My take-away from the 2006 movie Amazing Grace (about the abolitionist William Wilberforce) was, who is Olaudah Equiano and how can I find out more about him? Obviously, Wilberforce was very instrumental in the abolition of slavery in the UK and the British colonies but the narrative of one white man defeating the evils of slavery has never sat well me.
So I watched the movie and then I put this book on my TBR about 10 years ago and it has been there ever since. I was hesitant to read it in part because it's an 18th-century memoir/biography. I don't get along with biographies at the best of times, least of all when they're over 300 years old. The other reason I was hesitant was that there is always a season of preparation needed to embark on yet another tale of our suffering.

But I'm glad I pushed past the hesitancy and the pain barrier to engage with this honest and eloquent plea highlighting the barbarity of slavery and savagery of any nation partaking in it.

The autobiography begins in Equiano's childhood as a free boy in Benin and follows him through his kidnapping and sale into slavery through to the purchase of his freedom and the life he lived following. Equiano had a fairly unconventional experience in bondage. He was fortunate to have kind slave owners and spent his captivity working on merchant ships which prevented him from the cruelty of the overseers on the sugar cane plantations in the Caribbean. However, in his work, he was witness to some of the worst atrocity, many of which are detailed in his narrative.
I love the way Equiano doesn't hold back from describing the perpetrators of chattel slavery as barbaric and savage, the very words they used to defend it.
In terms of pacing, it reads like historical writing. There are moments of great excitement and eloquence but these are interspersed within the often not very exciting day-to-day. It's a book that's written to inform, not entertain. If you go in with that expectation, you'll get a lot out of it.