Indiana University Press Research in African Literatures

Slavery and Etiological Discourse in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and Buchi
Emecheta
Author(s): Modupe Olaogun
Source: Research in African Literatures, Vol. 33, No. 2 (Summer, 2002), pp. 171-193
Published by: Indiana University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3820980
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Slavery and Etiological Discourse in
the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo,
Bessie Head, and Buchi Emecheta
Modupe Olaogun
contexts?is a theme that has been explored by the Ghanaian Ama

Slavery?human
Ata bondage
Aidoo, the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta,for labor
and the Southexploitation
African- in domestic or market
born, Botswana-naturalized Bessie Head?all women writers whose writing
is contemporaneous. In addition to their interest in chattel slavery, the
writers look at states that share some characteristics with slavery, notably
oppression across class, ethnicity and gender, servility, and dependency.
Ari effect of the explorations is a consideration of the metaphorical status
of slavery.1
Appearing at a time when the tendency in African literature was
toward a close reflection of the current social and political developments,
these writers' depictions of slavery are remarkable. In quantitative terms,
the thematic emphases of the literary and critical literature in Africa from
the mid 1960s through the 1970s was not slavery but a re-evaluation of the
meaning of political independence for the African societies that in the pre?
ceding eight to ten decades had been European colonies. No sooner than
many African societies, already politically altered through the contact with
Europeans, regained political autonomy, there arose a feeling in those
societies that they were still trapped in a subservient position within a
recalcitrant imperialist European economic sphere. The feeling as articu?
lated in much of the literature was of betrayal by an independence that
had brought many of the new African countries a myriad of political, eco?
nomic, and social problems. The congruence of the theme of slavery in
Aidoo's Anowa (1970), Head's Maru (1971), and Emecheta's The Slave Girl
(1971) is, therefore, not a simple reflection of the temper of the post-
independence period. But the congruence is also not a mere coincidence.
The interest in the theme of slavery in the work of Aidoo, Head, and
Emecheta suggests a deeper structural analysis of historical time than a
focus on the immediate independence period as a privileged moment
through which the postindependence morass in Africa could be under?
stood. Head additionally suggests in Maru that racial and ethnic bigotry
comes from a universally expressed desires by one individual to dominate
another. This article argues that the three writers together trace a trajec?
tory in cultural interpretation different from a tendency to focus on
Africa's immediate political realities. It suggests that the writers' represen?
tations of slavery are explorations of more remote or submerged causes of
the problems frequently configured as neocolonial. Furthermore, it sug?
gests that the writers' depictions of gender relations in the chosen texts are
not the texts' exclusive destinations?as has tended to be assumed by
much ofthe critical focus on these texts' gender discourse. The depictions
of gender relations, and of the position of women in particular, serve a
Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 2002
172 Research in African Literatures
broader etiological purpose of accounting for "the state of thing

Reading Aidoo's play and Emecheta's novel?both set in West Africa?in
tandem with Head's novel, set in Botswana, also challenges a tradition
historiography that tends to separate these regions in the discussion
slavery.2 Thus this reading draws attention to a crosscultural dialogue
which the writers implicidy participate. Lastly, it tests a possible anxi
about the chosen texts' etiological discourse?that it might mask a fixati
with origins. Although this reading focuses on Aidoo's Anowa, Hea
Maru, and Emecheta's The Slave Girl (1977), it makes references to oth
relevant work by the writers.
The most prominent political events of Africa in the 1960s include
political independence?the regaining of the rights to self-governance b
African societies that had been colonized in the nineteenth century b
Europeans. These events also included the consequences of the indepen
dence, and the continued struggles for freedom by African societies still in
the throes of foreign domination. But prominent on the internation
scene in the 1960s was the Civil Rights Movement, whose goal was equa
ty, initiated by blacks in the United States of America. The significance
the Civil Rights Movement for Africans would include the historical co
nection emanating from the dispersal of African populations to t
Americas between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, which was p
marily though not exclusively through the transatlantic slave trade cov
ing the same period. Although the transatlantic slave trade had be
prohibited by the middle of the nineteenth century by virtually all th
Western countries implicated in it, its unsettling vestiges remained into th
mid-twentieth century (and beyond). One of these vestiges was the seg
gation and persecution of blacks in the United States by whites who we
opposed to the prohibition of slavery and to a full integration of black
into the American society. The segregation and persecution of t
American blacks provoked the Civil Rights Movement, which resonat
with the heightened struggles in the 1960s by South African blacks to com
bat apartheid?a system of racial segregation through which South Afri
blacks had been politically and often economically disenfranchise
Apartheid had been formally adopted in 1948 by the politically ascenda
forces within the white settler population in South Africa to keep the coun
try's blacks in a dominated position. A common denominator of the pol
ical struggles involving Africans and the American blacks in the 1960s w
a rejection of second-class status and other reminders or activators o
enslavement. In their respective writing, Aidoo, Head, and Emech
recall slavery and enslavement, conceived of as the ultimate antithesis
independence and of the rights to personal liberty, and through this th
matic choice these writers reflect a sensitivity to a long view of the histor
of causes, or to an etiology that is simultaneously introspective a
prospective. This long view of history or etiology looks for correlates
events across time and space and highlights causal relationships within a
between these realms. The outcome of the long view of history is a su
gestion of cultural interpretations that are historical and that at the sa
time analyze the metaphorical potential of events.
Modupe Olaogun 173
The three writers' description of their respective work gives evidence

