Olaudah Equiano was born in 1745 in a village east of the Niger River in what is now Nigeria. At the age of ten, he was captured by slave traders and taken to the American south where he was sold to a planter in the West Indies where he worked aboard slave ships sailing between the Caribbean and England.

By the age of twenty-one, Equiano had saved enough money to buy his freedom. He visited the Mediterranean, took part in Phipp's expedition to the Arctic, and crossed the Atlantic several times. He became an ardent member of the anti-slavery movement and came to know several of its leaders.

Between1789 and 1827, Equiano's book, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African ran into seventeen editions in Britain and the U.S. This slightly abridged edition, now reissued from its first published edition in 1967, keeps in print a book of great literary and historical importance in the context of African writing.