The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano

About this book

Olaudah Equiano tells how, as an Igbo boy of about eleven, he was kidnapped from his village in what is now Nigeria, carried across the Atlantic in a slave ship and sold. Renamed Gustavus Vassa, he served a British naval officer through the Seven Years' War, was sold again to a merchant in the Caribbean, traded on his own account and bought his freedom in 1766, before travelling as far as the Arctic.

Context and significance

Published in 1789, the book became a bestseller and a powerful weapon of the campaign to abolish the slave trade, which Equiano supported with lectures across Britain. Some historians have questioned whether he was born in Africa or in South Carolina, but his account remains one of the founding works of Black literature in English. Read it with Frederick Douglass's Narrative.

About the author