West Africa, 1700s

West Africa, 1700s. . , Transatlantic Slave Trade , Between 1514 and 1866, Europeans forcefully took more than 12 million Africans to the Americas. About twenty percent of the captives did not survive the journey across the Atlantic. About 400,000 enslaved Africans came to Britain's North American colonies. The majority of Africans were taken to European colonies in Brazil and the Caribbean., Europeans needed laborers to produce products like tobacco and sugar in the Americas. Enslaved Africans were forced to provide this labor. Men, women, and children were captured by African middlemen and taken to the coast where they were put into the lower decks of European slave ships. Men were shackled together in pairs, and women kept confined below. The low clearance left adults unable to stand. Poor sanitation led to disease outbreaks, which killed many. When the ships arrived in the Americas after weeks on the Atlantic, the Africans were sold in American slave markets., Oulaudah Equiano (c. 1745 - 1797) , Oulaudah Equiano was born in the Igbo region of the Kingdom of Benin. When he was about 11 years old, he was captured by slave traders and taken to Colonial Virginia. He was sold several times but was eventually able to purchase his freedom. Equiano became active in the British abolitionist movement and delivered lectures describing the evils of slavery. He also wrote an autobiography describing his life as a slave. Equiano's book is valued for its detailed descriptions of life in 18th-century Igboland, and as a slave in the Atlantic world.