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

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 African-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. An 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 preceding 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 articulated in much of the literature was of betrayal by an independence that had brought many of the new African countries a myriad of political, economic, 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 understood. 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 trajectory in cultural interpretation different from a tendency to focus on Africa's immediate political realities. It suggests that the writers' representations of slavery are explorations of more remote or submerged causes of the problems frequently configured as neocolonial. Furthermore, it suggests 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 of the critical focus on these texts' gender discourse. The depictions of gender relations, and of the position of women in particular, serve a broader etiological purpose of accounting for "the state of things." 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 traditional historiography that tends to separate these regions in the discussion of slavery. ² Thus this reading draws attention to a crosscultural dialogue in which the writers implicitly participate. Lastly, it tests a possible anxiety about the chosen texts' etiological discourse—that it might mask a fixation with origins. Although this reading focuses on Aidoo's Anowa, Head's Maru, and Emecheta's The Slave Girl (1977), it makes references to other relevant work by the writers.

The most prominent political events of Africa in the 1960s included political independence—the regaining of the rights to self-governance by African societies that had been colonized in the nineteenth century by Europeans. These events also included the consequences of the independence, and the continued struggles for freedom by African societies still in the throes of foreign domination. But prominent on the international scene in the 1960s was the Civil Rights Movement, whose goal was equality, initiated...