The formerly enslaved African writer, sailor, and abolitionist whose 1789 autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, became the most influential first-person account of the transatlantic slave trade ever written — a bestseller that put a human voice and an 'I' at the centre of the British abolition campaign, even as modern scholarship has raised an unresolved question about whether the African childhood it so movingly describes was his own memory.
He wanted the book to do the arguing for him. So Olaudah Equiano placed his own portrait at the front of it — a Black man in a fine coat, holding an open Bible, looking the reader in the eye. For most British readers in 1789, this was one of the most sustained encounters they had yet had with an African speaking to them directly, in print, as an equal. Not a number in a ledger or a figure in a pamphlet, but a man with a name, a childhood, a wife, and a story he insisted on telling himself. The book was an immediate success and sold out fast. And the man in the portrait had made a bet: that if he could get strangers to live inside one African life for a few hundred pages, they could never again pretend the trade in such lives was a trade in cargo.