of their interest in the exploration of slavery as a means to understanding
the causes of some of the quandaries associated with Africa's postcolonial
era. The analysis that follows relates the writers' declared interests to the
texts' actual representations.
Aidoo has stated that Anowa developed from a story that her mother
had told her and which Aidoo had transformed (James 19). In reflecting
on her work, Aidoo has also said, "I think that the whole question of how
it was that so many of our people could be enslaved and sold is very impor?
tant. I've always thought that it is an area that must be probed. It probably
holds the keys to our future" (James 20). Aidoo underscores in her state?
ment her special interest in slavery as a historical phenomenon and as a
discursive subject. She manifests that interest through her recurrent por-
ing over the theme. Anowa represents a process in her explorations begun
in her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965). Set in Ghana in the early
1960s, shortly after Ghana gained independence from Britain, The
Dikmma of a Ghost dramatizes a confrontation between a young black
American woman, Eulalie, and the family of a young Ghanaian man, Ato,
to whom she is married. The animosity between Eulalie and her in-laws
arises from the two sides' mutually negative assumptions about each other.
The two sides' images of each other are mostly distortions and stereotypes
that have arisen from the experience of the transadantic slavery. These
images reflect the characters' largely unexamined heritage from that expe?
rience. To the members of Ato's family, Eulalie, as a descendant of slaves,
is one who has been fundamentally altered in a negative sense, a rootless
individual. Eulalie's in-laws conflate her historical origins and her biologi-
cal origins?both misconceived by the in-laws?and initially reject her.
In her own case, Eulalie regards members of Ato's family as savages?
obviously reflecting the kind of cultural education that accompanied and
survived American and European partial justification for participating in
slavery. A prevalent discourse in the European countries; participation
in slavery thrived on a Manichean construct that opposed savagery to
civilization, African to European, and so on.3
Aidoo highlights slavery again in the short story "For Whom Things
Did Not Change," the most sustained of the stories in the collection No
Sweetness Here (1970). Set in an urban center in Ghana a decade after inde?
pendence, the story shows a middle-aged steward at a rest house, Zirigu,
who alternates between calling a guest, Kobina, who is a young black
Ghanaian, "my white master" and "Master." The young guest is not only
puzzled by the steward's choice of this form of address but is uncomfort?
able with the obsequiousness with which it is accompanied. Habituated to
conceiving of employment relationships as master-slave or master-servant,
Zirigu is adamant. As to the significance of the political independence,
which is generally understood where Zirigu lives as the originating
moment of the new era, Zirigu is totally oblivious. Zirigu was a servant and
a soldier in the imperial British army during the colonial period. Through
his colonial service he had learnt about the peoples and customs of other
lands; the colonial service, however, had not given him an insight into the
changes taking place in his own society. At the end of his narrative through
which he describes his experience and shares his innermost thoughts with
the guest, Zirigu asks with an ingenuousness that is incongruous with his
middle age: "My young Master, what does 'Independence' mean?" (29).
Aidoo's interest in clarifying the historical moment is reflected in a
dialogue characterized by abruptness that is not attributed to specific char?
acters in the story but that suggests a dramatized narrating consciousness:
Tf you ask them, why ten years after independence, some of
us still have to be slaves, they say you are nuts to ask questions like
that.'
'You are getting your definitions wrong. By what stretch of
imagination does a steward-boy or a housemaid become a slave?'
(15)
The questions that are posed in this dialogue strike at the heart of the lim?
its of metaphorical extensions in language, and also at the heart of a
debate about whether some kinds of labor that resemble or constitute slav?
ery currendy in Africa are serious enough to warrant attention.4 Throu
an ironic vocalization of the notions of independence and slavery, as su
gested in the juxtaposition ofa dialogue like the one above with the ch
acterization of Zirigu, Aidoo depicts slavery as a sign whose metaphori
status cannot be assumed but must be clarified. Slavery and independe
are interactive states comprised of signs of current, anterior, and posterior
origination, intransigence, and transformations. They are not transpar
metaphors of states of being, as may be illustrated in the conflict between
Zirigu and Kobina.
Though Zirigu is employed in the postindependence period as a stew
ard, he has nonetheless imbibed a feudalist-colonial mentality that sees
world in a Manichean relationship of master-minion. In Zirigu's world,
master-minion relationship is an unchanging one and the people involv
in it cannot switch places. Just for having grown accustomed to his situati
as a minion, Zirigu does not question it; he even begins to defend it. Zir
projects onto himself an identity of a slave. But the young guest at the res
house contests this projection by Zirigu and the metaphoric assumptio
implicit in its reification:
T don't make coffee for long time. Maybe now, 'e be cold. I go
stand am for stove.'
'Take your time, man. I'll wash myself and then come and fetch it.
Please, Zirigu, I've said that you shouldn't wait on me hand and
foot'
'Massa!'
'Well, I don't see why you should You are old enough to be my
father.'
'My white Massa!'
'And I am not a white man.' (14)
Kobina perceptively recognizes the aggressive but also furtive manner in
which language, which is a social transaction, naturalizes a private percep-
Modupe Olaogun 175
tion. He abjures the slave mentality displayed by Zirigu and the linguistic
codes that naturalize it, but he does so only within the limited parameters
of his personal modesty. Kobina does not seek to change on any large scale
the distortions in the wider social and economic relations obliquely mir-
rored by Zirigu's language. Rather than probe the source of Zirigu's sense
of powerlessness and the perpetuation of a colonial mentality by the social
classes that Zirigu represents and serves, Kobina flees from the sheer man?
ifestations of the powerlessness and the colonial mentality:
'Massa . . .'
'Zirigu, how often should I tell you not to call me that?'
'But you are my massa!'
T am nothing of the sort. I was born not six years when you
were going away to fight. How can I be your massa? And this is a
Government Rest House, not mine. I am not even your employer.
So how can I be your Master?'
'But the other Massas, they don't say make I no call them so?'
'Hell they don't. That is their business. My name is Kobina,
not Master.'
'Kob-i-n?a . . . K-o . . . Massa, I beg, I no fit call you that. I
simple no fit.'
'Too bad. That means I'll have to leave here too, earlier than
Ihadhoped.' (19-20)
"For Whom Things Did Not Change," therefore, draws attention to a slav
mentality that is (mis) (in) formed and reinforced by social, economic, an
linguistic relations.
Anowa, published in the same year as "For Whom Things Did No
Change," amplifies Aidoo's interest in the etiology of slavery within a his
torical context. The play employs a legend about a strong-headed girl wh
refuses her parents' guidance in selecting a husband, only to end up con-
firming the parents' worst fears. Vincent Odamtten has already pointe
out other treatments of this legend, including one by Efua Sutherland
another Ghanaian writers (Odamtten 48). In Sutherland's re-telling ofthe
tale (1960), it should be added, the girl is the princess Foriwa, who is dr
ven by an impulse to modernize her village in a certain way, and so mar
ries a "stranger" who can bring about the fulfillment of her desire. The
stranger does not end up eating up Foriwa, as in the folktale, but joins
Foriwa to transform the village, and with her lives happily ever after. In Ay
Kwei Armah's later (1970) parodic rendering of Sutherland's tale, th
stranger looks like a white man. Seen against Sutherland's and Armah's re
interpretations, Aidoo's point of departure from the legend is all the mor
striking in its tropological import.
Aidoo specifies the historical setting of her play in a way that draws
attention to the antecedent historical even in the area:
It is now a litde less than thirty years

When the lords of our Houses
Signed that piece of paper?
The Bond of 1844 they call it?

Binding us to the white men
Who came from beyond the horizon. (8)
A more direct way of stating the temporal setting could have been to s
that the actions take place about 1870. Aidoo, however, foregrounds t
year 1844, when leading Fanti chiefs signed a treaty binding Fantiland, a sig
nificant portion of modern Ghana, to the British for protection. This r
erence to a specific time and event comes early in the play, in the prologue
to establish the play's etiological interest. The Fanti chiefs had understo
their transaction with the British as a survival strategy to help them d
with attacks from their neighbors, the Ashanti. As shown, however, by one
of Aidoo's narrators, Old Man, borrowing from the hindsight provided
thirty years of observation, the signing of the bond was quintessentiall
self-mortgaging act:
And men will always go
Where the rumbling hunger in their bowels shall be stilled,
And that is where they will stay.
O my beloveds, let it not surprise us then
That This-One and That-One
Depend for their well-being on the presence of
The pale stranger in our midst. (7)
Another device that Aidoo employs in the explanatory discour
the play comprises the narrators, Old Man and Old Woman, jointly
The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-and-Pepper. The equivalent of a Greek ch
The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-and-Pepper explains and offers opinions
actions in the play. But the Old Man and Woman also interject cultu
historical interpretations emanating from them and from the societ
are not stricdy part of the immediate dramatic action. This interp
dimension of The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-and-Pepper emphasi
impulse towards understanding why things have come to be the wa
are. The dualistic characterization of the narrators reflects the disp
nature of the town's voices and of the epistemic processes that the
tors and the voices symbolize. The Old Woman's utterances tend to
impetuous judgments, while the Old Man's utterances tend to show
sured reflection.
The Old Man begins his narration by passing on the history ofthe town
of Abura, where the story is set, with a highlight of the town's cultural val?
ues and of the events that have shaped/are shaping the town. The two piv
otal events that the Old Man highlights are the signing of the 1844 treaty
and the trading in slaves up to the time the action in the play is unfolding?
the 1870s?when slavery had already been oudawed officially in the
European countries and in their colonies. The narrator ranks these event
and calls slavery the "bigger crime":
And yet, there is a bigger crime
We have inherited from the clans incorporate
Of which, lest we forget when the time does come,
Modupe Olaogun 177
Those forts standing at the door

