Aspects of Equiano's travels, the autobiography of a Nigerian in late eighteenth‐century England.

This paper is a study of the English of Olaudah Equiano. His autobiography, published in 1789, was the first book written in English by a Nigerian. It tells how, sold when a boy into slavery and transported to the Caribbean, he later purchased his freedom, settled in England, and became a prominent abolitionist. Literary English of the late eighteenth century adhered to neo‐classical models, with complex sentences and a Latinate vocabulary, and these features are much in evidence in Equiano's writing. The principal focus of the paper is on his use of tenses, especially the present perfect, which in Equiano's day was used much as it is now; but he sometimes uses it in ways that are difficult to account for. Thus his mastery of the language was not flawless; but the flaws do not compromise the literary merits of the work or impede our understanding of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]