The Cruelty of Men in Olaudah Equiano’s Middle Passage

It is sad to see how my generation (including myself) is slowly losing all sight of where we have come from. Olaudah Equiano’s Middle Passage excerpt has opened my eyes to how dreadful it must have been for African American slaves, especially during the Middle Passage. In his experts he talks about how slaves would rather try to take their own lives than to live in that abdominal situation for even a second more. He goes on to say that slave masters would not even allow it to happen by punishing any slave who tried to commit suicide. It is hard for me to fathom the psychological and physical turmoil of African American slave during the middle passage, and through this essay that is what I am going to do.

Change is one of the hardest things to overcome, and is one of the leading causes of stress. Sometimes change can cause: shock, denial, resistance, anger, and sadness, until finally we come to accept our fate. The Middle Passage was probably one of the hardest events for a slave to handle. Imagine yourself as an African American when suddenly you are captured by strange people, and you are sold and thrown into a boat. As the boat starts to move you become sadden because you don’t know if you will ever see your family again. You try to close your eyes but the cries of a thousand other African American keep you up. As months goes by you think of ways to kill yourself, but to no prevail as you watch others attempt to jump of the boat but before they can they are recaptured and punished. The psychological condition of a slave must have been horrendous, because their culture, their beliefs, and their basic needs for survival have been stripped away, leaving them literally with nothing to live for.

During the Middle Passage, slave’s physical conditions were almost if not just as bad as their physiological conditions. For example during this time roughly 15 million slaves were captured and transported. There were around 600 African Americans on each boat, and each boat was designed to hold roughly around 450 people at the maximum. Days start to go by and the smell of musk, urine, feces, and blood start to come together into and unimaginable stench, full of disease. Each breath you take fills your lungs with disease and you slowly start to loose conscious of who you are.