Olaudah Equiano's life and autobiography

¶ … Olaudah Equiano's narrative

One of the most starling revelations provided by the life of the Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano is the commonness of African slavery and the tolerance of slavery in the world in general, even by whites who acknowledged African intelligence. Equiano, while he condemns the institution of slavery, paints a complex and nuanced portrait of the phenomenon. Rather than present himself as an innocent, spirited away from a pure, African land to his largely white audience, Equiano is fair and balanced in his portrait of what his previous existence was life as an African prince, where he was attended by slaves before he became a slave himself in the Americas. However, he still conveys the message that, although slavery is a barbaric institution wherever it is practiced, the African experience of being in White captivity was profoundly different than the American slave experience. By reading his narrative, whites are able to learn why slavery in the Americas is so uniquely horrific, and also see how the commonness of slavery in the culture of the day caused his moral, Christian masters to praise his skills as a clerk and navigator, yet deny him his natural impulse towards freedom. Modern readers must also be aware of Equiano's self-conscious presentation of his life and his own consciousness of his white audience, whom he was attempting to persuade with his gentility and fairness, as well as with the horrors of slavery.

The alien quality of the culture he entered when first enslaved is immediately apparent when Equiano boards the ship in Chapter 2 of his narrative. Almost intuitively, or with the gift of hindsight he realizes that he is parting with his culture as well as his freedom: "I was now persuaded that I was got into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. Their complexions too differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, which were very different from any I had ever heard, united to confirm me in this belief. Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country" (70-71). This description illustrates how the strangeness of the Europeans could be used as a method of fear and control against the Africans during the Middle Passage. Yet it also implicitly suggests to the white audience of Equiano's day that as whites often regard blacks as aliens, blacks regarded whites in the same way. In other words, prejudice against black Africans is not innate; rather fear of human difference is part of the human psyche. This description also underlines the fact that because bondage under whites removes Africans from their home, and from any chance at return, of being seen by their families, or bought back or exchanged for other prisoners, it is very likely worse than the African version of slavery.

Then begins the physical horrors of the sickness, starvation, and thirst of the actual boat ride itself, which is yet another horror. Although Equiano portrays 'good' whites in his narrative, perhaps to make his condemnation of slavery more persuasive to his audience, he is also unsparing in his presentation of its horrors. African girls as young as ten are defiled, and men are branded with their master's initials to prevent them from escaping: "And yet in Montserrat I have seen a negro man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears Cut off bit by bit" (206). Equiano, a converted Christian, stresses the departure from true Christian values in these actions by whites. He implies that his Christianity is a gift to him, but because white slavery is a betrayal of such values white cruelty is therefore even more horrifying a moral betrayal.

The lessons of what slavery was like, the mechanisms of the slave trade, and the particularly barbaric forms of slavery in the West Indies are striking -- as well as slavery's commonness, as it was practiced by Africans against their own people. But perhaps most shocking to his contemporary readers was how even good white men and women who were fond of Equiano and respected him did not see a profound contradiction between the institution and their feeling of fellow humanity for the property they 'owned.' Equiano was seen as a financial asset to his masters for his mind, not simply how hard his body could work. He "had the good fortune to please my master in every department in which he employed me; and there was scarcely any part of his business, or household affairs, in which I was not occasionally engaged. I often supplied the place of a clerk...I became very useful to my master; and saved him, as he used to acknowledge, above a hundred pounds a year. Nor did he scruple to say I was of more advantage to him than any of his clerks; though their usual wages in the West Indies are from sixty to a hundred pounds current a year" (202-203).