involved in the controversial and disastrous undertaking in
1787 to send poor blacks to Sierra Leone. His objections to the
mismanagement of the project caused his dismissal from his commissary
role and drew criticism from many quarters. He recovered from this
debacle, however, and later, when the abolition of the slave trade
became a fiery issue in Parliament, Equiano dedicated himself to the
anti-slavery cause by visiting abolitionist leaders and writing letters
to newspapers and important officials, including a lengthy letter to Queen Charlotte. His most important
contribution was the publication in England and the United States of
his well-written and fascinating two-volume autobiography, The
Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano,
subscribed to by many of the key men and women in the
abolitionist crusade. The work was widely read, translated into several
languages, and published well into the nineteenth century on both
sides of the Atlantic.
Equiano’s
autobiography was the prototype of the slave narratives of the
nineteenth
century. It set the pattern for the countless narratives—both
nonfictional and fictional—that have influenced American literature
down to the present day. Equiano followed the spiritual autobiographical
tradition of his day derived from Augustine and Bunyan and adapted by
Puritans and later by his Quaker contemporaries. Yet Equiano added to
the genre a new dimension—that of social protest. In addition, his use
of irony in the depiction of himself as an enterprising character
places his work in the secular autobiographical
tradition established by Benjamin Franklin.
Taken with minor adaptions from the entry Angelo Costanzo
wrote on Olaudah Equiano for
The Heath Anthology of American Literature
(1990) 1: 694-695
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