They lived a life of few luxuries, but never went without the essentials. He explains that they never went without, “As we live in a country where nature is prodigal of her favours, our wants are few and easily supplied” (Equiano 14). He describes his childhood with strong endearment, he speaks of his village as a community, explaining the celebrations, daily routines, and governing body with a strong positive tone.
Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in the village of Essaka, near modern day eastern Nigeria (Onyeoziri). The different stories they tell highlights the complexities of slavery and how all those enslaved held varying definitions of what it meant to be a slave. Though the two memoirs are both self-written slave narratives they tell varying accounts of their personal experiences as slaves. Both self-written memoirs were revolutionary first hand accounts of their experiences with slavery which went influenced governing bodies of the time and impacted generations to come. Nearly 100 years later in 1845 Frederick Douglass published his self narrative The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.
More than 6,000 such narratives are estimated to exist the overwhelming majority of American slave narratives were authored by African Americans.In 1759 Olaudah Equiano published his self-narrative The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equaino, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. It could be written or orally related by the slave personally. A slave narrative gives an account of the life, or a portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave. The slave narrative is a literary genre involving the autobiographical accounts of enslaved Africans. Jones, Memoir and Poems of Phillis Wheatley, a Native African and a Slave, From Log Cabin to the Pulpit, or, Fifteen Years in Slavery, Thirty Years a Slave, Behind the Scenes: or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, The Life of Josiah Henson, The Kidnapped and the Ransomed: Being the Personal Recollections of Peter Still and His Wife "Vina" After Forty Years of Slavery, Memoir of Pierre Toussaint, The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher, Africa for Christ: Twenty-Eight Years a Slave, and The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman. This collection contains: Twelve Years a Slave, Up from Slavery, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, The Life of an American Slave (Fifty Years in Chains), The Experience of Rev.
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