Equiano and Zong

As a leading abolitionist in English society, Equiano was famous for his expose on the infamous slave ship Zong. Equiano exposed the cruel event of when 133 slaves were thrown overboard in mid-ocean for insurance purposes. To me, this event is sickening but also displays the inhumanity of the slave trade and that slaves really were perceived as an economic commodity rather than people. The picture to the left is a replica of the Zong at tower bridge at the commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the abolition. Also, the resulting court case, brought not by the authorities as a mass-murder charge against the ship-owners, but as a civil action by the ship-owners seeking compensation from the insurers for the slave-traders' lost "cargo," was a landmark in the battle against the African slave trade of the eighteenth century.
Before, in class I posed the question of whether Equiano' literary contributions were successful in a monetary sense and I found out that this travel narrative made Equiano a fortune, which then gave Equiano freedom from his benefactors and independently focus on what he wanted in life, like his desire to improve economic and educational conditions in Africa, especially Sierra Leone.