As WWNTK continues our salute to National Library Week, we will also salute African American or African writers.
Black writers during the slave and revolutionary eras (roughly 1760s–1830s) utilized poetry, narratives, and letters to challenge slavery and assert humanity. Key figures were Phillis Wheatley and Jupiter Hammon, about whom we have previously discussed.
In 1789, a middle-aged African-born man in London published The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, laying the foundations for new genres of literature and new ways of understanding the experiences of enslaved people. In this autobiography, the author, Olaudah Equiano, detailed his life journey from African captivity to Atlantic slavery to British freedom. In twelve chapters, Equiano presented a body of evidence that helped to support the cause of abolition and the end of transatlantic slaving by Britain and others.
Equiano, according to his Narrative, was born into an Igbo community in what is now Nigeria. He came from a powerful family—his father was a political leader—but that fact could not prevent Equiano from being kidnapped into slavery. Along with his sister, Equiano was captured from his village and marched from trader to trader for several months to the Atlantic, where he was sold to a ship bound for Barbados. At this point, he was only eleven or twelve years old. In his biography, Equiano candidly described how the experience stirred fear and confusion in the Africans it ensnared: white people, sailing ships, and life in the stinking holds convinced him and others that they were “in another world.”