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991266 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES Vol 40 No 4 (Winter 2009) copy 2009 991266

Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes

of African Slaveries1

TAIWO ADETUNJI OSINUBIUniversiteacute de Montreacutealtaiwoadetunjiosinubiumontrealca

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the representation of slavery in the ction of ChinuaAchebe The author suggests that the complex representation of slavery inAchebersquos rst three novels offers an insight in how writers of Achebersquos gen-eration wrote within a period of ideological crisis and multiple competingorders of social reality they needed to resist European cultural imperial-isms and colonial conquest at the same time that they had to evaluate theimperialisms injustices and more generally the shortcomings of Afri-can political institutions The author suggests in this paper that Acheberesponds to these situations of competing pluralizing forces by embedding

African articulations of slavery within rival moral frameworks in his rstthree novels Things Fall Apart No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God Achebeplaces slavery in an ongoing process in which the onslaught of colonialismuncovers and also radically transforms the moral and legal dispensationsin which African slavery was worlded These novels are thus narratives ofloss and alienation the afterlives of slavery become an intimate but deeplyperturbing part of postcolonial heritage

What then is the complex of indigenous African notions

relevant to the issues we are discussing here We have

used the terms slave and slavery yet one hardly need dwell

on the fact that their meanings shaped in one cultural-

historical setting cannot be expected to disentangle very

well the institutions of another place and time

mdashK opytoff 490

Slavery in Africa was a complex system of labor use ofthe exercise of rights in persons and of exploitation and

coercion tempered by negotiation and accommodation Its



26 991266 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES 1056802 VOLUME 40 NUMBER 4

form varied over time and place Slaves might be menial

eld workers downtrodden servants cherished concu-

bines surrogate kin ostracized social groups dedicated toa deity or a ready pool of candidates for sacrice

mdashRobeRts and MieRs 3

In the eighteenth century abolitionists would need to

make the case for slave trade abolition In the nineteenth

century British merchants would need the moral capital

accrued during the abolition campaign to make the colo-

nization of Africa conform to new denitions of imperialpurpose

mdashbRown 329ndash30

THE AFTERLIVES OF SLAVERY ORTHINGS FALL APART AT FIFTY

Perhaps because it has become enshrined as the novel about the African encoun-ter with Europe assessing the putative silence on slavery in Things Fall Apart has become a way of framing a perceived larger displacement of slavery in WestAfrican literatures2 Yet the occurrences of slave in the novel trace the meaningsof slavery in the sensibilities of the portrayed community While slavery nevercoalesces into a tangible narrative vector for the collective experience of Umuoait appears in a series of references subordinated to the trajectory of the main themeof the novelmdashthe arrival of Europeans and the colonial dispensation Appraisals

bemoaning the absence of slavery in Things Fall Apart inherently conceptualizerepresentations of slavery as slavery in its transatlantic manifestations Hence thenovel plays a metonymic role in assessments that often ignore the subtleties ofwhat slavery might look like on the continent The epigraphs above dramatize the

point that practices and evocations of slavery in Africa have had so many dimen-sions that to insist on one single denition for all contexts is to neglect the context-specic ways in which slavery and its effects are contextually and ideologicallyarticulated Besides it is almost impossible to write about slavery in Africa withoutconsidering that ldquothe institutionrdquo has been mediated by European antislavery abo-litionism and colonialism Invariably paradoxical admixtures of colonial violencecommerce benevolence and the enchantment of colonial modernity color the endof some forms of slavery in African communities The issue here then is similarto Edward Saidrsquos question about the nature of anticolonial resistance How doesa culture seeking to become independent of imperialism imagine its own past

(Culture 214) To rephrase that question How does an African writer rememberAfrican ldquoimperialismsrdquo and injustices as he writes about European conquest

Although he is not concerned with writers specically Achille Mbembeexamines an aspect of Saidrsquos question in relation to African memories of slavery inhis much-cited ldquoAfrican Modes of Self-Writingrdquo In trying to explain this so-calledlack of an African memory of slavery as part of African dead-end imaginaries



TAIWO ADETUNJI OSINUBI 991266 27

created in response to slavery colonization and apartheid Mbembe attens thecomplex ways in which Africans remember ldquoslaveryrdquo This is evident in his choiceand cursory readings of research on African memories of slavery Thus he relies

on Madelaine Borgomanorsquos insufficient reading of a putative silence on slavery inAfrican literature In short ldquoslaveryrdquo is remembered in much more complex waysthan Mbembe suggests and perhaps the best way to reconsider the possibilitiesof his otherwise creative and suggestive injunction to consider the heteronomyof slavery would be to examine how for example Chinua Achebemdashamong manyother African writersmdashhas offered an inquiry on slavery and memory despiteclaims to the contrary Part of the problem in Mbembersquos critique resides in hisrefusal to think of how Africans legitimated slavery within their sovereign sys-tems and how those systems were recalibrated by colonialism In other words per-haps the rst issue to consider is how Africans consider the relationship betweenslavery and colonization

If as Mbembe points out ldquocolonial advance across the interior of the conti-nent could be said to have taken the character of a creeping slave revoltrdquo and theensuing colonization was a ldquoco-inventionrdquo created by ldquoWestern violence as wellas the work of a swarm of African auxiliaries seeking protrdquo how did that co-invention calibrate memories of slavery (262) At stake here are the African notionsof sovereignty How did African political thought rationalize slavery and how didcolonization change the bases of that rationalization Or for that matter how didthe arrival of capitalist modernity in colonial guise affect African conceptions ofthe human Mbembe only attends to these vital questions about the constitutionof the self of communities and of sovereignty as they pertain to the ldquocontempo-raryrdquo of period of globalization and not the beginning of colonization Hence theinsights from his considerations of African ldquoself-stylingrdquo in reaction to ldquostates ofwarrdquo and conceptions of ldquodivine sovereigntyrdquo are excised from eighteenth- andnineteenth-century contexts where they could have been useful Yet we cannotread the narratives of gures such as Samuel Ajayi Crowther and Olaudah Equi-ano without attention to widespread forms of endangerment about which theywrote in their respective centuries Indeed for twentieth-century writers such asAmos Tutuola ( My Life in the Bush of Ghosts) Abdulrazak Gurnah (Paradise) and

Chinua Achebe in his rst three novels writing about slavery in Africa entails avulnerable positioning in the transition period between African sovereignty andcolonialism It is during such transitional moments in which multiple ldquoorders ofrealityrdquo are in play that what Mbembe calls the ldquoheteronomy [of] the all-purposesigniers constituted by slavery colonization and apartheidrdquo can be grasped (258)

At least since the publication of Paul Gilroyrsquos The Black Atlantic capitalistchattel slavery has been invoked as a point of entry for African-derived popula-tions into modernity Yet as Saurabh Dube cautions articulations of modernityemerge out of particular specic histories characterized by particular constella-tions of dominance and visions of progress (198ndash99) If transatlantic slave trade

and slavery are taken as the point of entry of African-derived populations intoWestern modernity in the Americas the colonial incursion arguably does thesame for continental Africans The point is made frequently that African recap-tivesmdashslaves taken off slave ships and resettled in places such as Freetownmdashorreturnees from the Americas paved the way for modernity in West Africa3 None-theless as Christopher Brown has pointed out enslaved Africans who embraced




antislavery and abolitionism could not foresee the future the imperial powershad for the continent The future the British planned and the future the returneesforesaw are best imagined as adversative anticipations of possible worlds Thus

the gure of the (formerly enslaved) African returnee roaming the pages of WestAfrican ction on slavery arguably serves as a janus-faced gure It is a prolepticgure embodying adversarial anticipated worlds while also domesticating theviolence of colonialism and representing it as the enchantment of modernity Thequestion is How does slavery travel from one theatre of modernity the circumat-lantic world where it is conjoined to capitalism but anterior to formal (and infor-mal) colonialism to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africa wherecolonialism needed to suppress slavery as it paved the way for a new phase ofcapitalist expansion As prisms through which to focalize narratives about vari-ous African and African-derived populations the coupling of slavery colonialism

and modernity functions as a counterfactual connective agent Slavery is not quitecolonialism and colonization is not quite slavery Indeed since the abolition ofslavery functioned as a moral capital for later colonial incursions into the conti-nent the abolition and memorializations of slavery are irredeemably conjugatedwith the violence of the colonizing moment As articulations of slaverymdashie itsinjuries and legaciesmdashare taken from one moral order and resettled in anotherthose articulations become surface phenomena that can be pressed into the serviceof different representational projects Hence returning recaptive slavesmdashor even

blacks from the diasporamdashare regarded as embodiments of the enchantment ofcapital on the continent

