Olaudah Equiano
Olaudah Equiano bought his own freedom and wrote the book that gave the British abolition campaign its most powerful witness. By his own account he was born around 1745 in Igboland in what is now southern Nigeria, kidnapped with his sister at about eleven, marched to the coast and shipped across the Atlantic — a passage he described in detail that no European abolitionist could match. Some scholars have argued from a baptismal record and a naval muster that he may have been born in South Carolina, and the question remains open. He was sold in Virginia, bought by a Royal Navy lieutenant who renamed him Gustavus Vassa after a Swedish king, and served at sea for years, seeing action in the Seven Years' War and learning to read, write and navigate. Sold again to a Quaker merchant in Montserrat, he was permitted to trade on his own account and accumulated forty pounds, with which he purchased his freedom in 1766 at about twenty-one. He then worked as a sailor and hairdresser, joined an Arctic expedition, and settled in London, where he became a leading figure among the Sons of Africa, the first Black political organisation in Britain. He brought the Zong massacre to Granville Sharp's attention in 1783, in which 132 enslaved people were thrown overboard for the insurance. The Interesting Narrative, published in 1789 at his own expense, ran to nine editions in his lifetime and made him prosperous. He toured Britain and Ireland promoting it and petitioned parliament. He married Susannah Cullen in 1792 and died in 1797, ten years before the trade was abolished.
- Lived: 1745 CE – 1797 CE
- Nationality: Igbo/British
- Roles: abolitionist, writer
