Slavery and Emancipation in the Caribbean: Preserving the Public Memory

Abstract

A few enslaved Africans, like Olaudah Equiano, contributed with their narratives to exposing the outrage of slavery even before it was abolished in the British Empire in 1838. Other icons have since helped by their writings to preserve the memory of emancipation as a landmark in the struggle for human freedom. But the biggest contributors to the cause and memory of emancipation are the millions of known or anonymous victims whose lives were brutally taken in the protracted and galling experience of chattel slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas.

Olaudah Equiano, an Ibo from Nigeria, was just 11 years old when he was kidnapped into slavery. He was held captive in West Africa for seven months and then sold to British slavers, who shipped him to Barbados and then took him to Virginia. After serving a British naval officer, he was sold to a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who allowed him to purchase his freedom in 1766. In later life he played an active role in the movement to abolish the slave trade. [Excerpt from the autobiography: The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano… (c. 1789)]