Olaudah Equiano was a slave that learned to read and write; eventually he was able to buy his freedom. This excerpt from his autobiography focuses on his view of the slave trade. He starts off talking about his personal experiences with being captured and sold. Then he speaks about hypocritical Christians. Next he asks many rhetorical questions about the wrongfulness of slavery. To give a background to Olaudah Equiano’s life, he was kidnapped by slave traders when he was eleven. He was then shipped to America and sold to a farmer in Virginia. Then he was purchased by a British captain, where he learned to read and write in England. He was then enlisted in the Royal Navy. Once again he was sold to people in the Caribbean. Later he bought his freedom and had many exciting adventures: shipwrecks, colonizing in Central America, and journeyed to the Arctic Circle. He settled down and published this autobiography of his experiences with slavery.…show more content… He then describes the slaves as buyers see them, parcels, like items or goods, not like people. He goes on talking about how families and friends are separated and that “most of them never to see each other again.” Slave owners did not recognize Africans as people; they did not care about separating a mother from her child. When he mentions the “nominal Christians” we can tell he know that many of these buyers were