Olaudah Equiano Essay

In Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, he tells in an autobiographical sense of the stresses on his life caused by slavery. He both endorses and denounces slavery itself but in terms of who the listener is, in my opinion. He touches on the commodification of human life and the strains on a black man’s existence both as a slave and freedman.

Humans were commodified since the process of obtaining them was one similar to obtaining a regular trade good from a foreign country. The cheapest means were the only regards as to how the enslaved were transported with little regard to the fact that it was actually human life hanging in the balance instead of some
In justifying slavery in this way, he removes all claims to blame from those who only passively partake in slavery while omitting the fact that if there is no market create by those passive partakers of slavery, then there is no market for the slave trade. If his goal is to abolish slavery, then he neglected to realize or state that any type of slavery is not good, even if it is what he is accustomed to from his homeland. This may have been a device simply to garner the acceptance of his message form those that actually owned slaves into leading them to believe that he himself believed they were not to be blamed but that they had inability to relieve the stresses caused by slavery. I think that he also brought up the enslavement of those from his homeland to relate to their underlying guilts about owning slaves. This justification of slavery played his coming criticizing of the slave trade. It also posed as a Segway into other more practical commercial endeavors that the enslavers could partake in instead of