Achebe responds to the fraught conundrum of representing slavery with aparadoxical mode of narration that interrogates how one form of violence sup-presses another but both are legitimated and comprehensible within distinct moralorders Precisely because slavery in Africa was a clutch of institutionalized prac-tices within distinct moral orders any narration centered within the same moralorder can only portray those manifestations as unjust when that same order has

been fractured and an alternative space of inspection becomes available Achebesituates and juxtaposes moral orders that authorize the events under inquiryWhile the compromised ldquofactsrdquo of events can be reconstructed to a certain degree

their painful meanings are refracted through alternativemdashoften conqueringmdashmoral orders It is the resulting de-teleologization of moral orders that makes itpossible to perceive enslavement slavery and subsequent colonial subordination but impossible to construct any teleological moral position Achebe achieves sucha gesture by placing his rst novel at the pivotal point between a coherent Africanmoral order and an impending European order In Things Fall Apart in particularslavery recedes into the background because the narrative is vested in a moralworld that not only legitimizes slavery but also rests upon it as constituent partof a civil order portrayed through the narrativersquos preoccupation with justice thelaw and the upkeep of a moral worldview My agenda in this paper is to highlight

how Achebe plots the changing meanings of slavery through reexive narrationthat replicates the power constituting force of slavery in Things Fall Apart Arrow ofGod and No Longer Ease4 The transformations in the evocations of slavery acrossthe novels underline the obligation to jettison one single denition of slavery as wegrapple with the ways in which ldquoslaveryrdquo is remembered across different commu-nities Taken together the invocations of slavery in Things Fall Apart Arrow of God




and No Longer at Ease point to the search for an irretrievable moral center in whichto enunciate the operations of slavery in one specic historical setting But sincethat moral order is irrevocably altered Achebe places slavery in an ongoing pro-

cess in which the onslaught of colonialism uncovers and also radically transformsthe moral and legal dispensations in which African slavery was worlded

UPTAKE WORDLINESS AND MORAL ORDERS

As much as slavery circulates as a heteronomous subject its meanings are oftendelimited within the moral order that functions as a scene of uptake In her exami-nation of the events leading to the last execution in Australiamdashknown as the RyanstorymdashAnne Freadman reformulates Austinrsquos notion of uptake to elucidate thetransformation and assimilation of an event into the stories that become resonant

parts of collective memory In its simplest sense uptake occurs when a speech actcrosses a threshold and creates new meaning by erasingmdashor at least reconstitut-ingmdashthe traces of its previous citations Uptake is a reexive process operatingin bidirectional relation between two citations the utterance turns back uponits previous citation in order to move forward and create the new meaning in itsuptake Such an action may form part of a longer chain of iterations Uptake thuspartakes in the Derridean notion of differance As Said claries such deferrals ofmeaning are not simply invariably at work in language but are part of the mecha-nisms through which we produce meaning in the respective contextsmdashworldli-nessmdashof any utterance that need to be actualized alongside individual readings ofa text (see ldquoThe Textrdquo) As Freadman shows uptake is also inevitably a process ofadaptation as a narrative is always judged against a memory and the ldquoadaptationof remembered contents to changed contextsrdquo (41) Such adaptations are then fedinto a continuum of social action While it is tempting to read uptake as translationit may be better considered as the mediation between thresholds and it must bedistinguished from the violence of translation which actually silences competingregimes of mediation that may generate uptakes legitimating other kinds of socialaction Achebersquos use of these senses of uptakemdashand of the violence of translationmdashdemonstrates powerfully how we may begin to apprehend slavery in his ction

Articulations of slavery suppurate at several key incidents but they are suppressed because it is not the enslaved that determine the ensuing uptake5

The value of Freadmanrsquos fashioning of uptake lies in underlining the crucialrole of the law in the fabrication and consolidation of social imaginaries As sheexplains although most citizens would think of the law as being on their sidethe Ryan execution went down in popular imagination as a breach in the sociallyimagined functioning of the law The statersquos abuse of due process created a situ-ation in which citizens realized their image of the law was based upon a sociallyimagined ideal process Uptakes deriving from such deviations from imaginedideals delineate signicant thresholds in the lives of deviating individuals and

communities Such deviations also highlight the imbrications of the law withlegitimating social imaginaries and their implied moral orders Charles Taylordescribes the social imaginary as a composite set of ways in which people imagineand propagate collective social identities through ldquoimages stories and legendsrdquoand other concrete practices that mediate shared understandings of practicesnorms and the communally shared sense of legitimacy The imaginary includes




the sense of how things should be how they should go as well as a shared abilityto recognize infractions against common practice These understandings could be anchored in ldquosome notion of a moral or metaphysical orderrdquo and they become

the ldquolargely unstructured and inarticulate understanding of our whole situationwithin which particular features of our world show up for us in the sense theyhave It can never be adequately expressed in the form of explicit doctrines becauseof its unlimited and indenite naturerdquo (24ndash25) Most important is the materialeffect of these understandings

[Social] imaginaries have a constitutive function that of making possiblethe practices that they make sense of and thus enable In this sense their falsitycannot be total some people are engaging in a form of democratic self-rule evenif not everyone as our comfortable self-legitimations imagine Like all forms of

human imagination the social imaginary can be full of self-serving ction andsuppression but it is an essential constituent of the real It cannot be reducedto an insubstantial dream (Taylor 183)

Although Taylor describes the evolution of Western modernity his elucidationshelp contextualize the forced and chaotic nature of the colonial modernity withwhich Achebe grapples The idealized objectives of Western modernity are rarelyextended to peoples of African-derived descent at the moments of their inceptionThose populations encounter rst the detritus that Simon Gikandi has calledmodernityrsquos counterpoints (10ndash11) In this uneven process the European projectproffers ideals and counterpoints depending upon individuals involved in theencounter The intrusion of colonial forces into Achebersquos ctional worlds createuneven processes of disembedding and re-enchantment secularization alongsidesacralization as well as new spaces of individual self-fashioning that may meetstiff opposition from collectives The tussles between African legal systems andcolonial law in Achebersquos ction serve as a framing device for the ongoing changesin the constitution of social imaginaries since changes in law creates new moralorders and ways of apprehending dissatisfaction with the imagination of the col-lective As Ruth Buchanan and Sundhya Pahuja explain the law as a ldquodiscursiveand institutionalrdquo practice is a crucial medium for imagining constituting and

legitimating communities (261) This is especially true of Achebersquos ctional worldsin which communities sustain the constitutive force of their societies throughadherence to a highly articulated legal system vested in divine sovereignty Thesacralized law recognizes the sovereignty of the people at the same time that itallows the enslavement of others Enslavement and resistance to slavery thuscohere in the same system of maintaining sovereignty according to an inner logic

