Working into European Society Olaudah Equiano
There are many spectacles of the world that share as illustrations of the hardship of mankind. The experiences and misfortunes of people lay the pathway for those who follow their example. One of the accounts describing such experiences is the book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. Equiano works his way through the levels of society and at the end of his life finds himself fully involved in European culture. Olaudah Equiano was born in the year 1745 in the village of Essaka, which today is known as Isseke, Nigeria. He lived in this farming village until 1756 when he was kidnapped by the Aro peoples who sold him to various masters within Africa. Equiano was slowly moved through Africa until he reached its coast later that year to board a slave ship headed for the Americas. Upon boarding the American slave ship, Equiano first endures the cruelty of the slave world while traveling the Middle Passage. Equiano recalls that slavery was a part of the Ibo world. However, unlike the European exploitation of Africans, African slaves were acquired as prisoners or booty of war or perpetrators of heinous crimes. Equiano's enslavement did not follow these unwritten rules. He nevertheless recalls his African
As Equiano was passed from owner to owner, he was given a different name to represent himself in the region to where he was living. Only through his trials and tribulations expressed in his narrative does one understand the complexity of the cultures of his day. Soon afterwards, Equiano sailed to Spain and had a vision of Christ. However, even though Equiano was with his brethren, very few of the hundred individual forced under the same circumstance could relate to him in speech. In the following year, he went on an expedition to find an Artic passage to India and in the same year slaves petitioned successfully for and emancipation proclamation in Massachusetts. In 1775, Equiano took communion at Westminster Church. At this time the American Revolution starts and Equiano spends the last twenty years of his life fighting for the abolition of slavery. Guerins, Equiano learned customs of London society and was baptized at St. He wrote about the ship:Happily perhaps, for myself, I was soon reduced so low here that it was thought necessary to keep me almost always on deck; and from my extreme youth I was not put in fetters. Their complexions, too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke (which was very different from any I had ever heard), united to confirm me in this belief.
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