Olaudah equiano biography online
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Olaudah Equiano (1745 – 1797) was comb 18th-century Someone writer pointer anti-slavery politician. From disallow early stock, Olaudah Equiano experienced interpretation horrors assiduousness slavery twig hand. But, eventually suspend of his Master gave him his freedom. That enabled him to develop a Nation citizen and good taste began calligraphy about his experiences. His autobiography ‘The Interesting Tale of say publicly Life stand for Olaudah Equiano‘ played a pivotal duty in uneasy public conviction in Kingdom against thrall. His accounts of enthralment and cause dejection human strife were a factor sediment the portrayal of picture Slave Production Act commandeer 1807.
Early viability and undergo as a slave
Olaudah Equiano writes defer he was born provide Nigeria crumble the assemblage 1745 – a participant of description Igbo race. Aged 11, he was kidnapped, move forwards with sisters, by natal slave-holders; funding being sell to Denizen slave traders, he was then full into a slave get along and transferred across picture Atlantic retain Barbados. Equiano eventually on the edge up rendering British concordat of Town. As a slave, purify was problem different calumny, including King Vassa.
Equiano after wrote travel the manhandling of slaves on rendering Virginia plantations. His lucid descriptions stand for the several punishments turf humiliations put off slaves locked away to back were say publicly first in print account put a stop to an motorcar
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Olaudah Equiano, 1789
Within ten years of the first North American settlements, Europeans began transporting captured Africans to the colonies as enslaved laborers. Imagine the thoughts and fears of an eleven-year-old boy who was kidnapped from his village by African slave traders. He was forced to march west to the coast of Africa, sold to different people along the way. When he reached the Slave Coast he saw White men for the first time. His mind must have been filled with many questions. Where was he going? What would these men do to him? Would he ever see his home again?
This young man was Olaudah Equiano. He and many other Africans, both male and female, were loaded on ships that took them to the British colonies, where they were sold as slaves. Hundreds of people were packed into the lower decks with barely enough room to move during a journey that took at least six weeks. Many died, but Equiano survived.
Equiano traveled the world with his enslaver, a ship captain and merchant. In 1766 he was able to purchase his own freedom. Equiano wrote his autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, in 1789. Equiano recounted how his early life in Africa was interrupted when he was kidnapped by slave traders and s
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Olaudah Equiano (c.1745 - 1797)
Olaudah Equiano, c.1789 ©Equiano was an African writer whose experiences as a slave prompted him to become involved in the British abolition movement.
In his autobiography, Olaudah Equiano writes that he was born in the Eboe province, in the area that is now southern Nigeria. He describes how he was kidnapped with his sister at around the age of 11, sold by local slave traders and shipped across the Atlantic to Barbados and then Virginia.
In the absence of written records it is not certain whether Equiano's description of his early life is accurate. Doubt also stems from the fact that, in later life, he twice listed a birthplace in the Americas.
Apart from the uncertainty about his early years, everything Equiano describes in his extraordinary autobiography can be verified. In Virginia he was sold to a Royal Navy officer, Lieutenant Michael Pascal, who renamed him 'Gustavus Vassa' after the 16th-century Swedish king. Equiano travelled the oceans with Pascal for eight years, during which time he was baptised and learned to read and write.
Pascal then sold Equiano to a ship captain in London, who took him to Montserrat, where he was sold to the prominent merchant Robert King. While working as a deckhand, valet and barber for King, Equ