FOR KIM WOODS ONLY

Olaudah Equiano, 1745-1797, was, after Tousssaint L’Ouverture, perhaps the most famous black person in the world during his day. In 1789, Equiano wrote and published his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, which became the first English language international best-seller by a black author. The book did not only make Equiano a famous celebrity. The book also provided the anti-slave trade movement in Britain and elsewhere in the Atlantic World with a first-person account of the horrors of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and thereby greatly contributed to the shift in popular sentiment away from supporting slavery and towards the eventual abolition of the TAST by the British parliament in 1807.

 

ASSIGNMENT:

Read the excerpt attached at the link above (which is from Chapter 2 of Equiano’s autobiography) and based on your reading of the excerpt and on our class discussions so far about West African societies, answer the following:

1. Who kidnapped Equiano? Was he kidnapped by his own people? How do you know? How was he captured?

2. Does Equiano ever use the word “tribe” in his descriptions? What term does he use to describe the African societies he passes through on his way to the coast?

3. What type of West African society does Equiano come from?

4. How does Equiano contrast domestic slavery in West Africa with the plantation slavery he will experience in Barbados?

5. Why do you think Equiano is sometimes referred to as the first African?

The summary the book:

http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/equiano1/summary.html