Sophia’s Visions · Other lives · The Atlantic world, 1745–1797 · B2–C1
Olaudah Equiano: the Man Who Wrote His Own Freedom
Sophia’s Visions: seventeen centuries from now, a man who has been bought and sold will buy his own freedom, write the story of his life, and help to turn a nation against the trade in human beings. But was the story of his childhood his own? Telling a life story (had been working for years…, would sit and read…, was never to see again…), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight I saw a book, Philo. On its first page, under the author’s portrait, it says: “Written by himself.”
Because many readers in his time did not believe that a man who had been enslaved could write a book at all. The words “by himself” were an argument.
In our city too, half the people at the harbour market are for sale. I have never once heard one of them asked for his story.
For more than three centuries, European ships carried about twelve and a half million Africans across the Atlantic to be sold as slaves in the Americas. The voyage, known as the Middle Passage, lasted weeks or months, in chained, crowded holds; well over a million people died at sea. In the 1700s, Britain was the leading slave-trading nation, and its sugar islands in the Caribbean depended on enslaved labour.
By the 1780s, a movement to abolish the trade was growing in Britain. Its campaigners needed evidence, and above all they needed voices: people who had lived through slavery and could describe it themselves.
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