ABSTRACT
When Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative was first published in 1789, he had already bought his freedom from his last master, Robert King, back in 1766, and subsequently became a staunch activist against enslavement. The first part of Equiano’s narrative presents an image of Africa that is crafted to refute the negative and dehumanizing representation of black Africans that dominated various Western discursive formations and iconography in the 18th century. Equiano argues that like the government of the Israelites at the time they reached the Promised Land, chiefs and elders, who doubled as judges, administered the semi-autonomous provinces which made up the kingdom of Benin. Equiano contrasts the innocent, humane world of children with the racially prejudiced, corrupted world of adults when describing his friendship with Richard Baker, the fifteen-year-old boy from America he met on board a slave ship.
