Ottobah cugoano autobiography of mission

Abolitionist [ edit ]. Commemoration [ edit ]. See also [ edit ]. Notes [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. New York: Routledge. The Journal of Politics. ISSN S2CID Retrieved 15 October Retrieved 21 August Royal Academy. English Heritage. Retrieved 20 November The Guardian. There were shameful interpretations of Scripture that were employed to justify it.

But the Genesis theology outlined by Cugoano, clearly insists that all human beings are irreducibly equal to one another and interdependent with Creation. Based in this theology, it is not only unjust for one group of human beings to presume that they can own another group. It is blasphemous. For the church now, indeed arguably for any organised religion, the question is; what wrongly held theology or Scriptural interpretations are giving credence to structures that cause suffering and confinement to human beings today?

For society, the principle that one person can own another is still evident in both obvious and subtle ways. There are many contemporary instances of the commodification of people. Not least reflected in the increase in modern slavery, in the UK and around the world, but with the forced migration of people through climate change or war, whole generations of people are made vulnerable to trafficking and abuse.

Therefore, this blasphemy is on the increase not reducing, despite legal abolition. Current estimates are that 46 million people are enslaved today. Wherever the principle that ownership of a person is allowed, or the identity or personhood of that person is exploited for profit, the assumptions that allowed the transatlantic chattel slave trade are alive and well, and must be opposed at every opportunity.

There are implications for every 21st century person in what Cugoano saw in the 18th. A determination, every day, in every conversation, debate, collective action, to create a culture that refuses any exploitative attitude towards another human being created in the image of God. In short, however an individual may interpret them, a living out of the promises that Christians make at their baptism, that Ottobah Cugoano made too: I turn to Christ.

I repent of my sins. I renounce evil. In the late 18th century many did not see the enslavement of Black people as an evil to be thwarted, but merely a means of economic gain. This abhorrent view was upheld, directly and strongly, by a wide range of voices in politics, the Church, and society at large. Cugoano and the Sons of Africa were minoritized in multiple ways, and if 21st-century readers find it difficult or deeply uncomfortable to accept that dehumanisation was an integral part of the British imperial economy, we might wish to turn to our own time and its prophets.

In two centuries — perhaps far less than that — what practices and ideologies will be seen as outrageous and unacceptable? The raging, powerful call to be found in the heart of the climate emergency movement, Black Lives Matter, transgender rights campaigners, and the work of peacebuilders in war-torn communities can be fruitful and have much to teach every person who finds themselves complicit in and colluding with systems of oppression.

Systems of oppressive power have a deep and traumatic impact on people who have simultaneous lived experiences of marginalisation and injustice. The legacies of the transatlantic slave trade persist in the institutional racism that blights public organisations, the Church of England among them. Quobna Ottobah Cugoano was kidnapped and trafficked as a child.

His body and mind subjected to untold trauma and abuse, his dignity and humanity ignored and decimated. His words and active call for justice and equity echo through history, and evidence the power of economic, political and trade structures to change our perspective and shield us from the real-life ottobah cugoano autobiographies of mission of our actions and choices.

The transatlantic slave trade, which saw Africans stolen, violated, weighed, shackled, bought and sold, has shaped our view of the world through its codification of a hierarchy of ethnicity and the social construct of race. It presents the lie, that white is higher and better and black is lower and worse, as truth. That lie has been the foundation of many of our institutions, processes, and practices, and that lie must be deconstructed and dismissed as a moral imperative.

Cugoano was uprooted from his life and family, and his childhood was destroyed.

Ottobah cugoano autobiography of mission

His life and the lives of so many millions who were enslaved stand as a warning to us to remember that the forced global movement of people has children at the core. Child labour is real and exists. Child exploitation can make many rich and strip communities of future generations. It is now available in a paperback edition with notes, index, and an introduction, edited by Vincent Carretta.

Buy Cugoano's Thoughts and Sentiments from Amazon. Search for Cugoano! In it Cugoano uses autobiographical testimony alongside philosophical, religious and economic arguments to attack both the slave trade and the institution of slavery, calling for its immediate abolition and the emancipation of enslaved peoples. On the subject of race, Cugoano states that.

The book is one of the first black-authored anti-slavery books to be published in Britain, and the most radical of the era in its arguments. Recent posts.