Saturday 29th October
Olaudah Equiano: An outspoken African in 18th Century Cambridge
Part of the Cambridge African Network’s Family Event celebrating African arts and culture.
Free talks honouring the life and work of former African slave and prominent author and anti-slavery campaigner Olaudah Equiano.
1pm – Olaudah Equiano: The Black Abolitionist in 18th Century Cambridge City and Cambridgeshire
A presentation by Dr Carol J Brown-Leonardi: Anthropologist, historian and member of Cambridge African Network
This presentation focuses on the life of Olaudah Equiano in Cambridge and his contributions to the abolition movement. A lens will be focused on Equiano’s important position in the abolition movement and his skill in altering perceptions and attitudes towards the African nation and crucially the African slave.
2pm – Joanna Vassa: A Life Imagined
A talk by Dr Angelina Osborne, an expert in Black British history, politics of slavery and abolition, post emancipation. Angelina is the co-author of ‘100 Great Black Britons’ and author of ‘Equiano’s Daughter: The Life and Times of Joanna Vassa’.
Joanna was the younger, and only surviving daughter of Olaudah Equiano, and his wife Susannah Cullen.
This talk explores the life of Joanna as gathered from the archives and considers what her life could have been like, living as the daughter of one of the leading Black abolitionists of the eighteenth century.