The relationship of the slave to the law in Achebersquos ction is best graspedthrough the concept of the ldquorights-in-personrdquo but this concept evokes some cor-relations with with Orlando Pattersonrsquos formulation of the radical alienation ofthe slave that results in ldquosocial deathrdquo that needs to be claried The ldquorights-in-

personrdquo also needs to be differentiated from what Mbembe calls the status of thetotal domination and social death that characterizes plantation slavery which inturn is indebted to Agambenrsquos elaboration of the homo sacer Historians of slav-ery in Africa use the concept of ldquorights-in-commodityrdquo or ldquorights-in-personsrdquo tounderstand precisions of legal denition of ownership of life functions Theserights exercised by one person or group exercise over another may ldquocover not just




a personrsquos services but [also] his entire personrdquo (Miers and Kopytoff 7) SuzanneMiers and Igor Kopytoff use the term ldquotransactionsrdquo as applied to formal ldquotrans-fers of rights-in-personsrdquo to capture a range of relations that include kinship and

marriage Although these transfers are quite complex and different they all restupon the transfer of rights towards or over a person and his or her descendantsfrom one group to another within a slavery-to kinship-continuum While variantsof such concepts appear in most societies its extraordinary levels of renementin Africa suggest that categories as ldquopropertyrdquo or ldquosalabilityrdquo may not be usefulin entirely extricating ldquoslaveryrdquo from ldquokinshiprdquo in ldquoAfrican societies in whichrights in wives children and kin-group members are usually acquired throughtransactions involving material transfers and in which kin groups ldquoownrdquo and maydispose of their blood members in ways that Westerners concern appropriate to

ldquopropertyrdquo (Miers and Kopytoff 11) Indeed these rights and transactions are sointricately embedded within the ldquotraditionalrdquo organization of societies that theycomprehend phenomena for which many societies would not use ldquoslaveryrdquo (12)Addressing slavery as practiced in Igboland up to the nineteenth century VictorUchendu identies similar conventions under the rubric of the ldquocommodity rightsrdquopurchased in a person He denes slavery as a ldquocontinuum of status disabilitiesrdquothat varied with the number of ldquocommodity rightsrdquo purchased in a person (123)The crucial issue then is that ldquoslaveryrdquo in African literatures cannot be fully appre-hended by paying attention to representations of ldquoslavesrdquo alone Slavery as Miersand Kopytoff stress must be examined in the contexts of African institutions andpractices and not simply in opposition to freedom Slavery covers a variety ofdimensions of social mobility that may occur in an individualrsquos lifetime or acrossgenerations of his or her descendants Slaves may occupy positions of the harsh-est liminality be intimate members of a kin-group or even hold high office andexercise great inuence To represent slavery in other words is to situate it as it isexperienced within its meaning sustaining world with all the nuances that attendto the legal precisions related to the social thickness of slave life That thicknessappears even in the eloquent ldquosilencerdquo on slavery in Achebersquos ction

THE VIOLENCE OF ABAME AND THE SUPPURATION OF SLAVERY

The six references to ldquoslaveryrdquo in Things Fall Apart delineate how its meaningsdepend upon the relationships between individuals or communities These rangefrom ties of kinship to contractual labor relations forced subordination andimprisonment loss of sovereignty and social exclusion Achebe arranges therelationships between these terms through the fundamental juxtaposition ofassociations between Mbaino Umuoa Abame and the conquering Europeanpower While each community stands in a reexive chain of subordination to theother each is also rmly embedded in a life world that precludes an emphaticcomprehension of the otherrsquos subordination Achebe epitomizes this modality of

juxtaposed incompatible historical experiences central to his novel through thenarrative of Abame events of great import happen in a meaning-sustaining orderthat is destroyed and overwritten by another conquering order Each subsequentnarration occurs within a different legitimizing ethical system As Robert M Wrensuggests the narrative of Abame is the symbolization of a past event Historicallythe Abam warriors procured slaves in raids for the Aro slave traders (Ohadike 447)




Thus while the relationship between the Abam and Abame is not explicit in ThingsFall Apart that inconclusive nature could be read as part of Achebersquos use of ironicallusionsmdashthe historical function of the Abam warriors is revisited explicitly in

Arrow of God (15 133 160 203) The historical antecedent for the Abame narrativewas probably the murder of D F Stewart and the punitive Bende-Onitsha Expe-dition (Wren 15) The punitive expedition is part of a British colonial tradition ofcollective punishment against the Aro who were involved in slave trading His-torians have of course pointed out that these punitive expeditions were muchmore about colonial conquest abolition also functioned as legitimation of colonialconquest The people of Umuoa however do not register the Abam as slaveraiders but as refugees eeing the destruction of their homeland The historicalpast is resettled within a different ethical framework

This narrative of Abame underlines the crucial linkage between slavery andsovereignty in Achebersquos ction By dispossessing the Abam of their right to self-determination colonial terror transposes the previous meanings of the AbamInsofar as Abame circulates in Achebersquos ctional world as a form of ldquooriginaryrdquoencounter with the terror of European modernity the effacement of its histori-cal connection to slavery creates a form of counterfactual interface in which themeanings of slavery are always doubled between a changing African world andthe impending colonial modernity in Achebersquos ction In Things Fall Apart thesilence on Abamersquos possible connection with slavery demonstrates ironically theway colonial violence upstages the violence of slave raids Because the people ofAbame arrive in Umuoa as refugees and become objects of empathy their pastdeeds recede into a ldquosuppressedrdquo moral order In fact the empathy of Umuoa forthe Abam underscores the fact that Umuoa itself is in all likelihood a slave raid-ing terror to other communities In No Longer at Ease Achebe revisits the silenceon slavery in Umuoa through a series of explicit analogies between the warlikenatures of Abame and Umuoa (No Longer 8 186) Indeed the similarities between

ldquowarlikerdquo peoples of Umuoa and Abame emerge specically in the latter novelThe people of Umuoa are ldquovery proud of its past when it was the terror of theirneighbors before the white men came and leveled everybody downrdquo (No Longer 5) But the narrative of Things Fall Apart already reveals the deep kinship relations

between Abame and Umuoa

ldquoAbame has been wiped outrdquo said Obierika ldquoIt is a strange and terrible story If Ihad not seen the few survivors with my own eyes and heard their story with myown ears I would not have believedrdquo ldquo Most of them were sons of our land whose

mothers had been buried with us But there were some too who came because they had friends in our town and others who could think of nowhere else open to escapeAnd so they ed into Umuoa with a woeful storyrdquo ldquoBut I am greatly afraid We have heard stories about white men who madethe powerful guns and the strong drinks and took slaves away across the seas

but no one thought the stories were truerdquo ldquoThere is no story that is not truerdquo said Uchendu ldquoThe world has no endand what is good among one people is an abomination with others We havealbinos among us Do you not think that they came to our clan by mistake thatthey have strayed from their way to a land where everybody is like themrdquo(138ndash41 emphasis added)




Uchendursquos remark underlines Obierikarsquos indirect allusion to the deep-seatedconnection between Umuoa and Abame Umuoa represents for Abame whatMbanta represents for Okonkwo In other words Umuoa may only remember

its own ldquoimperialismsrdquomdashie its slaving pastmdashthrough indirect circumlocutorynarration

The careful contextualization of the terror of domestic slavery in relation tothe violence of colonial conquest expresses Achebersquos crucial point as one systemof subordination conjugates another the ensuing alterations creates compet-ing moral orders in which events can only be understood and expressed with ateleological clarity by suppressing all contradictions Slavery however was verymuch part of the historical events Achebe addresses Wren affirms in his study ofAchebersquos ction that slavery was part of the moral justication for the ldquopacicationrdquoof Igboland although economic ldquoactivity may in fact have taken precedence overthe war on slaveryrdquo (18) In 1902 the British subdued the Aro and destroyed theLong Juju Oracle (ibinokpabi) that functioned as a last court of appeal But therewere in fact continued punitive expeditions for the next fteen years (Ohadike 448)Thus if slavery does not appear explicitly in the novel it is because it is embed-ded in the structure of a civil ordermdashthe system of social cohesion based on localcodes of justice and morality anchored within shared mechanisms of politicalimagination Elizabeth Isichie in her volume on Igboland history contextualizeshow slave raiding contributed to a general degree of insecurity that became partof the social fabric (42ndash67 75ndash110) She suggests that while the rise of the Atlanticslave trade distorted the already existing patterns of slavery and created insecu-rity and a militarization of everyday life the effects of slavery had an apparentcontradictory nature In as much as the capture export or domestic enslavementof people created a general atmosphere of insecurity there were corollary ldquoben-ecialrdquo transformations in economic life The increase in slave raiding and itscessation were invariably deeply enmeshed in the new colonial crisis

In effect the fates of Ikemefuna and Okonkwo demonstrate the fusion of poli-tics and religion through the sacricial logic underpinning the novel Both Mbainoand Umuoa ldquosacricerdquo members of their communities for self-preservation andin recognition of a superior subjugating power Taken together the conjoining of

political expediency and sacral-religious nature of sacrice offers crucial insightinto the life worlds of slavery in Achebersquos ction Once given away to allay thewrath of Umuoa Ikemefuna essentially oscillates between the status of a com-munity slave and a son to Okonkwo until the oracle decrees his death Achebeorchestrates a differentiation of the life worlds in which slavery is embeddedthrough the repetition of slave in propinquity to other forms of social relations

