Olaudah Equiano and Mary Prince give very different accounts of home life and their experiences as children. On of the key aims of Equiano’s Interesting Narrative was to establish in the mind of the reader the fact that Africans lived in ordered and civilized societies with their own traditions and systems of government. He also aimed to contrast his childhood life of freedom in Africa with the barbarity of slave societies in North America and the Caribbean. He was writing for a British audience that would have been unfamiliar with African societies but also he was attempting to counter contemporary pro-slavery arguments which denied the humanity of Africans and claimed that the Transatlantic Slave Trade was a means to civilise Africans. Although other Africans based in Britain, such as Ottobah Cugoano and James Gronniosaw, referred to their African homelands in their narratives, Equiano’s is by far the most extensive description of an African society by a former slave.

Mary Prince, on the other hand, was born into slavery in Bermuda in the Caribbean. In her History, she too contrasts her life as a child with her later experiences and by so doing emphasises that slave ownership took many different forms. As a child she was purchased as the pet of a white child, the grand-daughter of her owner, a practice that was also the fashion in Britain in the 18th century, where the wealthy purchased African, and sometimes Indian children too, as pets. She also shows how slave families could be broken up and dispersed, just like any other property at the whim, or death of an owner. Slavery was an institution that had some impact on everyone, in societies which profited from it, such as European colonies in the Americas but also in Britain and other European countries.