Of the great ocean shall remind our children
And the sea bears witness. (6)
Aidoo frames the play's remembering act through the opening speech
by the Old Man and through his closing speech after the central charac?
ters, Kofi Ako and Anowa, as a result of an impossible resolution of their
differences, respectively have committed suicide and gone mad (Anowa
subsequently drowns in the play's alternative ending). At the end, the Old
Man remarks:
And yet no one goes mad in emptiness, unless he has the disease
already in his head from the womb. No. I is men who make men
mad. Who knows if Anowa would have been a better woman if we
had not been what we are? (64)
The characteristics of the Old Man's reflections include contradiction,
debate, and doubt?elements that are lacking or evident in varying pro-
portions in the other characters' modes of inquiry into the nature of their
being.
The play dramatizes the different modes of inquiry through the
conflicts involving the characters. The most precipitous of these conflicts
concerns the question of slavery. The first of the conflicts takes place when
Anowa declares that she is going to marry Kofi Ako. To Anowa's mother,
Badua, Kofi Ako's previous record as a lazy and shiftless young man con-
demns his present. Badua's relation of effect to cause comes readily:
A?a?h, I wish I could turn into a bird and come stand on your
roof-top watching you make something of that husband of yours.
What was he able to make of the plantation of palm-trees his
grand-father gave him? And the virgin land his uncles gave him,
what did he do with that? (18)
After Anowa has left home to be with Kofi Ako, Badua waits in vain for
a conciliatory visit from her defiant daughter and there begins the seeding
of another conflict. The focus now shifts to the source of Anowa's behav?
ior and the conflict takes place between Anowa's mother and father. The
mother hastily concludes that Anowa is "strange," while the father reject
this label as it will imply some fault with his "man seeds," and as he gen
uinely believes that Anowa is not behaving the way women her age have
not been known to behave. Badua and, to a lesser extent, Osam reveal an
essentialist definition in which the present is a transparent reflection an
linear extension of the past. Although these characters' attributions of
causes may sometimes appear to hit the mark, the reason is not in the
soundness of the characters' episteme, which attributes an essentiality to
things and displays an unmitigated certitude about the nature of things.
No sooner than Kofi Ako and Anowa begin to live together they
become embroiled in conflicts that highlight their differences, especially in
their analysis of their situation. First, Kofi Ako wants Anowa and himself to
use protective charms as a means of fending off evil forces that might stand
in their way to attaining prosperity and that might prevent them from pro-
creating. Next, Kofi Ako wants them to acquires slaves to help them in their
work, which consists of trading in animal skins. Anowa objects to Kofi Ako's
first proposition on the grounds that it proffers a metaphysical solution to
a physical problem in which they are, and should act, as human agents. She
objects to the acquisition of slaves on the grounds that she can personally
find no moral justification for it. The couple's argument reflects their dif?
ferent processes of deriving meaning and correlating effects with causes.
When Anowa finds it increasingly difficult to persuade Kofi Ako not to
trade in slaves, she describes herself as a "wayfarer," a term that is commonly
applied in the area to slaves. Anowa's metaphorical extension of the term
emphasizes the alienation that she shares with the slaves already acquired
by Kofi Ako. The exchange between Anowa and Kofi Ako is worth repro-
ducing as it reveals the intricacies of each of these characters' positions:
KOFI AKO: ... I think maybe you are too lonely with only us
men around. I have decided to procure one or two
women, not many. Just one or two, so that you will
have companionship of your kind.
ANOWA: [Almost hysterical\ No, no, no! I don't want them. I
don't need them.
KOFI AKO: But why not?
ANOWA: No! I just do not need them. [Long pause] People
can be very unkind. A wayfarer is a traveller.
Therefore, to call someone a wayfarer is a painless
way of saying he does not belong. That he has no
home, no family, no village, no stool of his own; has
no feast days, no holidays, no state, no territory.
KOFI AKO: [Jumping up, furious] Shut up, woman, shut up!
ANOWA: Why, what have I done wrong?
KOFI AKO: Do you ask me? Yes, what is wrong with you? If you
want to go and get possessed by a god, I beg you, go.
So that at least I shall know that a supernatural
being speaks with your lips ...[...] I say Anowa, why
must you always bring in this . . .
ANOWA: What?
KOFI AKO: About slaves and all such unpleasant affairs?
ANOWA: They are part of our lives now.
KOFI AKO: [Shaking his head] But is it necessary to eat your
insides out because of them? [ Then with extreme inten?
sity] Why are you like this? What evil lies in having
bonded men? Perhaps, yes [getting expansive] in
other lands. Among other less kindly peoples. A
meaner race of men. Men who by other men are
worse treated than dogs. But here, have you looked
around? Yes. The wayfarer here belongs where he is.
Consorts freely with free-born nephews and nieces.
Eats out of the same vessel, and drinks so as well.
And those who have brains are more listened to
Modupe Olaogun 179
than are babbling nobility. They fight in the armies.

