Olaudah Equiano

BIOGRAPHY

Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavus Vassa, is born in 1745 in what is now Nigeria and died in 1797. As a child he already learned how to shoot and at the age of nine he was sold to British slavers and transported first to the Barbadoes in the West Indies and then to a plantation in Virginia.
Olaudah was one of the most prominent Africans involved in the British movement of the abolition for the slave trade. His autobiography depicted the horrors of slavery and helped influence British lawmakers to abolish the slave trade through the Slave Trade Act of 1807. Olaudah worked on a seaman ship and he also was a merchant and explorer in South America, the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies and the United Kingdom.
It is curious that although he did not live with poor living conditions or was not a member of a poor family, he was send into slavery. For me it is terrible to think about being sold into slavers, but at an age of a child it is even more terrible.

"The Interesting Narrative of the Life"

In class we read the first pages of his "The Interesting Narrative of the Life" and there were groups which presented the different chapters to the class.
The chapters 1 to 6 can be found at
http://history.hanover.edu/texts/equiano/equiano_contents.html.

"The Interesting Narrative of the Life" was published in London, England in 1789. Two years later when it was reprinted in New York, it found an enthusiastic audience. This publication history suggests its centrality to the antislavery cause. Furthermore Equiano was the first African before Frederick Douglass, who spoke so movingly to the American audience about inhumanity. With his stories he tried the British government to abolish the slavery.

What is an epistle?

An epistle is a writing directed or sent to a person or group of people. It is usually a letter, very formal and often didactic and elegant. The epistle genre of letter-writing was common in ancient Egypt as part of the scribal-school writing curriculum.

Slavery

Slavery refers to a situation where a human being is considered to be the property of another and is therefore obligated to perform tasks for their owner without any choice involved.