![]() ![]() ![]() He and his sister were then sold into the slave trade and transported from village to village on the way to the west coast of Africa. As detailed in his Narrative, Olaudah was one of the Igbo people and lived as such until he was kidnapped at the age of eleven while the adults of the village were out tending to the fields. Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in what is today southern Nigeria. The structure and rhetorical strategies used were replicated in a number of subsequent slave narratives in fact, the work is so influential that it is a foundational text in a variety of literature courses: African, African-American, British, and American as well as a seminal text in American history (as a primary source for its early and detailed descriptions of plantation life). Equiano’s account was one of the first widely read “slave narratives” (as the genre came to be called a sub-genre of general “captivity literature” that became prevalent with colonization). The British anti-slavery movement held a deep irony: during the 18th century, the British perfected the Atlantic trade slave system only to be the first to struggle to bring the practice to an end throughout their Empire (this happened, eventually, by 1833 and after a series of slave revolts). Not only this, but it is a beautifully written memoir that contains an ardent appeal to end slavery made to an audience comprised of the growing number of Britons then calling for abolition. ![]() Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography is the first direct account, written by a slave, of the experience of the middle passage in English. ![]()
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