Where the valiant and well-proven can become a
captain just as quickly as anyone. How many wayfar-
ers do we know who have become patriarchs of
houses where they used only to serve?
ANOWA: But in all this, they are of account only when there
are no free-born people around. And if they fare
well among us, it is not so among all peoples. And
even here, who knows what strange happenings go
on behind doors?
KOFI AKO: [Irritated beyond words, he seizes and shakes her] Anowa,
Anowa, where else have you been but here? Why
can't you live by what you know, what you see? What
do you gain by dreaming up miseries that do not
touch you? Just so you can have nightmares? (36-38)
Kofi Ako's argument comprises stratagems to pass off slaves as p
who are ultimately no worse off than nonslaves, all things conside
these things being the benevolence of slave-owners and the natural e
ments of slaves. It subscribes to the dictum "Live what you know, what
see." It abjures the inquiring and probing long view of history, cho
instead to short-circuit the exacting mental demands and moral co
quences of such a route. The more Anowa seeks to develop her ideas
the ramifications and effects of slavery, the more Kofi Ako attemp
restrict the discussion until he finally orders her to "shut up." Kof
illustrates the antithesis of Anowa's etiological position, a position
which the author sympathizes, judging from her insistence upon ex
ing the history of the transadantic slave trade and assessing the par
pants' responsibility in it.
If Kofi Ako represents a flagrant mercantilist apologia for slaver
also symptomizes an insidious desire to expurgate slavery from Africa's
rative. The play highlights that denial by echoing some aspects of Kofi A
position in a dialogue between the child Anowa and her grandmoth
Anowa recalls the dialogue as she becomes increasingly isolated, ha
been labeled a witch, not just by Kofi Ako but also by her mother, who
heard about Anowa's refusal to own slaves and has interpreted the r
as a disavowal of material wealth. The dialogue is prompted by the g
mother's recounting of her travels, including visiting the famed slave ca
(at Oguaa, the older name for Cape Coast, Ghana). In the dialogu
child asks questions about slavery, but the elder dissuades her:
What is a slave Nana?
Shut up! It is not good that a child should ask big questions.
A slave is one who is bought and sold.
Where did the white men get the slaves?
I asked.
You frighten me, child.
You must be a witch, child.
They got them from the land.
Did the men of the land sell other men of the land, and women
and children to pale men from beyond the horizon who looked
like you or me peeled, like lobsters boiled or roasted?
I do not know, child.
You are frightening me, child.
I was not there!
It is too long ago!
No one talks of these things anymore!
All good men and women try to forget;
They have forgotten!
What happened to those who were taken away?
Do people hear from them?
How are they?
Shut up child.
It's too late child.
All good men and women try to forget;
They have forgotten! (45-46)
The import of this dialogue is that it is a reinstatement of the crucial place
of slavery in Africa's postcolonial history, as Mildred Hill-Lubin has als
suggested. Maureen Eke proposes that Aidoo's general "attempt t
(re) cover, (re)member, or (re) memory Africa's history" serves a cathar
and healing purpose (76). But the ending of Anowa implies a call for re
tification more so than a calming of a consciousness stirred from watching
its collusion in the tragic waste wrought by slavery on a continent. In t
prelude to the ending, Kofi Ako sacrifices family bonding to his avarice. As
he physically expands, he loses his power to procreate. When Anow
exposes his emasculation, he shoots himself. In the first ending of the play,
Anowa becomes mad, and in the second ending she drowns after becom
ing mad. Regarding the bifurcated ending, Odamtten has commented
that neither insanity nor suicide is productive, anyway (78).
Anowa is an invitation to soul-searching on the cause and consequenc
of slavery. The Old Man's question in the end may not be so rhetorica
"Who knows if Anowa would have been a better woman, a better person
we had not been what we are?" (64)
Head traces the evolution of Maru, and a simultaneous developmen
of her own perceptions about social and historical relations as follows:
In Botswana they have a conquered tribe, the Masarwa or
Bushmen. It is argued that they were the true owners of the land
in some distant past, that they had been conquered by the more
powerful Botswana tribes and from then onwards assumed the tra?
ditional role of slaves . . .
The research that I did among the Botswana people for Maru
gave me the greatest insights and advantages to work out above all
that that type of exploitation and evil is dependent on a lack of
communication between the oppressor and the people he
oppresses. It would horrify an oppressor to know that his victim
has the same longings, feelings and sensitivities as he has. Nothing
Modupe Olaogun 181
prevented a communication between me and Botswana people

and nothing prevented me from stepping into the skin of a
Masarwa person. And so my novel was built up in blinding flashes
of insights into an evil that hung like the sickness of death over all
black people of South Africa. (Abrahams 14-15)
Head also cites as provocation for her writing Maru an experience in which
her young son whom she was raising in Botswana as a Botswana citizen was
harassed for looking "colored" (see A Gesture ofBeknging, letter #31). Head,
who was married to a black South African, was of "mixed"?black and
white?parentage; so Head's son looked "colored." But Head also wrot
about herself, "I look like a Bushman, who is a despised tribe here .... I
am short in height" (A Gesture ofBeknging, letter #33).
Head states that Maru is her deliberate examination of the reasons for
the low social status of the San, or the Basarwa, alias the Bushmen, in
Botswana, and how the causes of this low status manifest local and univer?
sal patterns of slavery. When she takes up the theme of slavery against in a
subsequent narrative, A Bewitched Crossroad: An Historical Saga of Africa
(1984), it is to use the historiography cum "faction" medium to amplify her
understanding of the internal and external forms of slavery as they have
contributed to the disdain with which the Basarwa have been treated.5
In the story of Maru, set in a village in Botswana, there is no specifica-
tion of a particular historical period, but a Botswana in the modern era is
suggested. The icons of modernity include "a long row of office blocks, at
the end of which was an imposing structure of modern design, painted in
a contrasting range of brilliant colors." The structure is identified through
a board bearing the words "Dilepe Tribal Administration," in block letters
(27). The administrative center ofthe village contrasts with the kgotla, the
village rotunda, where in earlier times Botswana chiefs deliberated the
political, legal, and social concerns within the community, as portrayed in
A Bewitched Crossroad.
Head depicts the social relations in Maru through conflicts that reveal
the characters. The conflicts receive symbolic and mythic amplifications in
the narrative language, with the result that what would look like a personal
incident in a small village becomes a colossal issue akin to a national prob?
lem. Head integrates into the story some autobiographical elements and a
historical event from Botswana's history that orchestrate the story's histor?
ical dimensions. The main conflict in the novel develops when a young
woman by the name of Margaret arrives in Dilepe village to work there as
a teacher. To the people of Dilepe, Margaret looks like a South African col?
ored. Things are fine until Margaret reveals her identity to be Masarwa, or
"Bushman." The Masarwa are traditionally slaves of the Tswana who con?
stitute the elite of the village. The Masarwa herd cattle for the Tswana at
posts located outside the village or live as slaves in Tswana households. The
prejudice held by the Tswana about the Masarwa is similar to that dis-
played by Ato's family against Eulalie in Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost.
Margaret, like Eulalie, is an untouchable by virtue of the circumstances of
her birth. Dilepe's social elite, with the exception of three people, deci
to run Margaret out of the village.
A relevant conflict in the novel's plot involves two of Margare
defenders, Moleka and Maru. The two men belong to the uppermost cr
of the elite, with Maru, for whom the novel is named, having the polit
edge because he is the paramount chief-designate. Moleka and Maru a
drawn to Margaret, choosing to see her as a person rather than as a re
resentative of the cartoon figures of the Bushman. The novel contra
Moleka's and Maru's methods of dealing with slavery, east as the ultim
consequence of prejudice. To make Margaret acceptable to the villager
Moleka begins to sit at table with his slaves. Even though Molka's act
sends the village buzzing, the narration swiftly exposes its limitation a
way of ending prejudice: "He always says he treats his slaves nicely. H
never says there ought not to be slaves" (48). The consequence of Molek
gesture is similar to the consequence of the rationalization Kofi Ako
Anowa, who wonders why slaves cannot simply belong in "their place"
they can get to act free (Anowa 37). These benevolent slave-dealers do
consider the impossibility of the condition of "free slave."
An effect of Moleka's action is that it ironically brings out among t
dominated class the very tendency that he is trying to correct. Here i
part of the narration: "A servant, not a Masarwa, who worked in Molek
home spread the word that they no longer knew what was what. He sa
that all the slaves in Moleka's home sat at table with him when he ate" (48).
The servant's response to the equalization gesture illustrates the hierarc
that has been socially constructed and exploited by the different grou
The novel describes this hierarchy in the early pages:
The white man found only too many people who looked different.
That was what outraged the receivers of his discrimination, that he
applied the technique of the wild jiggling dance and the tin cans
to anyone who was not a white man. And if the white man thought
that Asians were a low, filthy nation, Asians could still smile with
relief?at least, they were not Africans. And if the white man
thought Africans were a low, filthy nation, Africans in Southern
Africa could still smile?at least, they were not Bushmen. You just
have to look different from them, the way the facial features of a
Sudra or Tamil do not resemble the facial features of a high caste
Hindu, then seemingly anything can be said and done to you as
your outer appearance reduces you to the status of a non-human
being. (11)
Maru counters the ostracism of Margaret and the premise that inferi-
ority biologically inheres in the Masarwa by deciding to marry her.
However, Maru does not propose to Margaret; he takes the woman's voli-
tion for granted. His approach reveals that a liberation act that is solely
externally derived can be tyrannical. It also reveals the difficulty of concen-
trating on one source for the solution to a social and historical problem like
slavery. Maru assumes that by fixing the nuclear family, which looks like a
cognate ofthe inner soul that he privileges, he can fix the slavery problem.
Modupe Olaogun 183
He seems to think that although his approach may be slower, it is funda-

