The Life of Olaudah Equiano: Or Gustavus Vassa, the African
First African and then Western slave traders brought Olaudah Equiano’s Edenic childhood experiences to an end. Kidnapped, he was taken away from the womb-like Gemeinshaft and his father’s compound in which he had been favored and nurtured.
Commodified, he was placed in the hold of a slave ship for the brutal journey through the Middle Passage to the ‘New World,’ where the ultimate symbol of his status were the various names he was given by slave masters whose ‘ownership’ of him empowered them to desecrate his name
