Olaudah Equiano Example Essay Example

Olaudah back into slavery in the West Indies in 1762 where a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia named Robert King bought him and allowed Olaudah to engage in his own trading business, with which he was finally able to purchase his freedom from King for the equivalent of $3000. 00 by today’s standards on July 11, 1766. Working at various trades during the final decades of his life, Olaudah elped form the “Sons of Africa”, writing hostile newspaper reviews of pro-slavery books and campaigning against slavery and the slave trade. One has to wonder if Olaudah is bitter and angry because he was forced into being a slave or because he was born one, given the taste of being a free man then having it taken away from him back into slavery (where he himself bought and sold slaves to gain his freedom) and then having to buy his freedom when it was promised to him by someone he considered to be his mentor and then denied.We may never know the real truth of how Olaudah became a slave, the first part of his life is very vague. We do however know how it ends.

Maybe the how’s and why’s are not as important as the fact that he was a slave in the eighteenth century and still became a very educated and well written man. He fought for what he considered wrong, worked in a white man’s world and fought the system. Sounds like an American to me.History does not tell if he was a wealthy man just a very determined one. We all have skeletons in our closet, why not dress them in silk and

jewel’s.