mentally more justified than all other approaches. But while the revolu?
tionary effect of his marriage to Margaret builds up, what happens in the
meantime to the Masarwa slaves who are maintaining his (and other chiefs'
inherited) thousands of cattie posts and who "sleep on the ground, near
outdoor fires," their "only blanket" the radiation from those fires (59)?
Maru's neglect or postponement of necessary reforms in the economic
infrastructure is all the more disturbing because Margaret's mother had
been a denizen of those outdoor posts and had died in the night giving
birth unattended to Margaret. It was the child's cries that attracted as
passer-by and saved her. Margaret's survival is, therefore, a matter of
chance. An intervention that is too slow may be too late. However, this
criticism of Maru's slow reformism is not the narrative's central focus.
Maru's abdication of the throne of Dilepe to show the depth of his
investment in his marriage to Margaret is a strategy that subordinates the
external realm of politics to Maru's inner realm of morality. Maru is given
to listening to the voices of the gods in his heart?gods that tell him to
shun the vices of pettiness, bigotry, and so on. Some critics have already
pointed out the limitation of Maru's abdication as a political strategy, cit-
ing his own subsequent ostracism by the people of Dilepe.6 As the narra?
tive puts it, "When the people of Dilepe village heard about the marriage
of Maru, they began to talk about him as if he had died" (126). But one
detail about Maru's abdication from Dilepe is that it has a real-life model
in the action of a preeminent Botswana chief known as Khama III, or
Khama the Great. Khama was the heir-apparent of the Bamangwato about
1866 when he renounced the throne as a result of conflicts between his
vision of the society and some of the traditional practices in the socie
Khama subsequendy withdrew to one of his cattie posts, just like Hea
Maru. But Khama was not shunned; the people moved with him to the
tie post, thus founding the town of Serowe. Khama resumed his politi
activity. Under his rule, Serowe thrived and became the capital of mod
Botswana (see A Bewitched Crossroad ch. 4).
Head's variation on the abdication in Maru may imply a critique o
privileging of politics as the overriding denominator in social transfor
tion. The novels swings towards a private realm, and to an emphasis on
indigenous sources of slavery. Consequently, the narrative eclipses the h
torically specific colonial dealings in slavery. For instance, there is doc
mentation of Dutch farmers' and traders' widespread practice during t
nineteenth century of abducting and enslaving BaSarwa people in
Kalahari region of present-day Botswana (see, e.g., Morton, "Servitud
Slave Trading, and Slavery"). Rather than highlight the specifically hist
ical form of colonial practice in slavery, Head goes for a representation
which a simple Manichean white-black relationship becomes an inclus
pro forma implied slavery. Thus the white missionary who raises Marga
and bequeaths her name to the Masarwa girl gets caught in this episte
logically fuzzy equation. Although the senior Margaret kisses her adop
child's toes at bedtime and educates the child unstintingly, the narrat
states that the relationship between the senior and junior Margarets w
never really like that between a mother and child, and that the child "was
a semi-servant in the house" (16). Part ofthe reason for this judgment can
be deduced from the motive associated with the senior Margaret: she is a
white armchair scientist whose singular objective is to use her work on the
child to prove that "environment [is] everything; heredity nothing" (15).
Against an overdetermined colonial background, the premise of the
"experiment" by the senior Margaret is an attenuation of the Masarwa
child's latent ability and an arrogant substitution of the adopter's culture
in the child's life. The senior Margaret is therefore a typical representative
of the novel's "white man." Head may have seen the need for a more
specifically historical representation when she narrates the Dutch practice
of slavery in Southern Africa in A Bewitched Crossroad, although in this
"saga" she focuses on the Khoikhoi of the Cape Region rather than on the
San or BaSarwa ("Masarwa" in Maru).
Emecheta, like Aidoo, owes the material for The Slave Girl partially to
her mother, who also told her the story ofa slave girl, but this story is closer
to home. The model for Ojebeta, the main character of The Slave Girl, is
Emecheta's mother whom the author apostrophizes in her autobiography:
My mother, Alice Ogbanje Ojebeta Emecheta, that laughing, loud-
voiced, six-foot-tall, black glossy slave girl, who as a child suckled
the breasts of her dead mother; my mother who lost her parents
when the nerve gas was exploded in Europe, a gas that killed thou-
sands of innocent Africans who knew nothing about the Western
First World War; my laughing mother, who forgave a brother that
sold her to a relative in Onitsha so that he could use the money to
buy ichafo siliki?silk head ties for his coming-of-age dance. My
mother, who probably loved me in her own way, but never
expressed it; my mother, that slave girl who had the courage to
free herself and return to her people in Ibuza, and still stooped
and allowed the culture of her people to re-enslave her, and then
permitted Christianity to tighten the knot of enslavement. (Head
above Water 3)
Emecheta considers writing to be "therapeutic and autobiographical writ?