Sometimes when [Okonkwo] went to big village meetings or communal ances-tral feasts he allowed Ikemefuna to accompany him like a son carrying his stooland his goatskin bag And indeed Ikemefuna called him father (28 emphasisadded)

The elders and grandees of the village sat on their own stools brought here bytheir young sons or slaves Okonkwo was among them (46 emphasis added)




And so [Mr Brown] built a school and a little hospital in Umuoa He went fromfamily to family begging people to send their children to his school But at rstthey only sent their slaves or sometimes their lazy children (181 emphasis added)

All evocations demonstrate the interdigitation of slavery and kinship The rsttwo passages delineate Ikemefunarsquos indeterminate status in relation to Okonkwoand the community Whereas Okonkwo allows him to behave like a son onceOkonkwo is in company of other eldersmdashin the second passagemdashit becomesunclear who considers Ikemefuna a son or a slave when they emerge into publiclife The third passage again reveals another association between children andslaves in the villagersquos value regulating system Here the emphasis on lazy sug-gests the value of progeny lies in their contribution to the family fortunes Thussending lazy children and slaves to the white manrsquos school underscores their

interchangeabilityOf course the enslaved do not experience their expendability or the contin-

gency attending their lives with the communityrsquos emotional distance The narratordescribes Ikemefunarsquos experience of deracination and introduction into a state ofsuspension in detail The description of Ikemefunarsquos feelings is nothing less thanthe life world of an enslaved child inhabiting an undened statusmdashOkonkworeplicates similar feelings in exile but he never quite grasps Ikemefunarsquos senti-ments The way Achebe plots Ikemefunarsquos inability to comprehend the eventsleading to his uprooting and his painful acclimatization in Okonkworsquos householdis contrasted to the indifference of the larger community that ldquoseemed to forget all

about him as soon as they had taken the decisionrdquo (28) Ikemefuna oscillates in anembryonic status between kinship and cult slave As John Oriji explains as one ofthe oldest forms of slavery in Igboland cult slavery is very much imbricated withreligious and political power The meanings of slavery thus emerge in what Orijicalls the ldquosacerdotal realmrdquo of political and religious power (122) While this com-

bination of religious and political power is most pertinent to the fate of Ikemefunait is also pertinent to the larger fate of Umuoa in terms of the desacralization ofits world through the destruction of its political sanctity

The fate of Ikemefuna can be understood as one instance of transfer of theldquorights-in-personrdquo as compensation for the homicide committed by a man fromMbaino Such practices as Miers and Kopytoff point out were part of legal dis-pensation in some African communities (13) Following the transfer of rights-in-person the transferred will remain in a status of marginality until the acquiringgroup determines what is to be done with him That person may be handed overto a caregiver until such a time Thus the acquired becomes a kind of non-personin legal status As James Vaughn explains with specic reference to the Margisocieties had detailed processes of incorporating their slaves into the desired formof integration Vaughn describes this nely balanced contradictory mechanismof marginality and integration the ldquolimbic institutionrdquo (100) This institution of

formalized marginality helped maintain social boundaries that may otherwise be lost The vacillating relationship between Okonkwo and Ikemefuna outlinesthe distinctions between the latterrsquos ldquomarginality-in-kinshiprdquo and ldquomarginality-to-societyrdquo Although an acquired person will rst be marginal within his hostkin group as well as his host society the marginality-in-kinship may change asthe acquired is absorbed into a kin-group His change in kinship marginality




may however not necessarily affect the marginality-to-society since this lattermarginality served to consolidate and preserve a generalized social identity of

ldquoslaverdquo Miers and Kopytoff explain the movement of an acquired person moved

through the limbic institution as a process of slave social mobility that includedthe dimensions of ldquoformal [legal] statusrdquo ldquoinformal affectrdquo and the dimension of

ldquoworldly achievement and successrdquo The differences in these forms of slave mobil-ity are crucial in Things Fall Apart The ldquostatus mobilityrdquo of an acquired persondelineates the process of ldquoinformal incorporationrdquo into the receiving group Sucha person could for example become someonersquos slave and come into a specic for-malized relationship with corresponding rights and privileges This formalizedrelationship may change over time for the individual or his descendants with therecognition of additional rights and privilegesmdashsuch as the prohibition of resaleIn intergenerational terms the individualrsquos descendants could be recognized as

ldquofreerdquo and become fully-edged members of the acquisitor clan But the actual for-mal status of an acquired may not necessarily encapsulate his everyday situationHence the categories of ldquoaffective mobilityrdquo ldquoaffective marginalityrdquo ldquoaffectiveincorporationrdquo and ldquowordly success mobilityrdquo become necessary implements toassess the slaversquos lived life in opposition to his legal standing

[A slaversquos] affective mobility leads to a reduction in his affective marginality and tohis greater affective incorporation This change is in the sphere of emotion andsentiment rather than formal and legal codes It has to do with the esteem andaffection in which he is held and the way he is treated An acquired outsider for

example may be warmly accepted by his acquisitor lineage and come to be heldin high regard yet his formal rights may remain entirely unchanged He mayfor example still be legally liable to be resold [or even killed like Ikemefuna]even though his masters would never consider doing it His worldly successmobility means changes toward a better style of life more political inuenceand even more control over greater wealth all which reduce the marginality ofhis everyday existence and indicate success in the business of things Needlessto say this may occur with or without any change in either his formal status orhis affective incorporation (19ndash20)

In such a situation of great variance over the meanings and everyday manifesta-tions of slavery writers could either pen ethnographic ction that would explainall contextual differences or suppress ethnographic contextualization as is thecase in Things Fall Apart

Whereas the ldquoenslavementrdquo of Ikemefuna eludes Okonkwo he comes closeto grasping the loss of sovereignty as a form of enslavement through the repeatedpropinquity of slavery and Abame The function of this proximity has its moststriking effect on Okonkwo during his exile

Kotma of the ash buttocks He is t to be a slave

The white man has no sense He is t to be a slave (175)

This song appears in Obierikarsquos account to the exiled Okonkwo of events inUmuoa There is an irony in that invocation of slavery This song of derision




essentially constitutes the reaction of the men of Umuoa to their subjugationand undignied treatment by the British colonizers and their court messengersThus the irony of the song as the futile resort of the conquered strikes Okonkwo

forcefully the people may well consider the court messengers t to be slaves but from Okonkworsquos perspective the men of Umuoa are being treated as slavesHence in a rare display of despondency Okonkwo bows his head in sadness (175)Okonkworsquos despondency results from what he considers loss of sovereignty Asif to reinforce this point he immediately reects upon the reasons for the newweakness of Umuoarsquos men and discards Obierikarsquos proffered lesson from thedestruction of Abame

ldquoHave you not heard how the white man wiped out Abamerdquo asked ObierikaldquoI have heardrdquo said Okonkwo ldquoBut I have also heard that Abame people were

weak and foolish Why did they not ght back Had they no guns and machetesWe would be cowards to compare ourselves with the men of Abame Theirfathers had never dared stand up before our ancestors We must ght these menand drive them from the landrdquo (175ndash76)

This is in effect the second mention of Abame in proximity to slavery in the novelThe rst allusion occurs in the episode in which Obierika discusses the destructionof Abame (137ndash41) The manner in which this reference to slavery occurs in thecontext of what is essentially a cautionary tale highlights the function of caution-ary tales in Achebersquos ction they are for all intents and purposes reexive narra-

tives that test or attest to a characterrsquos level of consciousness or lack thereof Eventssimilar to those in Abame overcome Umuoa but Umuoans heed the lessonand refrain from attacking the white man The dialogue about slaves in the NewWorld and the contingent nature of abominations circumscribes the instability ofthe locus of power and as a consequence the shifting patterns of signication onslavery But the way this reference to transatlantic slavery is coupled to Obierikarsquos

great fear evokes correlations with Ikemefunarsquos own fear immediately after beingintroduced into Okonkworsquos household (28) Indirectly then the narrative raisesa subterranean exploration of the elusive conjugations between slavery colonial-ism and sovereignty Obierikarsquos fear foreshadows the manners in which the

community will go through a symbolic process of conversion similar to IkemefunarsquosThe coupling of slavery and sovereignty in Things Fall Apart is thus part

of a carefully wrought plan Umuoa as Gikandi suggests has a clear patternof zones of inclusion and exclusion that is suddenly subverted by colonization(48ndash49) Consequently as much as the rst ve references to slavery touch upon thechanging nature of political power and self-ownership the last reference rightlyconcerns the emergence of new identities for cult slaves in the fold of ChristianityThe conversation between Mr Kiaga and new converts of Umuoa is not simply atussle over the meanings of osu but a demonstration of the violence of translation

