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W.

W. Empire pod UK.com. Hello and me, welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnand

and me William Durham pool.

So William this is part two of an extraordinary life, right?

A really extraordinary life and how it's recorded in such detail and such sort of realism. You really feel you know this man and yet he's telling a story which while incredibly common and many liniments of it taking place over 12 million lives is this is a sort of uniquely sharp

focused look at one of those exactly that I mean in his own words which is what

makes it so very immediate and so very human and as he says as you've just pointed out you know I believe there are a few events in my life which have not happened to many and that figure of 12 million really resonates with that this is just one story, one experience of the house.

And it's funny how in history this happens so often that you get, you know, a whole world which is silent,

particularly if you're talking about people who are not

in the top tier who are not literate who do not leave historical records and then

something happens to record one of this is rather like a sort of Pompeii moment when suddenly a whole world is is frozen in aspect or frozen in lava in the case of Pompeii.

So preserving a world that otherwise would be completely lost and I feel this is a kind of very much

18th century transatlantic slave trade version of that and yet in another way equiano's is a kind of unique character because he's so much himself he's such his own voice comes across so clearly and it's a very particular voice that mixture of piety wisdom

charm charm and also you know the the kind of rhetorical devices that are familiar to those who read their

Bibles and that's going to become quite important in this episode.

Much more in this bit of the story.

Yeah so let's just remind you what what you've missed or if you heard the

podcast that went out on Tuesday just just a quick refresher. This is a young boy who was

taken from his village,

...