“Raised in an Ibo village (in modern Nigeria), Olaudah Equiano (ca 1745-1797) was kidnapped by African raiders and slod into slavery. He survived the horrors of the Middle Passage to the New World, where an English naval officer bought him ito serve as a cabin boy and renamed him Gustavus Vassa, after a sixteenth-century Swedish hero who freed his people from the Danes (such names concealed the status of a slave, because slavery was frowned on by the British Navy). During years at sea, as well as a period at a London school, Equiano acquired a basic education. He was also baptized, which many slaves expected to make them free. But his hopes were cruelly disappointed when, after six years’ service, he was suddenly sold and shipped to the West Indies. There a Quaker merchant, Robert King, purchased him, employed him as a clerk and seaman, and eventually allowed him, in 1766, to buy his freedom. Equiano went back to England, working first as a hairdresser and later voyaging all over the world, even taking part in an effort to find a passage to India by way of the North Pole. In the 1780s he became involved in the abolitionist movement. The story of his life was an important contribution to that movement, not only for its explicit arguments against the slave trade but also for its demonstration that someone born in Africa could be humane, intelligent, a good Christian, and a free and eloquent British subject. [His autobiography] went through many editions and made Equiano famous. He married an English-woman, fathered two daughters, and died in London in 1797.”

— From the introduction to an excerpt from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself,
published in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition. Volume C. The Restoration and the Eighteenth Century, pp. 2850-1.