These outcasts or osu seeing that the new religion welcomed twins andsuch abominations thought that it was possible that they would also be receivedAnd so one Sunday two of them went into the church The whole churchraised a protest and was about to drive these people out when Mr Kiagastopped them and began to explain




ldquoBefore Godrdquo he said ldquothere is no slave or free We are all children of Godand we must receive these our brothersrdquo ldquoYou do not understandrdquo the convert maintained ldquoYou are our teacher and

you can teach us the things of the new faith But this is the matter which weknowrdquo And he told them what an osu was (156)

In the free indirect discourse that follows the last sentence an authorial voiceexplains the meanings of osu as living practice in a whole paragraph Mr Kiagareduces all those nuances into the word slave Whereas the osu and the domesticslaves gradually nd new identities that allow new spaces of affirmation thecomplex issue of lost narratives in the Ikemefuna episode focalized throughIkemefunarsquos own lack of an interpretative paradigm for events that befall him aswell as the unrecorded narrative of the girl that accompanied him underscores

Achebersquos attention to the consequences of setting a stable normative center throughwhich to focalize an African historical experience of which slavery is part Moreimportant the operations of the osu system as part of a legal dispensation areseemingly conned to a so-called traditional world while the deities to which theosu are dedicated are without their legal underpinning in the modern world Theparagraph of free indirect discourse explaining the worlding of the osu functionsas a counterpoint to the district commissionerrsquos paragraph on Okonkwo Whilethe former expands a word into a paragraph the other compresses a life into aparagraph The inverse proportion of amplication versus simplication hints atthe thresholds at which African conceptions become modied as they enter the

colonial dispensation

SLAVERY AND THE DISLOCATED SACERDOTALKINSHIP AS DISCURSIVE LAW

As much as no slave character gains voice in Things Fall Apart any critique of thisomission must be coupled with a question Under which conditions does the voiceof the slave or former slave enter circulation within any given social order Achebedoes not answer this question but demonstrates how the disembedding of thesacerdotal realm banishes certain surface realities such as ritual slave sacrice and

the necessity for the osu to maintain their unkempt hair Christianity and behindit the military force of the British gives the osu the space in which to fashion newidentities that remain in articulation with the discarded osu identities in the so-called traditional sphere Put differently the treatment of slavery in the novels elu-cidates Mahmood Mamdanirsquos notion of the theoretical bifurcated modern versustraditional Africa developed in his Citizen and Subject As Mamdani argues theBritish colonial administrationrsquos system of indirect rule implicated a bifurcationof political dispensations There was on the one hand the native law and customsand on the other hand the colonial law and administrationmdashwhich will later

become the independent nation-state The resulting bifurcation of legal dispensa-tions is omnipresent in Achebersquos ction and must be understood as a set of con-icting legal domains in which articulations of slavery have different meaningsThus in Achebersquos novels African legal systems recognize the rights-in-personconcept associated with slavery while the colonial and postcolonial state does notAlthough this co-presence could be plotted in narrative and consequently read as




the spectral afterlives of slavery and colonial modernity in Africa I read it as thethreshold and sign of the interpenetrations of the bifurcated systems and theirrespective uptakes of African dispensations displaced into spaces of alterity Cer-

tain aspects of social life do not move easily across the threshold and it is at suchmoments of gridlock that the traditional demonstrates its effective hold throughthe sudden appearance of its individual uptakes Especially since the extremephysical violations that index the rights-in-person just about disappears slaveryoperates as a vestigial remain that Anthony Appiah has described as a stigmamarking the hidden afterlives of African slaveries (254) Achebe demonstratesartfully the operative force of this vestigial remains by creating parallelmdashAfricanand colonialmdashremains in Arrow of God and especially in No Longer at Ease In asense the logic of sacrice that inheres in Things Fall Apart runs through the latternovels however its sacral and undisputed nature in the former is already beingcorrupted in Arrow of God and in No Longer at Ease it simply operates as unnamableforce that nevertheless possesses effective materiality

Olakunle George extends Mamdanirsquos notion of a bifurcated Africa to revealthe pattern of never-ending translation in Arrow of God He suggests key scenesdramatize ldquothe complexities of conversion and translation both understood asmotions of historical becomingrdquo (349) The conversation on slavery in the twonovels subsists in this larger process of what George calls conversion Of courseas demonstrated powerfully in the conversation on the osu between Mr Kiagaand his converts translation is never complete or successful but generates thesurface meaning or the truth events needed by competing communities whilerelocating other competing meanings into the sphere What George calls ldquotensionsrdquoand ldquoepiphaniesrdquo are thus markers of the thresholds of uptake As he points outthe bifurcation of the African nation-state into dual epistemic orders creates aneducated elite and teeming millions incorporated into state structures throughtribal identity This bifurcation is also uid since the elite also participate withinthe traditional or switch codes in the continuum between the traditional and themodernmdashlearning English French or Portuguese does not mean Africans forgetAfrican languages or the various creoles that structure living linguistic practiceRather this bifurcation hardens and dissolves according to the lawmdashor the con-

stituting powersmdashof the object in translation In fact the ascendancy of one overthe other tradition over the modern creates the epiphanies in questionThis concept of a tussle over thresholds of impossible translation appears

in Arrow of Godmdashand even more so in No Longer at Easemdashas the juxtapositions ofslavery and the logic of sacrice At the end of Things Fall Apart the African worldhas lost jurisprudence over political power leaving only the religious power ofthe sacerdotal realm Arrow of God charts the erosion of that religious power andNo Longer at Ease charts how the sacerdotal operates within the remains of kinshiprules Hence in Arrow of God the recurrent intimations of slavery appear in rela-tion to the transformationsmdashor translationsmdashof sacrice the necessary legitimi-

zation of such transformations as well as its explicit reference to the private sphereof kinship as the realm that confers the powers of transformation This reexiveiteration of sacrice gains its constituting (and indeed constitutional) power in thenarrative from what can be described as the ldquooriginaryrdquo human sacrice at theformation of the community in a now mythical past




In the very distant past when lizards were still few and far between the sixvillagesmdashUmuachala Umunneora Umuagu Umuezeani Umuogwugwu andUmuisiuzomdashlived as different peoples and each worshipped its own deity The

hired soldiers of Abam used to strike in the dead of the night set re to the houses andcarry men women and children into slavery Things got so bad for the six villagesthat their leaders came together to save themselves They hired a strong team ofmedicine-men to install a common deity for them This deity which the fathersof the six villages made was called Ulu Half of the medicine was buried at aplace which became the Nkwo market and the other half was thrown into thestream which became Mili Ulu The six villages then took the name of Umuaroand the priest of Ulu became their Chief Priest From that day they were neveragain beaten by an enemy (Arrow 14ndash15 emphasis added)

Slavery thus gains its salience through its unspoken association with subservience

and its opposition to sovereignty The villagers essentially found a new commu-nity grounded in a fear of enslavement by the Abam Ulu then becomes a formof ikengamdashthe life-constituting force of the community and its link to ancestorsmdashthat protects against the Abam Readers may remember that the great medicinecreated by Umuaro consisted in part of a human being from the community AsEzeulu explains times of emergence may need urgent measures such as humansacrice (133) While it may be absent as a force in public life slavery operates asthe occulted counterpoint to sovereignty and self-ownership In other words theopposition to slavery operates as the foundational logic of the communityrsquos politi-cal system The infractions against a personrsquos ownership of the self are thus notsimply rare but their appearances also crystallize the unspoken law of UmuaroIt is against this fundamental narrative of community creation that all referencesto slavery and sovereignty gain meaning

