AphraBehn wrote the first novel in the English language. She may justly be called, ‘Mother of the English Novel’. Behn’s Oroonoko [2], predates Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe by thirteen years. Although her highly original work of fiction has sometimes been dismissed as a ‘romance’, similar to the proto-fiction that appeared in the previous century, her work in fact marks a wholly new departure in English literature. It bears the hallmarks – the narration of events as recalled and filtered through the eyes of its characters; the interest in exact narrative detail; the claim that the tale is a true story, and based on eye-witness accounts – that thereafter would define the novel proper. Oroonoko is now generally agreed to draw on the author’s first-hand experience, albeit highly fictionalised, of a period spent in the Dutch colony of Surinam, in South America. Behn’s novel is remarkable in the period when it was written, for the respect with which its narrator describes the customs of indigenous peoples, and the dignity and courage of native-born Africans, the novel’s heroes. In her tale of the rebellion and tragic fate of a noble and heroic African prince, and of his wife Imoinda, Behn not only wrote the first English novel, but – nearly two centuries before Uncle Tom’s Cabin – the first work of fiction to denounce the institution of slavery