Who was Olaudah Equiano?

A formerly enslaved man who bought his own freedom and became a leading figure in the British abolitionist movement, principally through an autobiography that was a genuine publishing phenomenon and one of the first widely read accounts of slavery written by someone who had experienced it.

The narrative. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was published in 1789, describing — by his account — capture as a child in what is now Nigeria, the Middle Passage, enslavement in Barbados, Virginia and at sea, service in the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and eventual purchase of his freedom in 1766 for £40 earned through trading.

Why it mattered so much. Abolitionist argument had largely been made about enslaved people by others. This was made by one, in the first person, by a literate and rhetorically skilled author who understood his British readership — appealing to Christian conscience and, deliberately, to commercial self-interest by arguing that free African trade would be more profitable than the slave trade.

It sold extremely well, ran to nine editions in his lifetime, was translated, and made him financially independent. He toured Britain and Ireland promoting it and speaking, which was itself a form of argument: his existence and articulacy refuted the claims being made about African capacity.

His wider activity. He campaigned alongside the Sons of Africa, petitioned Parliament and the Queen, and publicised the Zong massacre, in which enslaved people were thrown overboard and an insurance claim was made for them as cargo — a case that did more than almost anything to expose the trade's nature.

The scholarly dispute. Two baptismal and naval records give his birthplace as South Carolina, which would mean the African childhood and Middle Passage sections were constructed rather than remembered. This is genuinely contested: some historians regard the documents as decisive, others note that enslaved people had strong reasons to give false origins. It does not affect the accuracy of what he describes, which is corroborated extensively from other sources.

He died in 1797, a decade before the trade was abolished.