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

Abstract

Slavery?human bondage for labor exploitation in domestic or market contexts?is a theme that has been explored by the Ghanaian Ama Ata Aidoo, the Nigerian Buchi Emecheta, and the South Africanborn, 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 postindependence 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