Olaudah Equiano's Narrative One of Term Paper

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Although Equiano portrays 'good' whites in his narrative, perhaps to make his condemnation of slavery more persuasive to his audience, he is also unsparing in his presentation of its horrors. African girls as young as ten are defiled, and men are branded with their master's initials to prevent them from escaping: "And yet in Montserrat I have seen a negro man staked to the ground, and cut most shockingly, and then his ears Cut off bit by bit" (206). Equiano, a converted Christian, stresses the departure from true Christian values in these actions by whites. He implies that his Christianity is a gift to him, but because white slavery is a betrayal of such values white cruelty is therefore even more horrifying a moral betrayal.

The lessons of what slavery was like, the mechanisms of the slave trade, and the particularly barbaric forms of slavery in the West Indies are striking -- as well as slavery's commonness, as it was practiced by Africans against their own people. But perhaps most shocking to his contemporary readers was how even good white men and women who were fond of Equiano and respected him did not see a profound contradiction between the institution and their feeling of fellow humanity for the property they 'owned.' Equiano was seen as a financial asset to his masters for his mind, not simply how hard his body could work. He "had the good fortune to please my master in every department in which he employed me; and there was scarcely any part of his business, or household affairs, in which I was not occasionally engaged.

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I often supplied the place of a clerk...I became very useful to my master; and saved him, as he used to acknowledge, above a hundred pounds a year. Nor did he scruple to say I was of more advantage to him than any of his clerks; though their usual wages in the West Indies are from sixty to a hundred pounds current a year" (202-203).

White slavery is thus shown to be worse than any other previous form of slavery because it is inflicted upon another people, destroying African's native culture, because it is morally hypocritical, and intellectually hypocritical. Equiano does the work of a white clerk, yet is supposed to be 'property' because of his innate inferiority. Equiano makes a persuasive case for the institution's abolishment. And always, Equiano's evident consciousness of his audience must be kept in the mind of the modern reader. Always he stresses how he years to be free, and that God's providence set him free -- with a healthy does of hard work on his part, and luck. His autobiography remains a fascinating cultural document of the many contradictions inherent to the institution of slavery, and how former slaves used their own narratives to lobby for slavery's abolition.

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