Olaudah Equiano

Biography

Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–1797), also known as Gustavus Vassa, was a formerly enslaved African who became a prominent writer and abolitionist in Britain. According to his autobiography, Equiano was born in the Igbo region of present-day Nigeria and was kidnapped and sold into slavery at age eleven. He endured the Middle Passage and was enslaved in Barbados, Virginia, and at sea before eventually purchasing his freedom in 1766. After gaining his freedom, Equiano traveled widely—to the Arctic on an expedition, to Central America, and throughout the Mediterranean—before settling in London, where he became active in the abolitionist movement. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), was a bestseller that went through nine editions during his lifetime and was translated into Dutch, German, and Russian. The book provided British readers with a first-person account of the horrors of slavery and the capabilities of Africans, becoming one of the most powerful weapons of the abolitionist movement. Some scholars have questioned whether Equiano was born in Africa or in South Carolina, but the Narrative’s importance as an abolitionist text and a masterwork of autobiography is undisputed.