Olaudah Equiano was a well-educated slave who opened the doors to the black community of the British colonies by writing his personal narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the life of Olaudah Equiano. He believed that, "a life without liberty is no life at all". In believing this, Equiano did everything in his power to gain his freedom away the wicked acts of slavery in southern America. He knew that he would have to have a well-constructed argument to show that slavery was unjust and cruel in America. Doing this, he wrote his personal narrative to show the inhumane acts that the British brought upon the African slaves.
Equiano told of the cruel and violent acts that the British performed on the slaves in his narrative to show that slavery in America was crueler than anywhere else. Equiano said that he would "call upon God's thunder, and his avenging power, to direct the stroke of death to me, rather than permit me to be a slave, and be sold from lord to lord" (Equiano 73). Equiano states that he would rather die than encounter the violence that the British would bring to him. But what would make a man want to end his own life? Equiano tells about a time, "when a slave was staked into the ground, then cut most shockingly, then his ears were cut off bit by bit all because he had sexual relations with a white woman who was a prostitute: as it were alright for a white man to rob an innocent girl of her virtue; but most heinous in a black man only to gratify a passion of nature"(Equiano 78). This such account just describes how unfair life was for African slaves. No person, regardless of color or race should have to endure the punishments and cruelties that the African slaves had to endure in these times. On another account, Equiano describes a time when another Negro man was hanged for not being loyal. As if being hanged wasn't enough, just before the Negro man lost his life, he was burnt to death.
