![]() Olaudah Equiano was placed on a slave-ship bound for Barbados. ![]() Indeed, such were the horrors of my views and fears at the moment, that, if ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country." Their complexions, too, differing so much from ours, their long hair, and the language they spoke, (which was very different from any I had ever heard) united to confirm me in this belief. I was immediately handled, and tossed up to see if I were sound, by some of the crew and I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, when I was carried on board. Equiano later recalled in his autobiography, The Life of Olaudah Equiano the African (1787): "The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast, was the sea, and a slave ship, which was then riding at anchor, and waiting for its cargo. When he was about eleven, Equiano was kidnapped and after six months of captivity he was brought to the coast where he encountered white men for the first time. ![]() According to James Walvin "Equiano described his father as a local Igbo eminence and slave owner". His father was one of the province's elders who decided disputes. Olaudah Equiano was born in Essaka, an Igbo village in the kingdom of Benin (now Nigeria) in 1745. ![]()
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