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Olaudah Equiano Chapter 2 Summary

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The Interesting Narrative of The Life of Olaudah Equiano, Chapter II
This document was written as an autobiography by a former slave, Olaudah Equiano. This was the first slave narrative to reveal such detailed effects on one victim of the slave trade and provides an interesting insight into a time where few people survived to give an account of their experiences. Olaudah is a skilled and bright young man who wrote this as a way for the world to be aware of the horrors of the slave trade. This source is a interesting historical account of the Atlantic slave trade
Through his writing, Equiano is appealing to the British government in a bid to plead his case for the release of slaves. The Queen would also have been one member of his intended …show more content…

The source conveys to us just how horrifying the slave trade was. Children were kidnapped from their homes and their identities were taken from them They went through brutal, undeserved punishments and female slaves were sexually as well as physically assaulted by the superior white men.
Olaudah was a skilled boy who was the youngest in his family and particularly close to his mother. Olaudah begins this chapter by telling the reader how he and his sister were kidnapped, unwillingly travelling with their captors until eventually ending up separated. He first ended up being put to work in the bellows where he planned to escape. His plans were put in jeopardy however, when he unintentionally killed a chicken and had to hide himself through fear being beaten for this. He survived this episode and moved onwards. After some time he ended up in Tinmah, which he described as "the most beautiful country I had yet seen in Africa", residing with a widowed African woman and her son who was close in age with Olaudah. He did not have a typical slave-master relationship with the woman, he ate with them and was treated so well that it "made me forget I was a slave". In spite of this happiness, Oladuah once again found himself moving, this time to a place that was totally different to any kind of society he had

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