Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass 

Ok, so you are wondering why my first book featured for Veganuary isn’t about animals. This is because I didn’t come to the animal rights movement overnight. My quest for justice began with other social justice movements.  As a West African, slavery is a significant and traumatic part of our history, as is colonization. In some areas, we can still pinpoint whose families were traded as slaves, or those who traded in slaves, by their family names. The current instability of my country, Guinea, can be traced back to the slave trade and French colonization. 

Frederick Douglass, an enslaved person in the United States, turned abolitionist campaigner, drew significantly on the abuse of animals to draw comparisons to how Black people were treated as slaves. In order to justify slavery, it was necessary to dehumanize Black people, to treat them no better than animals. This has left a complex legacy when discussing the interconnectedness of oppression but highlights the fact that the category of human has not remained static throughout history, and that it has expanded or shrunk at various times in order to deny people rights. The concepts of dehumanization and animality have been used to justify the oppression, enslavement and genocide of people throughout history. This has led to a reluctance to draw comparisons with the oppression of animals due to the very real fear you may be contributing to the dehumanization of marginalized populations. While the animal rights movement is not the same as the struggle for the abolition of slavery, it can be useful for those looking to advance the rights of animals to learn from the abolitionist movements that came before, while also becoming familiar with why certain comparisons can be harmful to groups across the world that still experience significant racial or other forms of discrimination.

While Douglass is by no means the only writer you can learn from when thinking about slavery, his use of animal comparisons raises the question that if we are to stop oppressing humans based on comparing them to animals, perhaps we also need to stop oppressing animals.

Title: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Author: Frederick Douglass

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780199539079

Veganuary is guest curated by Abdourahamane Ly, He is a vegan animal rights activist with a background in Africa-China cooperation and international trade. He was born in Guinea Conakry, and after spending 13 years in China he moved to Rwanda to continue his work. You can follow him on Instagram and X at @fulanivegan.