Equiano, Olaudah (Gustavus Vasa)

Olaudah Equiano was an outstanding 18th-century African of Igbo descent. He wrote and published a memoir that documented his life in Africa before enslavement, his life as a slave, his life in freedom, and his life as a writer and abolitionist. By his account, he was born in 1745 in Essaka (Isseke) in what is known as the Anambra State in southeastern Nigeria. Olaudah’s life took a tragic and dramatic turn when he was about eleven years old. He was kidnapped with his sister by slave raiders during the peak of the transatlantic slave trade in the Bight of Biafra in present-day Nigeria. After being sold to European slave traders, he worked as a slave in America and the Caribbean Islands and was later transferred to England, where he bought his freedom. His memoir and advocacy as an abolitionist brought him in contact with other abolitionists in England, where he was destined to play a critical role in the ending of the slave trade. Equiano and his memoir are significant in additional ways. Apart from the uncertainty about his early years, his autobiography provides one of the earliest depictions of the middle passage experience of enslaved Africans and the nature of Igbo society in the 18th century. His description of the political economy of the Igbo and the social organization of the society provides contemporary scholars with an early account of an African society.