Probably born in West Africa, Olaudah Equiano became one of the leading antislavery voices of the Atlantic world before his death. His memoir, entitled The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, is generally regarded as one of the canonical slave narratives. First published in 1789 and reprinted several times thereafter both in the United States and England, "the interesting narrative" was the most thorough and engaging document of the emerging genre of former slaves' written experiences. It remains a standard text about slavery, alongside later slave narratives by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and others.

Among other themes, Equiano focused early attention on the horrors of the overseas slave trade, or the "Middle Passage," as it became known--the forced migration of Africans to the Americas. Historians now place the number of Africans who endured the Middle Passage at between 12 and 15 million. Although some European and colonial American statesmen, activists, and scholars began critiquing the slave trade by the 1770s, they often did so from philosophical or religious perspectives. While Equiano meditated on such themes too, he also provided firsthand testimony; in one of the most famous passages, he wrote of the Middle Passage: "The stench of the hold [of the ship] while we were on the African coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time . . . the closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us . . . this wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains . . . the shrieks of the women, and groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable." Equiano's book gained immediate notice after first being published in England. The London Monthly Review stated that "his publication appears very seasonable, at a time when Negro slavery is the subject of public investigation; it seems calculated to increase the odium that has been excited" against British planters operating in the Caribbean. The book would also become popular in Ireland, where it sold several thousand copies in the early 1790s, and in the United States, where white as well as black abolitionists used it to attack the slave trade.

Equiano's narrative traced his life from freedom to slavery and back to freedom. Both he and his sister were kidnapped and separated while still quite young (he was roughly 11-13 years old). Equiano was then transported to a slave pen on the western coast of Africa, and then sent to Barbados. He ended up on a Virginia plantation, then was sold again to an English owner who brought him to Great Britain and renamed him Gustavus Vassa. Sold again and brought to the Americas, Equiano worked on merchant ships and eventually bought his own freedom. At his death on March 31, 1797, he was survived by his wife and two children in England.

Equiano was not just a writer but an early transatlantic antislavery activist. In addition to publishing his famous narrative, he presented petitions against the slave trade and gave public lectures about his experiences in bondage. His work was credited with helping stir popular as well as political sentiment against the slave trade, which England prohibited in 1807 and the United States banned in 1808. But Equiano's narrative is also viewed as a means of establishing a proud racial identity through print. As Henry Louis Gates has argued, Equiano, like other black authors of the postrevolutionary era, wrote to challenge stereotypes of African-descended people as savage and unlettered--and thus fit for enslavement. Equiano countered such pernicious views in a manner that remains powerful 200 years later.

Bibliography:

1) Robert J. Allison, ed., The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (Boston: Bedford Books, 1995)

2) Henry Louis Gates, The Signifyin' Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987)

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