The Interesting Narrative Against Slavery: Equiano as Abolitionist Anonymous College

Olaudah Equiano helped to popularize the horrors of slavery and facilitate the birth of the abolitionist movement through his book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.[1]This book did more than establish the genre of slave memoir. It focused on the ways that the global slave trade created a crime against humanity. Specific passages in the book detailed the horrors of slavery by emphasizing both the humanity of the slaves as well as the nearly unimaginable cruelties of the slave traders. These emotional impacts, which reverse the traditional thinking of the era in which the slaves were little more than animals and the slave traders were intelligent businessmen, helped create an emotional and humanistic argument against slavery. Equiano’s rhetorical strategy of directly addressing the reader and questioning the ways their religion interacted with the slave trade.

After describing the horrors of being kidnapped and sold into slavery, Equiano writes, “O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God, who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you? Is it not enough that we are torn from our country and friends to toil for your luxury and lust of gain?...