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First class male: a stamp will mark Equiano's contribution to the abolition of slavery

Oloudah Equiano emerged from an early life of slavery in the tropics and North America to become a leading figure in the London-based movement to abolish the slave trade.

In 1789 Equiano, now in London, published a memoir of his life detailing the horrors he witnessed as a slave. ‘The Interesting Narrative’, became a bestseller, helping turn the tide of public opinion behind abolishing the slave trade in Britain in 1833. Equiano’s harrowing record of the conditions on a slave ship as it crossed the Atlantic was often quoted by William Wilberforce in parliamentary debates. Passages such as the following helped convince other members of the case for abolition: ‘The stench of the hold when we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome … now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential… the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died. The shrieks of the women, the groans of the dying, rendered the whole scene of horror almost inconceivable.’
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Equiano was born in 1745. His epic forced peregrinations began in what is now Nigeria. At 11 years old he was kidnapped with his sister and marched to the West African coast, where he was sold to slave traders and shipped to Virginia via Barbados. After years slaving on plantations, Equiano was bought by a British naval officer, Captain Henry Pascal, and worked as his personal servant on board ship and as his gunpowder carrier in battle in the Seven Year War for control of North America and the Caribbean, fought by Great Britain and France.

Pascal later brought Equiano as a gift to his female cousins in London, where he was sent to school to learn to read and write in between periods at sea. This belated introduction to literacy was enough for Equiano’s talents to bloom as the author of an epoch-making memoir still published by Penguin Classics as ‘an exciting, sometimes terrifying adventure story and spiritual quest, also a sophisticated treatise on religion, politics, and economics… of enduring literary and historical value’.

In the late 1750s, after some years in London, Pascal sold Equiano to a Captain James Doran, who took him to the island of Montserrat and sold him to a Quaker merchant. He was put to work as a supervisor on plantations where the terrible tortures he saw inflicted on his fellow slaves drove him to achieve his freedom. Equiano saved whatever money he could, and in 1766 purchased his freedom for £40 – more than a year’s pay then – before returning to London in 1767.

He found work as a hairdresser and soon emerged as a leader of London’s free-slave population, campaigning for years to abolish the trade that had enslaved him. Equiano reported to early abolitionist Granville Sharp the Zong massacre of 1781 in which 133 sick slaves had been thrown alive from the Zong, a slave ship, so the captains could claim insurance on loss of cargo. News of the incident caused a public uproar against slavery that set off the abolition movement.

Equiano petitioned the Queen in 1788 as a member of the London Corresponding Society and campaigned through the 1790s. On April 7 1792 he married an Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen. They had two daughters, one of whom survived to inherit a substantial estate of £950 (equivalent to about £100,000 today), from her father, who had managed to turn his book into a financial success. Equiano died in March 1797, a full ten years before the slave trade was abolished on British ships, 40 years before slavery was abolished in British colonies, and 68 years before slavery was ended in the United States.