A number of distinctive features about the references to slavery bear men-tion Unlike in Things Fall Apart where slaves are members of the communityslavery appears as a relic in Arrow of God or is simply silenced Hence it appearsin proverbs and warnings that refer to the terror of an ancient time anterior tothe constitution of the community (15 26 27 108 160) The single reference to thepractice of enslavement in Umuaro refers to the abolishment of the institution by

the father of the present Chief Priest (133) The constant reiteration of the absenceof slaves also emerges in a reference to its manifestation in the public The twopassages reveal the differences between slavery in Umuoa and in Umuaro Therst passage from Arrow of God ldquorevisitsrdquo a similar passage in Things Fall Apart

The meeting [of elders and ndichie] began as fowls went to roost and continuedinto the night Had it been a day meeting children who had brought their fatherrsquosstools would have been playing on the outskirts of the market place waitingfor the end of the meeting to carry the stools home again But no father took hischild to a night meeting Those who lived near the market place carried theirstools themselves the others carried goatskins rolled up under the arm (Arrow

141ndash42 emphasis added)

In view of the repeated association between stools slaves and children in ThingsFall Apart (46) the elaborate attention to the children and stools at the politicalmeeting in Umuaro hints at the possible presence of slaves in that community But




if slavery does not operate visibly in Umuaro the foundational logic that is consti-tuted through the human sacrice against slavery surfaces repeatedly as a seriesof allusions to the connections between the contingency of self-ownership and the

contingency of sovereignty Hence the numerous references to slavery emerge incontexts in which the power or limits of self-ownership need to be determinedInvariably such contexts are intrinsically linked to sacrice which functions asthe ultimate means of assuring self-ownership or life (157ndash58)

In his reading of Arrow of God Mark Mathuray details elaborately the world-constituting function of the repetitions of sacrice in Achebersquos reexive novelTurning to Emile Benvenistersquos use of the ambiguous character of homo sacer as both ldquopollutedrdquo and ldquodivinerdquo he reveals that the guremdashembodied in the personof Ezeulumdashis essential to what Gikandi describes in the context of Umuoa asthe ldquozones of exclusion and inclusionrdquo crucial to social order In Arrow of God thepolarities of exclusion and inclusion are invested in the sacred person of Ezeuluwho functions as mythical hero and sacricial victim The sacred is thus not onlyintimately connected to divine power for citizens of Umuaro but it is also thesymbol of sovereignty Read thus the political tussle between Nwaka and Ezeulusymbolize contrapuntal mappings of the impending reconstitution of the sacerdo-tal realm Both the European administration and Umuaro are asserting forms ofrights-in-person over Ezeulu This point emerges for example in the opposition between Ezeulursquos reference to his possible death as human sacrice at the burialof Winterbottom and the command by the leaders of Umuaro that he ldquoeatrdquo ldquodeathrdquo(167 208) Nwaka the priest of Idemili sums up the issue as a constitutional battleto ensure the separation of political and religious power

ldquoWe have no quarrel with Ulu He is still our protector even though we no longerfear Abam warriors at night But I will not see with these eyes of mine his priestmaking himself lord over us My father told me many things but he did not tellme that Ezeulu was king in Umuarordquo (Arrow 27)

Nwaka in essence explains the necessity for change the demise of the threat ofslave-raiders augurs a new world in which Ulu is of less use Ezeulu apprehendsthe possibility that Ulu might be abandoned much clearer in his dream (160) Since

this essentially takes place at the end of the narrative the new world augured bythe decline of Ezeulu and the relegation of Ulu is the conversion to the sacriceof Christ (230) Yet the conversion to Christian sacrice doubles as a veiled inter-face between Umuaro and the European world On one hand it hints at the newdisjuncture between the colonial law and the sacred that promises a disenchant-ment of modernity On the other hand that impending modernity appears incounterpoint to earlier forms of contact between Europe and Africa through the

ldquoself-stylingrdquo of Africans converted into new beings in the novel Moses Unach-ukwu and John Nwokida (47 169ndash70) If Moses plots his encounter with Europeansin Onitsha as a sojourn in Egypt what is evoked is the context of Jewish enslave-ment in and deliverance from Egypt Beyond the blatant biblical allusion in Johnrsquosname his narrative testies to the benets of European commerce Submerged

between these two narratives of trade Christianity and deliverance from slaveryis the suppressed history embodied by the conspicuously silent West Indian mis-sionary Blackett who impresses Oduchemdashthe son Ezeulu sacrices to the white




manmdashbecause it ldquowas said that this black man had more knowledge than whitemenrdquo (46) Ultimately then the originary ight from slave-raids and Umuarorsquoshuman sacrice to ward off enslavement nds their counterpoint in the missing

narrative of the West Indian missionary The horror that occurs between the Afri-can ight from slave raids and the diasporic return from Atlantic slavery appearsas the enchantment that refuses complete domestication Achebersquos portrayal of the

ldquocounterfactualrdquomdashas supposed to simply contrapuntalmdashrelations to slavery do notsimply mark the heteronomous nature of memories of slavery It also indicates thedifferent temporalities and discrete uptakes of slavery across the diaspora

SLAVERY MODERNITY AND TEMPORALITIES OF UNEASE

Perhaps more than anything else No Longer at Ease addresses the fracturedtemporalities of colonial modernity and the seemingly counterfactual parallelworlds they engender Slavery symbolized by the mistranslated osu institutionmarks the insurmountable obstacle between the traditional and the modernmdashinfact the eradication of the stigma becomes the measuring plank for the progresstowards civilization (86) Obi Okonkwo bears an inverted similarity to Blakett heis a returnee from an encounter with Europe his journey is plotted as a journeyto the spirit world (58ndash59) However the returnee now encounters the suppressedpast as an archaic relic As readers know No Longer at Ease revolves around twoseemingly unrelated narratives in which Obi Okonkwo participates In the rstnarrative he arrives from Great Britain as a graduate with a promising career inthe civil service but is arrested and sentenced for accepting bribes In the secondand almost tangential narrative Obi decides to marry Clara an osu and seemsparticularly determined once he has the rst of many opponents to his objective(82) These two strands come together as Gikandi suggests in terms of Obirsquos searchfor the proper moral codes he needs to function in a Nigeria he does not under-stand (Reading Achebe 85ndash87) Obi Okonkwo like his grandfather functions withinimaginaries other than that of the worlds around him In effect Gikandirsquos readingof the novel returns us to the question of moral order I invoked at the beginning ofthis essay The Nigeria Achebe describes in this novel is an inchoate process from

which his characters are alienated In many respects Obi shares with his grandfa-ther Okonkwo the inability to grasp the transformations of social imaginaries orthe multiplicity of moral orders in which he is placed Thus like his grandfather heorchestrates his own ruin But while Obirsquos insistence could be read as Obirsquos inabil-ity to switch codes as his fellow Nigerians seem to do my emphasis on slaveryleads me to read the resonances and repetitions between Things Fall Apart and NoLonger Ease around the mutually conjugating issues of slavery sacrice kinshipand sovereignty as part of a deliberate meditation on slavery

As Don Ohadike explains the osu had a particular status in an elaboratelyarticulated system of unfree persons They were persons dedicated to a deity who

could neither be killed nor sold but had freedom of movement They could notassociate with or marry the freeborn and despite their apparent freedom theywere thought to be socially inferior to chattel slaves because they could neveraspire to ldquothe status of a freebornrdquo (438ndash39) In as much as the osu are not slaves theonly way Achebe can demonstrate their specic status is by demonstrating howthe institution survivesmdashas a vestige of the sacerdotal realm within kinshipmdashwell




beyond the abolition of slavery Thus the signicance of the juxtaposition of thenarratives of the bribe and the osu is that the former nds an uptakemdashin the senseof the law capturing and transforming Obirsquos lifemdashwhile the other disappears in

the narrative although the life of an unborn child is destroyed In other wordsthe law of the colonial state codies and operates upon a moral order distinct fromthe vestigial moral order in which tradition operates

The particular relationship of the abortion as a death in a reexive chain ofiterations emerges in the way the trial in all but name within the family inects a crucialscene between Okonkworsquos son and grandson Obi and Nwoye with sacrice

ldquoWhen they brought me word that he had hanged himself I told them that thosewho live by the sword must perish by the sword Mr Braddeley thought Ispoke the white manrsquos messenger whom my father had killed He did not know

