How Did Olaudah Equiano Enslaved African Americans

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Contact for Africans that were a part of the slave trade was an almost entirely negative experience. Africans view of their captors were heavily negative due to their poor treatment. The experiences of Olaudah Equiano give us a unique window into the lives of African slaves during the period of first European contact. Equiano received detestable treatment, and his autobiographical writings demonstrate firsthand just how poorly freshly enslaved Africans were treated. It’s particularly telling that one of the first lines he writes is “I was now persuaded that I had gotten into a world of bad spirits, and that they were going to kill me.”1 One has to be treated particularly poorly to have that as a first reaction to meeting a foreign people.