To this end, the narrator doesn’t sugarcoat the practices that the English and the Coramantien people engaged in to perpetuate slavery. In fact, her narrator explicitly says that she wants to let readers decide for themselves what they think about the Captain’s betrayal of Oroonoko into slavery. When Behn presents the slave-holding traditions of Coramantien and Suriname, she offers little commentary as to whether she considered the institution itself morally right or wrong. Indeed, at that time slavery was a common practice amongst whites and blacks alike, and Oroonoko’s transition from a slave owner to a slave himself attests to this historical occurrence. British readers would already be accustomed to rigid social stratification, even amongst whites (the divine right of kings to rule others, for example), and would have generally assumed that slavery was an appropriate state for races they considered to be “inferior,” like Africans. Though to our modern sensibility, the answer is obvious that freedom is an inalienable human right, this wasn’t so clear to Behn’s 17th-century British audience. Some important questions that Behn’s work asks us to consider are: do some people deserve freedom? And do others, then, deserve to be enslaved?
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