I spoke about Ikemefuna with whom I grew up in my motherrsquos hut until theday came when my father killed him with his own handsrdquo Obi knew the sad story of Ikemefuna who was given to Umuoa by herneighbors in appeasement Obirsquos father and Ikemefuna became inseparable Butone day the Oracle of the Hills and Caves decreed that the boy should be killedObirsquos grandfather loved the boy But when the moment came it was his matchetthat cut him down (157ndash58)

There are several uptakes in these passages and the contrast between themunderlines the function of repetition as a device of extrapolation In the rst para-graph as Nwoye and Mr Braddeley place themselves in different moral ordersthrough their affiliation with different victims they demonstrate their affectiverelationships to violent events

Achebe emphasizes the private nature of Nwoyersquos grief through the rehearsalof Obirsquos received memory of the event Nwoyersquos pain never becomes as palpableto his son who receives the narrative second-hand As much as Nwoye recountshis pain at Ikemefunarsquos death in order to underline the stress of his conversion toChristianity he now uses his suffering during conversion to underline his adher-ence to an element of Igbo tradition that causes Obi great pain The latter cannotmarry Clara the mother of his unborn child because she is osu

ldquoWe are Christians [Nwoye] said ldquoBut that is no reason to marry an osurdquoldquoThe Bible says that in Christ there are no bond or freerdquoldquoMy sonrdquo said Okonkwo ldquoI understand what you say But this thing is deeperthan you thinkrdquo

ldquoWhat is this thing Our fathers in their darkness and ignorance called an inno-cent man osu a thing given to idols and thereafter he became an outcast and hischildren and his childrenrsquos children forever But have we not seen the light ofthe Gospelrdquo Obi used the very words that his father might have used in talkingto his heathen kinsmen (151)

These are not just words that the father might have used the conversation rehearsesalmost verbatim the conversation on the same subject in Things Fall Apart Howeverthe realm of kinship now harbors a material power that even Obi perceives in a

ldquoheathenrdquo song offered by a woman ldquowho had been married into the village afterhe had gone to Englandrdquo




He that has a brother must hold him to his heartFor a kinsman cannot be bought in the marketNeither is a brother bought with money (146ndash47)

In terms of narrative action this song immediately precedes the conversationin which Nwoye forbids the desecration of the kinship through marriage Thelarger irony Obi might have recognized or not is that phrase ldquohad been marriedrdquoindicates a forceful nature alluding to the common consideration that a womanwho marries away from her into a village or clan where she has no kin was beingenslaved6 These torturous reexive maneuvers stress the inverted relationship

between osu and Ikemefunarsquos captivity as part of a complex system of exclusionstranslated into English as ldquoslaveryrdquo In an inverted sense whereas Ikemefunaundergoes affective mobility but retains his marginality-in-society Igbo society

maintains an affective distance from Clara although she cannot be marginalizedwithin the nation-state The violence of slavery resides thus in a stigma of whichthe uptake is an effective death sentence for the unborn

Yet the gesture towards the virtual on which the Achebersquos conversation onslavery ends signals the importance of beginning evaluations of the afterlivesof slavery from within what my selected epigraphs elucidate as their entangle-ments within local cultural-historical settings Invariably constantly emergingnarratives of slaveryrsquos multiple manifestations and legacies respond to locatedforms of animus Thus Achebersquos attention to the actual social acceptance andlegitimization of a form of what we now call slavery is instructive for learning

how the institution was transformed and subsided into a seemingly imperceptiblesocial stratum Among other things what Achebe teaches us is that with historicalpractices we may best begin by paying attention to their affective and powerfulvestigial remains In order words Obierikarsquos reection about the veracity of sto-ries about slaves taken over the seas should not be read as a silence on transatlanticslavery Rather it is part of the reexive play of differance in the text On one levelObierikamdashand perhaps in extension Achebemdashdoes not presume to be able to tellthat story for them On the other and much more signicant level since Obierikalives in an oral culture that reection is a meta-ctional nod to the larger worldof storiesmdashsuch as the slave and neo-slave narrativesmdashwith which Things Fall Apart is in articulation Most important the feared loss of sovereignty apparentin Obierikarsquos sudden awareness of the slaves ldquotaken awayrdquo underlines how theimpending formal colonization functions as the bridgehead for Africans into Euro-pean modernity This revelation of slavery in practice in the ction of Achebe isnot a silence on slavery It promotes an examination of slavery as it was embeddedwithin a now altered moral order Obierikarsquos reference to the slaves taken away isthe only instance when any citizen of Umuoa utters the word slavemdashall other ref-erences except for Mr Kiagarsquos simply occur in narrative As such it is Obierikarsquosimplicit recognition of injustice of the sanctioned practice within Umuoarsquos moral

order The slave is seen shown felt but we are never given an unproblematic voiceto reclaim and press into service in our own moral order Achebe points to thenecessity to consider imaginaries as materially affective entities and to locate howvestigial afterlives of historical practices such as slavery are now legitimized orocculted within our unfolding present It is perhaps in recognition of Achebersquos




achievement that a host of Nigerian writers writing in the wake of the return todemocratic rule in 1999 invariably make allusions to Achebersquos ctional worlds asthey investigate the new values of human life and labor within the twenty-rst-

century cultures of commerce law and governance called globalization7

NOTES

1 A version of this paper was presented at the African Literatures Association2009 conference in Burlington VT I would like to thank Ato Quayson Nandini DharEldon V Birthwright Sandra Richards and Anthonia Kalu for their comments I thankalso Germain Hamel and Trina Ojo for listening to my endless ruminations on thegrammars of slavery I am grateful to Adeleke Adeeko for his patience and his encour-agement as I worked through the issues in Achebersquos attention to slavery This paper isdedicated to the memory of my father Matthew Adeyemi Osinubi

2 For this type of analysis see Ogundele Opoku-Agyemang and BorgomanoThese essays are quite different in their analysis of the ldquosilencerdquo on slavery and I havesomewhat simplied the nuances of the authors for a lack of space Besides theseessays need to be placed in a sustained dialogue with alternative conceptualizationsof memories of slavery in work produced by Modupe Olaogun Christopher MillerAnne Bailey Bayo Holsey Achille Mbembe and writers in the collection of essays inthe edited volume Africa and Trans-Atlantic Memories of Slavery I attend to these largercontexts in my book project

3 For one such argument see especially chapters three and four of Lamin SanehrsquosAbolitionists Abroad For an alternative view compare Christopher Leslie Brownrsquos criticalassessment of the contradictory hopes of formerly enslaved Africans and Europeans inchapter ve ldquoAfrica Africans and the Idea of Abolitionrdquo in his Moral Capital Founda-tions of British Abolitionism For treatments of returnees in ction see Ayi Kwei ArmahrsquosFragments or Syl Cheney Cokerrsquos The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar Of course othernovelists use an inverse trope of the returnee that was captured but did not make theAtlantic crossing In these novels such as Amos Tutuolarsquos My Life in the Bush of Ghosts Yaw Boatengrsquos The Return and Obi Akwanirsquos March of Ages the returnees are dedicatedto forging ldquoAfrican modernitiesrdquo with new forms of kinship

4 I will not be treating the novels in the order in which they were published butin the order of the historical periods they cover

5 Freadmanrsquos fashioning of ldquouptakerdquo deserves a much more elaborate engage-

ment than I am able to offer in this paper It is a reading of J L Austinrsquos How to DoThings with Words alongside Judith Butlerrsquos theorization of the politics of performativespeech in Excitable Speech What I try to suggest in this paper is that the contexts of anti-imperial agitations in which Achebe wrote necessitated a particular mode of writingthat paid attention to African slavery at the same time it needed to avoid legitimizingcolonial conquest Freadmanrsquos use of the speech act in connection to an execution thatmost people considered unfair is useful for considering how the human being is pro-duced as a slave and the whole process is regarded as legitimate in any society Whatis important here is that it is the very people who consider the law as working for themthat ldquoturn againstrdquo the same law It is only through this deviation that we perceive anotherwise normalized valuation of human life I attend to the nuances of Freadmanrsquos

essay and its connections to the formation of social imaginaries in which the valuesof the human are embedded in a forthcoming account of the new uptakes of slaveryin Nigerian ction after 1999

6 Anthonia Kalu in conversation7 For a discussion of ways in which slavery is ldquorememberedrdquo in contemporary

Nigerian ction see my ldquoGridlock and Political Signication in African Post-SlaveryNarrativesrdquo paper presented at MLA 2009




