October is Black History Month, so every day during October I will be posting up an introduction to an historical person of colour with a place in the history of the United Kingdom.

According to his memoir, Olaudah Equiano was born in around 1745 in the Eboe region of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is today southern Nigeria. Enslaved as a child he was shipped to the Caribbean and sold as a slave to a Royal Navy officer. He was sold twice more but bought his freedom in 1766, and for a while worked at sea including as part of an expedition to the Arctic to try to find a north-east passage to India.

On moving to London, he became active in the campaign against the slave trade, and was encouraged and financially supported by benefactors to write his life story.

In April 1792, Equiano married Susannah Cullen, a local woman, in St Andrew’s Church in Soham. The register containing the record of the marriage is held in the Cambridgeshire Archives. The couple settled locally and had two daughters who were baptised at the church in Soham. Equiano died in Westminster in 1797.

More about Olaudah Equiano at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaudah_Equiano