Catalysts of change : Colonial transformations of Anglo European literary culture in the long eighteenth century

[Extract] In 1789 Olaudah Equiano published his autobiography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa, the African. It tells of his being kidnapped from his homeland Igbo (in present-day Nigeria), shipped across the Atlantic (first to Barbados and then to Virginia) and then sold into slavery. Learning to read, write and trade while in bondage, Equiano eventually bought his freedom before relocating to London in 1777, where he wrote The Interesting Narrative. It was one of the earliest books by an African to be published in England, and although not the first slave narrative to be printed, it is widely regarded as the prototype for those that came after it.1 Henry Louis Gates regards it as the ‘silent second text’ of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845).2