Note: As part of Black History Month, I’ll be posting excerpts from my book, Beyond the Suffering: Learning from the Legacy of African American Soul Care. It’s powerful to study Black Church History. It is even more powerful and impactful to learn from and to apply lessons from the history of African American one-another ministry. In today’s post, we learn from Olaudah Equiano.
From Victims to Victors
Free born Africans were ripped away from spouses, parents, children, village, and culture by capture. Stripped of everything, overnight they were transformed from farmers, merchants, scholars, artisans, or warriors into possessions. Without family, without status, they were treated as merchandise, as things—a mere extension of their captors’ will.
James Bradley portrays the dehumanization of capture in all its horror in a letter that he wrote in 1834 while a student at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati.
“I think I was between two and three years old when the soul-destroyers tore me from my mother’s arms, somewhere in Africa, far back from the sea. They carried me a long distance to a ship; all the way I looked back and cried.”
Born Free
Without a doubt, free-born Africans were victims of an inhumane institution. Yet,
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