Olaudah Equiano / Prince Slave Stories The story of Olaudah Equiano began in Nigeria in 1745, when he was born; by the age of 11 Equiano was a victim of kidnapping and was sold to slave traders. His fate was not to be nearly as harsh as millions of other African natives that were seized and put into bondage, as his own writing reveals. But he was a slave and suffered

Olaudah Equiano, Enlightenment Era Olaudah Equiano is credited with surviving, and perhaps even thriving in, perilous circumstances that would have destroyed the best of men. His is a character study in complexity because he has an extremely trenchant mind, as manifested in his verbal prowess and in his business acumen, the latter of which was directly responsible for the purchasing of his own freedom from chattel slavery in the 18th century.

Equiano and Slavery Equiano's main purpose in writing this Narrative was to inspire Parliament to abolish the African slave trade, which he stated at the beginning when he presented it in 1789. Part of his strategy was to describe himself as a humble "unlettered African" grateful to the West for obtaining knowledge of Christianity, liberalism, and humanitarian principles who is petitioning on behalf of his "suffering countryman" (p. 2). For the

5). Although the author was far from being fortunate to have been sold and bought and sold again, his ability to survive the sea passage that killed so many of his brethren testifies as much to his luck as to his mental and physical strength. Moreover, Equiano was young enough when he was first sold to the British to have still retained the fear of a child that might

..really believe[d] the people could not have been saved" (Carretta, p. 129). In conclusion, this is a fascinating man who was put into slavery and later became an educated, respected writer in his own time. And yet, even after publishing his book, the Interesting Narrative, critics in London doubted that he could have written it himself. A black man with such narrative skill was obviously a rarity. In the Monthly Review,

Slave Narrative and Black Autobiography - Richard Wright's "Black Boy" and James Weldon Johnson's Autobiography The slave narrative maintains a unique station in modern literature. Unlike any other body of literature, it provides us with a first-hand account of institutional racially-motivated human bondage in an ostensibly democratic society. As a reflection on the author, these narratives were the first expression of humanity by a group of people in a society where