OLAUDAH EQUIANOS INTERESTING NARRATIVE - Essay Example

Who likes to remember those days of despicable inhumanity; but your words are a reminder of the days when humanity was non-existent. At best the two legged creatures may be called homo sapiens but not humans, because they were totally devoid of humaneness—the slaves because of the misery, self pity and contemptuous life they led; the masters because of the insolence, avarice and brutality they bore. Your pardoning mind astonishes me when you absolve those brutal masters, attributing all their unimaginable brutality to the customary ways of slave-trade.

I just cannot afford to forget and forgive those afflictions; but when you say that, I too feel like agreeing with you: “had the pursuits of those men been different, they might have been as generous, as tender-hearted and just, as they are unfeeling, rapacious and cruel”. Those benumbed hearts perpetrated the pestilence of slavery, tainting God’s original designs for equality and independence. Yes it was the avarice of the planters and the slave traders that debauched them to the indescribable cruelties and inhumanity they practiced.

It is true as you said, they were NOT ‘born worse than other men—No; it is the fatality of this mistaken avarice, that it corrupts the milk of human kindness and turns it into gall’. How many times have we reproached our fate, and wished we had never been born, and we called on death to relieve us from the dreaded horrors! How much we wished to be born in a place ‘Where slaves are free, and men oppress no more’. Times when we were being sold from lord to lord; from misery to greater misery; bound with chains, mangled and torn!

How often have we called out to our old Pagan gods to send thunder and lightning and destroy those cruel masters who meted out contempt and cruelty to us, as if we were lesser than animals? Who taught us that trials and tribulations were God’s ways of imparting wisdom, resignation and strength to our minds? Who