Olaudah Equiano
Kidnapped as a child, bought his own freedom and wrote the book that turned Britain against the slave trade
Olaudah Equiano described in his autobiography being kidnapped with his sister from an Igbo village in what is now Nigeria at about the age of eleven, sold from hand to hand, and shipped across the Atlantic in a hold so foul that he hoped to die. Some historians have noted naval and baptismal records that give his birthplace as South Carolina; the rest of his life is well documented.
He was bought by a Royal Navy officer, Michael Pascal, who renamed him Gustavus Vassa and took him to sea during the Seven Years' War. He learned to read and write, was baptised in London, and expected to be freed, but Pascal sold him to a merchant in Montserrat. There he worked on trading ships and, allowed to buy and sell small goods on the side, saved up the forty pounds his master had set as his price. He bought his freedom in 1766.
He went to sea again, joined an Arctic expedition in 1773, and settled in London. In 1783 he took news of the Zong massacre, in which 132 enslaved Africans had been thrown overboard so that the owners could claim the insurance, to the campaigner Granville Sharp. With other Black Londoners he formed the Sons of Africa to lobby against the trade.
His Interesting Narrative appeared in 1789 and went through nine editions in his lifetime; he sold it himself on speaking tours across Britain and Ireland. He married Susannah Cullen in Cambridgeshire in 1792 and had two daughters. He died in 1797, ten years before the trade was abolished.