ing even more so" (3). The Slave Girl is Emecheta' tribute to her mother,
whose story, as laid out above, is parallel to the story ofthe mother's name-
sake, Ojebeta, in the novel. But the novel is also Emecheta's attempt to
"cover the history of womanhood and link it with the happenings of the
rest of the world" (204). Formally educated as a sociologist, Emecheta
brings to bear on her writing the exploratory reach of her discipline. Her
study of "the tradition of slavery" suggests a digging around her subject to
reveal the histories, manifestations, metamorphoses, myths, and ideologies
of slavery in an early twentieth-century Igbo village. Ibuza, where The Slave
Girl is set, is a node within an economic sphere located around the lower
Niger River, which itself is a node within Nigeria, then a colony of Britain.
This Nigeria in turn constitutes a cultural and economic space within the
orbit of imperial Britain. The notion of slavery is one that Emecheta picks
up again in a subsequent novel, Thejoys of Motherhood (1979), with which
Modupe Olaogun 185
The Slave Girl intertexts through the narration of the story of a slave girl
who is buried alive with her dead slave mistress. But the most intensive rep?
resentation of slavery in Emecheta's work is The Slave Girl.
The tide of The Slave Girl pays homage to the character Ogbanje
Ojebeta, whose ups and downs in her journey from being a freeborn to a
slave form the loose plot of the novel. As Florence Stratton has suggested,
however, it also projects the archetypal dimensions of a slave girl who is
buried along with her dead mistress so that in the after-life the girl can con?
tinue to cater to the mistress who herself is ultimately the patriarch's slave.
The "shallow grave" to which a girl in a patriarchal culture is consigned is
one that desperately tries to bury a girl's talents and being. Stratton is
extrapolating from Ojebeta's life history and from the life histories of the
other girls in the novel a common social fate symbolized in the story told
by Chiago, one of Ojebeta's fellow slaves (see Stratton).
The Slave Girl does identify the ideology of slavery with patriarchy, and
many critics have already highlighted this dimension of the novel (see
Stratton; see also Spencer-Walters). However, the files provided in the
novel of the various characters?which include girls as well as boys?and of
the actions of these characters also suggest an emphasis on the cultural,
economic, and political forces that cannot be subsumed under the analyt?
ical category of patriarchy without blunting these distinctive influences.
The novel projects the economic activities of the region in the time of
the story's setting through the depictions ofthe markets. It also highlights
the displacements of the various characters?most strongly symbolized by
journeys?that are consequences of internal cultural exchanges and ofthe
social and political transformations brought about by colonialism. It is use?
ful, therefore, to pay some attention to these components of the novel's
discourse. Such attention will reveal much more about the significance of
slavery in the novel's etiological discourse.
The slave Girl begins with a prologue that gives a synoptic history of the
founding of the area where the story takes place. Along with the historical
backdrop, the prologue describes the area's prominent cultural institu?
tions and assumptions. The first icon mentioned is the market, described
as "the center of all that mattered in Ibuza" (9). Markets turn out to be the
foremost defining icons of the adjacent areas as well. Asaba, Idu, and
Onitsha?all big towns?are presented through their markets alone, a rep?
resentation that is ultimately slanted, even if in the early years of the twen?
tieth century, the story's setting, southern Nigeria was experiencing a
mercantilist expansion arising from increased urbanization and from a
diversification of international trade as a calculated attempt to suppress
slave trade. We find these truly multifarious towns reduced to markets in
the novel.
The distinguishing features of the markets include the presence of a
new currency, whose significance incorporates its portability. The people
could carry on their person the new money and use it to magically trans?
form their identity. The market is also a place for spectacle, in which the
new wealth can be displayed. In the novel, all roads lead to the all the dif?
ferent markets, as people who live in the villages take products ranging
from cassava pulp to palm oil, palm kernels, and rubber to larger distr
uting/collecting centers for domestic and foreign consumption. But th
new markets and the new money have also generated new values, or mo
ified old ones. It is against this context of new-market-new-money-ne
values that Ojebeta's brother, Okolie, takes the precipitous action
selling his younger sister. Seduced by the magic of the new money, th
English currency of the expanded markets, Okolie leaves for Onitsha w
his seven-year-old sister in tow. Ojebeta has become Okolie's ward beca
their parents have been killed in an epidemic that originated in Euro
and spread across the world, and the eldest child in the family has aba
doned Okolie and Ojebeta in order to pursue his own economic salvation
On the way to Onitsha, Okolie experiences bouts of guilt for deciding
sell his sister, but the only thing that suppressed the guilt is his thought o
the liberating potential of the new money:
Mixed up with these feelings of self Justification was the conviction
that he desperately needed whatever money came his way to pre?
pare himself for his coming-of-age, one of the most important
events of his age-group. (26)
When Okolie and Ojebeta run into a suspicious relative, Okolie cooks u
a story woven around the legendary riches that Onitsha markets genera
". . . You remember our relative Olopo who married a Kru man?
She is very rich now. They say she has built many houses in Otu at
Onitsha. She heard of all the mishaps that were befalling us, with
everybody dying and sent a messenger last market day to tell
me that I should bring Ojebeta to Onitsha since she wished to see
her and buy her this and that, to console her for the loss of her
mother...."(41)
Okolie gets to see Ojebeta, and he does have his coming-of-age dan
Ibuza market in the grandest style in Ibuza's living memory. No o
Ibuza asks Okolie, who is known as a lazy and indigent farmer, the
of the money with which he stages his spectacular coming-of-age. A
seems to count in the village is the glory, however fleeting. The pe
Ibuza take the occasion to inscribe the centrality of their market as an
of their success:
By the time they had danced round Ibuza, many relatives from
Okolie's mother's side had joined in singing his praise names.
One old woman from Ezeukwu who had looked after his mother
Umeadi as a child came out and said:
"Who was born in the center of the biggest market in Ibuza?"
"He!" the crowd replied. Fingers pointed at Okolie, and the
voice of the crowd was as heavy as the blast of a gun, as frighten-
ing as claps of thunder. (83)
If the narrator's commentary here suggests an authorial distancin
from the celebration of Okolie's market show, there is nevertheless a
degree of elan in the narration of the teeming life of the Onitsha market
Modupe Olaogun 187
and of the industry of its women merchants. These merchants include Ma

