Where was Olaudah Equiano born?
(And Why Does It Matter?) Equiano’s autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, published in 1789, is important for many reasons. It is one of the very few texts written in English by a person of African descent during the eighteenth century. It is also one of the first accounts of a journey up from slavery written by one who had personally experienced enslavement. This makes it one of the earliest ‘slave narratives’. But is more than merely an account of what it was like to be a slave. In the book, Equiano gives a long and detailed description of life in an African village – the earliest such description in the English language – as well as offering a first-person account of ‘the middle passage’ – the journey from Africa to America in a slave ship. These were all important parts of a book that appeared in 1789; the year in which the British parliament first seriously debated abolishing the slave trade. (Indeed, we can see Th
