The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano by Olaudah Equiano (books to read for teens .TXT) π
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In the mid 1700s, around the age of eleven, Olaudah Equiano and his sister were kidnapped from their village in equatorial Africa and sold to slavers. Within a year he was aboard a European slave ship on his way to the Caribbean. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African was published by the author in 1789 and is part adventure story, part treatise on the corrupting power of slavery, and part tract about the transformative powers of Christianity.
Equianoβs story takes him from Africa to the Americas, back across the Atlantic to England, into the Mediterranean, and even north to the ice packs, on a mission to discover the North-East passage. He fights the French in the Seven Yearβs War, is a mate and merchant in the West Indies, and eventually becomes a freedman based in London.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was one of the first popular slave narratives and was reprinted eight times in the authorβs lifetime. While modern scholars value this account as an important source on the life of the eighteenth-century slave and the transition from slavery to freedom, it remains an important literary work in its own right. As a valuable part of the African and African-American canons, it is still frequently taught in both English and History university courses.
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- Author: Olaudah Equiano
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We are almost a nation of dancers, musicians, and poets. Thus every great event, such as a triumphant return from battle, or other cause of public rejoicing is celebrated in public dances, which are accompanied with songs and music suited to the occasion. The assembly is separated into four divisions, which dance either apart or in succession, and each with a character peculiar to itself. The first division contains the married men, who in their dances frequently exhibit feats of arms, and the representation of a battle. To these succeed the married women, who dance in the second division. The young men occupy the third; and the maidens the fourth. Each represents some interesting scene of real life, such as a great achievement, domestic employment, a pathetic story, or some rural sport; and as the subject is generally founded on some recent event, it is therefore ever new. This gives our dances a spirit and variety which I have scarcely seen elsewhere.2 We have many musical instruments, particularly drums of different kinds, a piece of music which resembles a guitar, and another much like a stickado. These last are chiefly used by betrothed virgins, who
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