Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes of African Slaveries

2009; Indiana University Press; Volume: 40; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2979/ral.2009.40.4.25

1527-2044

Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi,

African history and culture studies

This paper examines the representation of slavery in the fiction of Chinua Achebe. The author suggests that the complex representation of slavery in Achebe's first three novels offers an insight in how writers of Achebe's generation wrote within a period of ideological crisis and multiple competing orders of social reality; they needed to resist European cultural imperialisms and colonial conquest at the same time that they had to evaluate the imperialisms, injustices, and, more generally, the shortcomings of African political institutions. The author suggests in this paper that Achebe responds to these situations of competing pluralizing forces by embedding African articulations of slavery within rival moral frameworks in his first three novels: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and Arrow of God. Achebe places slavery in an ongoing process in which the onslaught of colonialism uncovers and also radically transforms the moral and legal dispensations in which African slavery was worlded. These novels are thus narratives of loss and alienation; the afterlives of slavery become an intimate but deeply perturbing part of postcolonial heritage.