Before the Civil War era, the most influential African abolitionist writer in both America and Britain was Olaudah Equiano. Kidnapped from his native Africa as an adolescent, and pressed into various types of menial labor, Equiano eventually traveled through much of the known world, including the North American continent, the West Indies, and Britain. He triumphed over slavery's adversities and lived to write a brilliant and popularly enduring autobiography that chronicled slavery and race relations from the slave's point of view. Not only is his work a masterful representation of eighteenth-century prose, it is an indispensable contribution to studies of the colonial era, in both Western and African contexts.

According to his biographer Paul Edwards, Equiano--who was taken from his home with his sister in 1756, when he was about eleven years old--was from an Ibo tribe in the North Ika Ibo region of Essaka, Nigeria. He was forced...