WORKS CITED

Achebe Chinua Arrow of God New York Anchor 1964 Print

No Longer at Ease 1960 New York Anchor 1994 Print Things Fall Apart 1958 New York Anchor 1994 Print

Akwani Obi O March of Ages Enugu Nigeria Fourth Dimension 2003 Print

Appiah Kwame Anthony ldquoWhatrsquos Wrong with Slaveryrdquo Buying Freedom The Ethicsand Economics of Slave Redemption Ed Anthony Kwame Appiah and Martin BunelPrinceton Princeton UP 2007 247ndash58 Print

Armah Ayi Kwei Fragments London Heinemann 1969

Austin John L How to Do things with Words New York Oxford UP 1965 Print

Bailey Anne African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade Beyond the Silence and the ShameBoston Beacon 2005 Print

Boateng Yaw The Return London Heinemann 1977 PrintBorgomano Madelaine ldquoLa litteacuterature romanesque drsquoAfrique noire et lrsquoesclavage lsquoune

meacutemoire de lrsquooublirsquordquo Esclavage et abolitions meacutemoires et systegravemes de repreacutesentationEd Marie-Christine Rochmann Paris Karthala 2000 99ndash105 Print

Brown Christopher Leslie Moral Capital The Foundations of British Abolitionism ChapelHill U of North Carolina P 2006 Print

Buchanan Ruth and Sundhya Pahuja ldquoLaw Nation and (Imagined) CommunitiesrdquoThe Post-Colonial and the Global Ed Revathi Krishnaswamy and John C HawleyMinneapolis U of Minnesota P 2008 261ndash74 Print

Butler Judith Excitable Speech A Politics of the Performative New York Routledge 1997

PrintCheney-Coker Syl The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar London Heinemann 1990

Print

Dube Saurabh ldquoColonialism Modernity Colonial Modernitiesrdquo Nepantla Views from the South 32 (2002) 197ndash219 Print

Freadman Anne ldquoUptakerdquo The Rhetoric and Ideology of Genre Strategies for Stabilityand Change Ed Richard Coe lorelei Lingard and Tatiana Teslenko Cresskill NJHampton 2002 39ndash53 Print

George Olakunle ldquoAchebersquos Arrow of Godrdquo Comparative Literature Studies 424 (2005)344ndash62 Print

Gikandi Simon Reading Chinua Achebe Language and Ideology in Fiction London JamesCurrey 1991 Print

ldquoTheory Literature and Moral Considerationsrdquo Research in African Literatures 324 (2001) 1ndash18 Print

Gilroy Paul The Black Atlantic Double Consciousness and Modernity Cambridge MAHarvard UP 1993 Print

Holsey Bayo Routes of Remembrance Refashioning the Slave Trade in Ghana ChicagoU of Chicago P 2008 Print

Isichei Elizabeth A History of the Igbo People New York St Martinrsquos 1976 Print

Kopytoff Igor ldquoThe Cultural Context of African Abolitionrdquo The End of Slavery inAfrica Ed Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts Madison U of Wisconsin P 1988485ndash506 Print

Mamdani Mahmood Citizen and Subject Contemporary and the Legacy of Late ColonialismPrinceton UP 1991 Print

Mathuray Mark ldquoRealizing the Sacred Power and Meaning in Chinua Achebersquos Arrow of Godrdquo Research in African Literatures 343 (2003) 46ndash65 Print




Mbembe Achille ldquoAfrican Modes of Self-Writingrdquo Public Culture 141 (2002) 239ndash73Print

Miers Suzanne and Igor Kopytoff eds Slavery in Africa Historical and Anthropological

Perspectives Madison U of Wisconsin P 1977 Print ldquoAfrican Slavery as an Institution of Marginalityrdquo Slavery in Africa Historical

and Anthropological Perspectives Ed Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff MadisonU of Wisconsin P 1977 3ndash84 Print

Miers Suzanne and Richard Roberts ldquoThe End of Slavery in Africardquo The End of Slaveryin Africa Ed Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts Madison U of Wisconsin P1988 3ndash70 Print

Miller Christopher L The French Atlantic Triangle Literature and Culture of the Slave TradeDurham Duke UP 2008 Print

Ogundele Wole ldquoDevices of Evasion The Mythic versus the Historical Imagination

in the Postcolonial African Novelrdquo Research in African Literatures 333 (2002)125ndash39 Print

Ohadike Don C ldquoThe Decline of Slavery among the Igbo Peoplerdquo The End of Slaveryin Africa Ed Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts Madison U of Wisconsin P1988 437ndash61 Print

Opoku-Agyemang Kwadu ldquoA Crisis of Balance The (Mis)representation of ColonialHistory and the Slave Experience as Themes in Modern African LiteraturerdquoNationalism vs Internationalism Inter(National) Dimensions of Literatures in EnglishEd Wolfgang Zach and Ken Goodwin 1996 119ndash228 Print

Opoku-Agyemang Naana Paul E Lovejoy and David Trotman eds Africa and Trans-

Atlantic Memories Literary and Aesthetic Manifestations and History Trenton NJAfrica World Press 2008 Print

Oriji John N ldquoIgboland Slavery and the drums of War and Heroismrdquo Fighting theSlaveTrade West African Strategies Ed Sylviane A Diouf Athens OH Ohio UP2003 121ndash31 Print

Osinubi Taiwo Adetunji ldquoGridlock and Political Signication in African Post-SlaveryNarrativesrdquo MLA Convention ldquoReconstructing the Past in African LiteraturerdquoSan Francisco 29 Dec 2008 Paper

Said Edward Culture and Imperialism New York Knopf 1993 Print

ldquoThe Text the World and the Criticrdquo The World the Text and the Critic Cam-

bridge MA Harvard UP 1983 31ndash53 PrintSanneh Lamin Abolitionists Abroad American Blacks and the Making of Modern West

Africa CambridgeMA Harvard UP 1999 Print

Taylor Charles Modern Social Imaginaries Durham Duke UP 2004 Print

Tutuola Amos The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts New YorkGrove 1994 Print

Uchendu Victor C ldquoSlaves and Slavery in Igboland Nigeriardquo Slavery in Africa Histori-cal and Anthropological Perspectives Madison U of Wisconsin P 1977 121ndash32 Print

Vaughn James H ldquoMafakur A Limbic Institution of the Margirdquo Slavery in AfricaHistorical and Anthropological Perspectives Madison U of Wisconsin P 1977 85ndash102

Print



991266 RESEARCH IN AFRICAN LITERATURES Vol 40 No 4 (Winter 2009) copy 2009 991266

Chinua Achebe and the Uptakes

of African Slaveries1

TAIWO ADETUNJI OSINUBIUniversiteacute de Montreacutealtaiwoadetunjiosinubiumontrealca

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the representation of slavery in the ction of ChinuaAchebe The author suggests that the complex representation of slavery inAchebersquos rst three novels offers an insight in how writers of Achebersquos gen-eration wrote within a period of ideological crisis and multiple competingorders of social reality they needed to resist European cultural imperial-isms and colonial conquest at the same time that they had to evaluate theimperialisms injustices and more generally the shortcomings of Afri-can political institutions The author suggests in this paper that Acheberesponds to these situations of competing pluralizing forces by embedding

African articulations of slavery within rival moral frameworks in his rstthree novels Things Fall Apart No Longer at Ease and Arrow of God Achebeplaces slavery in an ongoing process in which the onslaught of colonialismuncovers and also radically transforms the moral and legal dispensationsin which African slavery was worlded These novels are thus narratives ofloss and alienation the afterlives of slavery become an intimate but deeplyperturbing part of postcolonial heritage

What then is the complex of indigenous African notions

relevant to the issues we are discussing here We have

used the terms slave and slavery yet one hardly need dwell

on the fact that their meanings shaped in one cultural-

historical setting cannot be expected to disentangle very

well the institutions of another place and time

mdashK opytoff 490

Slavery in Africa was a complex system of labor use ofthe exercise of rights in persons and of exploitation and

coercion tempered by negotiation and accommodation Its























































































































































































































NOTES













WORKS CITED














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NOTES













WORKS CITED














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Print




WORKS CITED














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Print

chinua achebe

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Transcript of chinua achebe