Palagada and Ma Mee, pro to types of the new importer-exporter. The
women circumvent the laws banning export slavery. Choosing to see those
laws as obstacles to their generation of significant personal wealth, these
merchants turn to agricultural and industrial products for export/import.
They export farm products such as palm oil and rubber, and import fin?
ished goods, notably cloths. To build their wealth, the businesswomen rely
on the labor of the slave girls and boys?other people's children?whom
they acquire illegally by pretending to be interested in liberating the chil?
dren from poverty while actually enslaving them.
The hard-boiled merchant, seasoned by the markets, succeeds very
well; her child, the successor, who has not been re-born into the market,
fails woefully. Thus, Ma Palagada's economic empire disintegrates in the
hands of her son, Clifford, who has passed through the market but
through whom the market has not passed. The slaves of the market who
literally grow up there become its inheritors. Clifford reports on the
Palagadas' slaves at the end of the story: "Jieunuka was now a successful
businessman in Otu and had married Nwayinuzo; her friend Amana had
also gone into business and had a big shop, and a car, and though she was
now widowed was fine and happy" (177).
The novel suggests that the economic slavery promoted by the new
market ethos is a product of the colonial annexation of the Nigerian
market economies to Britain. But there is also an indigenizing process that
reflects the people's identification with the industriousness promoted by
the new market economy. Hence Ma Palagada, an apologist for slavery, is
drawn with warmth. There is a subplot that traces Ma Palagada's triumphs
and trials. Ma Palagada, who buys Ojebeta from Okolie, comes across gen?
erally as a wise investor. She is frequently ahead of all the merchants, turn-
ing every challenge into profit. When she dies and her empire collapses,
there is a sense of loss.
But there is a prickly ambiguity in the portrait of this successful
Onitsha merchant Ma Palagada, which together with the outcome of th
slaves mirrors what appears to the novel's ambivalence about slaver
Smart, feisty, industrious, wealthy, and beneficent, Ma Palagada would b
irresistible except for her dealing in slaves. When she is purchasing th
small children whose labor she will exploit, she is relentless. But we ar
made to feel admiration and sympathy for Ma Palagada. By virtue of bein
a woman, in a largely patriarchal society, she is potentially threatened b
social subjugation and economic exploitation. Ma Palagada takes a route
that will ensure her financial independence and that will diminish, if n
erase, the effects of an imposed social inferiority. Her measure of succes
is wryly noted in the narrative in the reversal that her personality and for?
tunes effect in a common patriarchal convention. Typically in that con
vention, a married woman is identified by her husband's name. M
Palagada's last husband, who is otherwise quite macho, and her children
by her two husbands are called by her sobriquet?"Palagada," which is a
reference to the sound made by her legs when she is walking (70).
The financial successes of the Palagada slaves who in the end take to
the market appear to mitigate any evil that Ma Palagada's robbing of these
(ex) slaves' childhood might have constituted. In contrast to the entrepre?
neurial Palagada slaves, Ogbanje Ojebeta, who chooses marriage over
accumulation of personal wealth, ends very badly. She merely changes
masters at the un-young age of thirty-five when her bride price is finally
paid by her husband, whom she gleefully calls her "new owner" (179). The
moral appears to be that in some circumstances slavery is "a necessary
evil." Consequendy, an ironic reading of the novel's fifth chapter, "A
Necessary Evil," which details Okolie's hypocritical rationalizing of selling
his sister, appears to be limited.
Closely associated with the markets are journeys that symbolize
cultural exchanges and displacements. At Ojebeta's birth, her caring
father makes a journey to Idu, similar to a mythic journey, to procure the
medicinal protection that will ensure her survival. Ojebeta's greedy
brother will take her on a journey that parodies family members' instinct
for mutual protection. Okolie claims that by selling his litde sister to the
wealthy Ma Palagada, he is offering her "a chance to make the best of her
life" (38). On their way to Onitsha, Okolie and Ojebeta pass a stream and
then cross the big River Niger. Like Ojebeta, Chiago crosses many rivers on
her way to slavery in the Palagadas' house. In the market at Onitsha, the
riverside is equally important. The market mammy, Ma Mee, has her stall
on the edge of the river, a position that enables her to snap up people dis-
embarking from canoes and to sell them her merchandise. The rivers and
streams have a strong association with slavery in a manner that recalls
some diasporic African slave narratives: "Whenever they went to Otu mar?
ket, and she went to the waterside, she still used to gaze across the tangle
of boats, canoes and steamers, across the River Niger, thinking to herself
that one day she would be free" (95).
The slaves in the Palagada household are displaced, many of them per-
manently:
It was said that Pa Palagada had bought the men from some
Potokis [Portuguese] who were leaving the country and returning
to their own land. The two, who were young boys at the time,
could not remember where they had originally come from, so they
were given Ibo names and were put to work on the Palagada
farms. (60)
One of the Palagada slaves was born a twin and her people, some?
where among the Efiks, did not accept twins; her mother had
nursed her secretly and later had her sold, simply to give her a
chance in life. (63)
The kinds of displacement illustrated in these passages are due to the
influence of the transadantic slave trade and to intercultural exchanges
within the area.
In the country at large, a more widespread form of displacement is
taking place. This displacement affects mostly the men who are leaving
their farm work in the villages to take up European jobs in the cities, bu
Modupe Olaogun 189
it does not preclude the women. The narrative compares the European
jobs, called "olu Oyibo," to the slaves' separation from their homes. When
Ojebeta returns to Ibuza after negotiating her freedom from the
Palagadas, the people of her village celebrate her "smooth skin and such
modest and polished manners" (149). They do not inquire about her
experience in Onitsha, but they probably would not have believed her if
she had told them that dispossession, loneliness, unpaid toil, and a dire
struggle to retain her personal dignity have constituted her experience as
a slave of the Palagadas:
They would call Ojebeta's stay with Ma Palagada anything other
than a good thing. For had she not returned with such fine man?
ners and clothes, just like the older men who went to seek their
fortunes in white man's jobs, in olu Oyibo. No, it was to olu Oyibo
that she too had gone, not just to Otu Onitsha. That was an under-
statement. (149)
Like the willful amnesia that the people of Abura in Aidoo's Anowa court to
prevent them from confronting slavery, the fantasy spun by the people of
Ibuza cushions them against recognizing their complicity in the evil that
stares them in the eye. Their hyperbolic sense of the prosperity that olu
Oyibo?the white man's jobs, which are drudgeries reserved for the
colonized?will confer on their sons and daughters is underscored by their
continued poverty. They do not forget to remind their children, such as
Jacob who becomes Ojebeta's husband, to "make more and more money
to come and give to your people," but when these children make their
periodic visits home, they can only hand out the white man's biscuits to the
relatives (161, 169).
Jacob, whom Ojebeta marries, reimburses Ma Palagada's son for the
amount that Ma Palagada had initially paid for Ojebeta. As a result of
being virtually bought anew by Jacob in a customary ritual called bride
price, Ojebeta begins a new form of slavery in which she is obligated to
serve her husband as he chooses. The novel's closing paragraph empha?
sizes the link between the foreign and indigenous forms of slavery:
So as Britain was emerging from war once more victorious, and
claiming to have stopped the slavery which she has helped to
spread in all her black colonies, Ojebeta, now a woman of thirty-
five, was changing masters. (179)
Together the responses to slavery by Aidoo, Head, and Emecheta con?
stitute a cultural critique in the independence phase of Africa's postcolo?
nial era. By breaking from the immediate neocolonial thematics, the three
writers highlight the polycentric character of African cultural dialogues
reflected in the literature. Their examination of slavery within specific
African contexts foregrounds female and class perspectives, but gender
and class do not emerge as an end concern.
The writings do not take exactly the same route or arrive at exacdy the
same destination. Aidoo's character Anowa, for instance, tempted by with
the potential wealth that she can generate as a slave dealer, risks her life
for spurning the allure of this wealth and for appearing to censure her
townspeople who relish such wealth. Her choice to privilege personal rela?
tionships and the common weal over a compromised personal wealth is a
difficult one, as she expressed this choice against the social tide. She sac?
rifices her life for the long-term survival of her society and for her own
moral integrity. Yet Anowa is not a simple morality tale; this play instead
provides a window into the multiple struggles of an individual confronting
an enormous economic, ethical, and psychological thrust: slavery. Though
Anowa's life, in spite of her immense talents, is not spared, due to her
public rebellion her society is never again the same. The play shows the
inherent polyglossia of a seemingly harmonized traditional society.
Head's Maru suggests a turn to the resources within the individual.
Placing the emphasis on the ethics of slavery, the narrative looks to the
untainted inner visions that the enslaver or oppressor can still marshal,
and to the resistance or the simulacra of resistance that the enslaved or
oppressed can muster. But investing the politically and socially privile
Maru, who has inherited a huge allotment of slaves, with a redemptive sp
it that insists on liberating the society first by doing away with his polit
and social authority is tantamount to wanting to save the world one f
ment of a person at a time. Maru's understanding of his new exemp
character makes him do away with his political and social authority.
effective is his personal mantra, which can be formulated as "You freebor
people, marry a slave and help eliminate prejudice"? In casting Maru
initiatives in active terms, relative to the subdued tones of Margaret's res
tance, Head's narrative unwittingly subordinates the agency of
enslaved and the oppressed to the grand gestures of the benevo
enslaver and oppressor.
Emecheta's Ma Palagada in The Slave Girl, in contrast to Head's Ma
and Aidoo's Anowa, energetically trades in slaves, buoyed up by her c
viction that slavery is "a necessary evil." The character Ogbanje Ojeb
to whom the novel's title refers primarily?embraces her husband, w
buys her from Ma Palagada's heir, as a "better master" (179). The sett
of this novel in the European colonial era, specifically from the heigh
World War I to the termination of World War II, when the most influ
tial colonial power "was emerging from war once more victorious, a
claiming to have stopped the slavery which she had helped to sprea
all her black colonies," heightens its ironic thrust. But Emecheta's ir
does not fully dispel a feeling that the novel conveys some ambival
about slavery through its suggestion that slavery is an upshot of inevitab
economic forces. It is as if the enslaver can simply be forgiven, and
enslavement forgotten, if in the end the enslaved somehow manages t
well economically.
The etiological discourse in the writing of Aidoo, Head, and Emec
in which they examine slavery suggests that slavery is not a discrete hist
ical event, but an event with prehistories and consequences. It revea
variety of the experiences of slavery, from the enslaved to the enslaver.
accretions on the notion of slavery render slavery as a sign w
metaphorical status invites scrutiny. By representing the dilem
Modupe Olaogun 191
motives, and emotions exemplified in the different characters in the

respective narratives, the writers lead us to inspect the causes, effects, man?
ifestations, and (trans) formations of slavery in specific contexts. Anowa,
Maru, and The Slave Girl in remarkable ways constitute explorations of
slavery that take a long view of history by going beyond the immediate
independence period for some understanding of the remote causes of
some perennial predicaments, notably the deep social polarizations and
the recalcitrant practices of slavery in some places, in the period beyond
independence in Africa.
NOTES
1. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the conference "Sla

