1) I believe that it sets the tone for his account, describes his attitude toward the book and gives an overall impression of Equiano himself. It shows his work is not meant merely for entertainment but for the purpose of promoting the inhumanity and torments of slavery.…
Equiano’s narrative provided a first-hand documentation of a real slave’s life long struggle and quest to abolish slavery. He recounts the misery of the middle passage by saying, “with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became so sick that…I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me” (68). He exposes the horrors, inhumanity, and immortality that slavery and the slave trade instigated from a rare perspective. His experience as a slave even went so far as to cause him to wish to die, rather than continue living…
The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano telling his experience during the slave trade compared to The Amistad shares many similarities as well as differences. As a whole, both of these historical stories emotionally and mentally tells the struggle of slavery including how they were treated as well as how big slavery was. In both stories it described how slavery affected African Americans so badly that death might have been better than being treated as nothing by being chained and thrown together, taken away from family members that they wouldn't see again, starve, and etc. In contrast the climax of the Olaudah Equiano's autobiography and The Amistad contrasts because of different conflicts that occurred during the Atlantic Slave Trade.…
In Smallwood’s account she takes a more argumentative and fact based documentation of the slave trade, this can make the reader feel disconnected from the people she is describing. While Equiano takes a more story driven route, making the reader feel as though they experienced it themselves. Equiano’s narrative cannot give full description about what the slave trade’s effect was on a grand scale. However, Stephanie Smallwood does just that in describing in detail not just how the slave trade affected the slaves themselves but also how it affected the Africa they left behind. In this way the flaw of each writer’s account is supplemented by the other’s…
Equiano experienced life as a slave on several continents. He endured the torment of the Middle Passage and the various physical and emotional insults and tortures, which came as a result of bondage to another individual. These descriptions are important in establishing the primary players in the slave game. The first is the African player and the other is the White player represented by both Europeans and Americans.…
Equiano’s document tell us many things, including how the people viewed the society and the morality of the public at that time. This document also show us how far we have come, as a society, as the whole world, from the time of brutality, time of savage, to the time of peace, and sociality. This document still has effect on our society even to this day, because even to this day, the discrimination against a group of people because of their race, religions, or nationality still exist. This document reveal how the slaves were treated, how slaves were nothing but a property, and how the Africans view the european.…
People in power often dictate recordings of history, but the Atlantic slave trade found an exception to this pattern. Documents from both enslavers and enslaved of this time regarding management of captives provide an insight on the treatment of slaves in the middle passage. Data from both parties clearly illustrates slave trading as a massive industry, and one where enslavers valued efficiency over the well-being of captives to garner the maximum possible profit. Conditions illustrated in these primary documents two and three demonstrate the extremely poor quality of life which slaves faced at the hands of clearly apathetic enslavers within the middle passage.…
“The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”, by Olaudah Equiano, is a narrative about a slave going to the new world. Olaudah Equiano was kidnapped by slave traders to be sent to the New World to be sold to other slave owners. This slave trade between Africa and North America was from 1619-1807 and carried hundreds of African men, women, and children in one tightly packed ship. In “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano”, Equiano describes the horrible conditions slaves were forced to endure on the voyage to the new world. Equiano wrote this slave narrative, a literary work that exposes the horrors of slavery through the first hand experience of the writer, to help abolish slavery. To assist in persuading the…
The autobiography ‘Kidnapped’, by Equiano is his point of view on the journey on slave ships to America. The story shows first hand the conditions on the ship and the treatment he received by the white slave owners. One time that shows just how cruel the owners were, they went fishing, ate the fish that were caught, and then threw the leftovers back into the ocean therefore wasting them.…
Equiano was trusted with responsibilities that would normally be insane for a man of black skin to have, such as “receiving and delivering cargo [to] ships” and grooming King’s countenance (Equiano 202). This labor had molded Equiano into a person with Europeanized gestures, knowledge and culture. Equiano’s unusual but fortunate ascension from slavery had begun a new breed of Africans that mirrored the tendencies of the white population through the labor he had received which were usually tasks saved for white men. However, Equiano still had lingering trauma from when he was shipped to the Americas as a slave product. During his sailing time, Equiano had observed the suicides of two slaves preferring death to a lifetime of slavery, which had built up his fear over the terrors and barbarities that the Africans in America were to undergo (Equiano 81).…
He was an accomplished businessman, a world traveler, an able sea hand, a former slave, a powerful abolitionist, a best-selling author, the husband of a British woman, and even the father of three daughters. Yet the debate of whether or not he is a credible, reliable source lives on. Even if Equiano did create a false childhood in The Interesting Narrative, the effects of what he created were tremendous. There is much more to Equiano than where he was born. Literary critics and historians alike should hail Equiano for the positive effect he had on African history, instead of tearing him apart for using falsehoods to end the slave…
Many years later Equiano wrote a biography about the treatment of slaves in Virginia. His descriptions of the punishments and humiliations that slaves had to endure were the first published account of an autobiography of an African slave. Equiano’s writings on slavery and its suffering were a factor in the enactment of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. I feel that Equiano was an extraordinary individual who patiently bought his own freedom and became an effective advocate for abolition.…
Equiano argues that the slave trade in his culture uses slaves that are convicted of “heinous” crimes or are “only prisoners of war,” whereas the Britons practice kidnapping as the main mode of obtaining slaves (Equiano 3). By describing the slaves from his homeland as criminals or enemies, he is minimizing the value of their lives and makes it seem less harsh than the capture of British slaves, but he is using the same reasoning as the Briton do to validate their participation in the slave trade. Additionally, he refers to them as “fellow creatures,” which dehumanizes the captured people and takes them to even a lower level below the criminals (Equiano 5). Additionally, he makes comparisons to the “condition” of treatment for his country’s slaves “from that of the slaves in the West Indies!” (Equiano 4). He is comparing how the British who are considered enlightened, treat their slaves like animals and looks to them as disposable property; whereas, his society gives their slaves enough respect to treat them humanely in a civilized manner. He tries to make slavery in his homeland seem less oppressive by describing the slaves as doing “no more work than any other member of the community” and “their food, clothing, and lodging” were basically the same as everyone else (Equiano 5). He stresses that some of the slaves “have even slaves under them as their own property,” which ignores the fact that these people are still enslaved and are there against their free will. Equiano fails to denounce the participation in the slave trade in his homeland and uses class status as an excuse for slaveholding. Interestingly, he does not argue for the freedom of the slaves in this section, but focuses only on the brutal treatment of them. He questions why the ancestors of the Britons who were…
The Trans-atlantic slave trade also known as the “triangular Trade” was born out of an emerging global trade network which joined Europe, Africa, and the Americas ships full of european goods travelled to Africa, via America and then back to europe with finished goods.…
The transatlantic slave trade was the largest horrific forced migration of Africans from their homelands to western hemisphere from 15th to 19th Century. Over twelve million men, women and children became the victim of this extreme exploitation. It was one of the terrific assaults in the human history which greatly influenced Africa’s Political and economic state. The purpose of the slave trade was to obtain profit and goods from European traders .Europeans used the slaves for plantations in Americas and also imported them to Brazil.…