Provincializing Slavery: Atlantic Economies in Flora Nwapa’s Efuru

Since its publication in 1966, Flora Nwapa’s Efuru has largely been read as a narrative of women’s solidarity. This paper departs from existing criticism by situating Efuru within a genealogy of West African fiction on the relations between Atlantic and African slaving networks. Efuru’s exploration of women’s subordinations within slaving systems, family sagas, and commodity histories locates women within an Atlantic world-system overtaken by colonialism. By focusing on narrative form, I read Efuru as a dialogue novel in which the author deploys strategies of indirection in order to narrate the disrupted historical relations of the lost Atlantic sphere in which Atlantic and domestic African slaveries were worlded. Such indirection, in turn, responds to the chagrin of African implication in Atlantic networks.