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Olaudah Equiano was an Ibo—an African people in the kingdom of Benin, along the Niger River. This region was also known as Calabar. Equiano was taken from his African village when he was 11 and sold into slavery. Later in life, he acquired his freedom and wrote a widely-read autobiography. This document is one of the few personal accounts of slave's journey from kidnapping to enslavement to eventual freedom. In this passage, Equiano describes how he was captured and made a slave: |
One day, when all our people were gone out to their works as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both, and, without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us into the nearest wood. Here they tied our hands, and continued to carry us... At last we came into a road which I believed I knew. I had now some hopes of being delivered; for we had advanced but a little way before I discovered some people at a distance, on which I began to cry out for their assistance; but my cries had no other effect than to make them tie me faster and stop my mouth, and then they put me into a large sack.
Equiano was separated from his sister and sold several times, from one African master to another, before he found himself on the Atlantic coast for the first time in his life:
The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast, was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to see if I were sound, by some of the crew; and I was now persuaded that I had gotten 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 was 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.
Equiano's account offers a personal view of the tragedies of the slave trade, but it does not reveal much about the situation in Africa that permitted such a wholesale trade in humans. For that we must turn to other documents.
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