Narratives: Chronicling Our Present, Remembering Our Past, Predicting Ou
Future," at Wilberforce University, Wilberforce, Ohio, 14-16 October 1999.
would like to thank die Faculty of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Humber Colleg
Toronto, for supporting my participation in this conference.
2. A remarkable departure from an essentialist separation of West African a
Southern African histories of slavery is the comparative approach taken in t
collection of essays edited by Elizabeth Eldredge and Fred Morton, Slavery i
South Africa: Captive Labor and the Dutch Frontier. In one of his essays in the book
"Slavery and South African Historiography," Morton characterizes the essential
ist separation of the two regions as a methodological lapse.
3. Documentations and analyses of European and American deployment
Manichean images for assuming self-superiority vis-a-vis other people are co
mon enough. A recent and extensive survey of the distribution, evolution, a
ideology of these images, however, is by Jan Nedeveen Pieterse in White on Blac
Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture.
4. Scholars and social activists place different degrees of importance on the ve
tiges of the slave trade between Africa and Europe and North America, an
Africa and the Arab countries; and on slavery within present-day Africa. See, f
instance, Derrick; Grace; and Morton and Eldredge. Derrick acknowledges th
continued existence of bondage, including its extreme forms, but he dismiss
its significance, drawing attention instead to Africa's "other problems." Gra
on the other hand, considers the instances to be too significant and too pro
to naturalization to be ignored. Derrick and Grace, as well as Morton a
Eldredge, and several other scholars see gaps to be filled in the research.
5. I use "faction" to mean a melding of fiction and facts. The manner and outco
of the melding will reveal different writers' artistic and other interests. The va
ations are, perhaps, captured in a definition of the term by Wole Soyinka, w
himself has written factions, as a "genre which attempts to fictionalize facts a
events, the proportion of fact to fiction being totally at the discretion of t
author" (Foreword, Ibadan: The Penkelmes Years; emphasis in original). Head
faction in A Bewitched Crossroad suggests an interest that is historiographical a
interpretive. This work consists of two narrative threads. One thread highlight
the factual events in the area corresponding to present-day Botswana and it
environs from about the middle ofthe eighteenth century to 1966. The other
an episodic story about a fictive clan?inspired by the experience of a real

life family?that mirrors the historical developments highlighted in the oth
narrative thread. The two threads take the form of alternating chapters that a
thematically organized.
WORKS CITED
Abrahams, Cecil, ed. The Tragic Life: Bessie Head and Literature in Southern A
Trenton: Africa World P, 1990.
Aidoo, Ama Ata. The Dilemma ofa Ghost. London: Longman, 1965.
_. Anowa. London: Longman, 1970.
_. No Sweetness Here. Essex: Longman, 1970.
Armah, Ayi Kwei. Fragments. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1970.
Azodo, Ada, and Gay Wilentz, eds. Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo. Tr
Africa World P, 1998.
Derrick,Jonathan. Africa'sSkves Today. NewYork: Schocken, 1975.
Eke, Maureen. "Diasporic Ruptures and (Re)membering History: Africa as
and Exile in Anowa and The Dilemma ofa Ghost." Azodo and Wilentz 61-7
Eldredge, Elizabeth, and Fred Morton. Skvery in South Africa: Captive Labor a
Dutch Frontier. Boulder: Westview; Pietermaritzburg: U of Natal P, 1994.
Emecheta, Buchi. The Skve Girl. London: Allison and Busby, 1977.
_. Thefoys of Motherhood. 1979. London: Heinemann, 1994.
_. Head above Water: An Autobiography. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 19
Grace, John. Domestic Skvery in West Africa with Special Reference to the Sierra
Protectorate, 1896-1927. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1975.
Head, Bessie. Maru. 1971. London: Heinemann, 1972.
_. A Bewitched Crossroad: An Historical Saga of Africa. New York: Paragon
1986.
A Gesture of Belonging: Letters from Bessie Head, 1965-1979. Ed. Randolph
Vigne. London: SA Writers, 1991.
Hill-Lubin, Mildred. "Ama Ata Aidoo and the African Diaspora: Things 'All Good
Men and Women Try to Forget,' But I Will Not Let Them." Azodo and Wilentz
45-60.
James, Adeola. In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk. London:
Heinemann, 1990.
Morton, Barry. "Servitude, Slave Trading, and Slavery in the Kalahari." Eldredge
and Morton 215-50.
Odamtten, Vincent. The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polykctics and Reading against
Neocoknialism. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 1994.
Pieterse, Jan Nedeveen. White on Bkck: Images of Africa and Blacks in Western Popukr
Culture. New Haven: Yale UP, 1992.
Soyinka, Wole. Ibadan: ThePenkelmes Years. A Memoir, 1946-1965. Ibadan: Spectrum,
1994.
Spencer-Walters, Tom. "Orality and Patriarchal Domination in Buchi Emecheta's
The Slave Girl" Umeh 125-37.
Stratton, Florence, "The Shallow Grave: Archetypes of Female Experience in
African Fiction." Umeh 95-124.
Modupe Olaogun 193
Umeh, Marie, ed. Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta. Trenton: Africa World P,
1996.
Sutherland, Efua. "New Life at Kyerefaso." Ghanaian Writing Today, Volume 1. Ed. B.
S. Kwakwa. Tema, 1984. 80-86. First published in Langston Hughes, An African
Treasury: Articles, Essays, Stories, Poems, by Black Africans. New York: Crown, 1960.

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Slavery and Etiological Discourse in the Writing of Ama Ata Aidoo, Bessie Head, and Buchi

contexts?is a theme that has been explored by the Ghanaian Ama

Vol. 33, No. 2, Summer 2002

broader etiological purpose of accounting for "the state of thing

The three writers' description of their respective work gives evidence

It is now a litde less than thirty years

The Bond of 1844 they call it?

Those forts standing at the door

than are babbling nobility. They fight in the armies.

prevented a communication between me and Botswana people

He seems to think that although his approach may be slower, it is funda-

Emecheta considers writing to be "therapeutic and autobiographical writ?

and of the industry of its women merchants. These merchants include Ma

motives, and emotions exemplified in the different characters in the

1. A shorter version of this paper was presented at the conference "Sla

an episodic story about a fictive clan?inspired by the experience of a real

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