Chapter 11 - Rehearsing the Past

Summary

The essay begins by discussing the debatable relationship between narratives of Black Atlantic chattel slavery and discourses of contemporary slavery in a global context. While some scholars are wary about conflating two different historical experiences, others see a useful link between past slavery and current trafficking. Uwem Akpan’s story “Fattening for Gabon” invokes the earlier trajectory of chattel slavery to the Americas but insists on a specific, local history of enslavement within Nigeria that locates it within a growing literature revealing West African internal involvement in past and present slave trade and trafficking. By restricting a global trafficking route to one origin in Nigeria, Akpan emphasizes local conditions of poverty and societal breakdown that lead to child trafficking in Nigeria and other African countries. I argue that even if Akpan ultimately borrows from the conventional slave narratives of the Black Atlantic, his attention is not solely or even primarily on the Middle Passage but on the First Passage when Africans captured other Africans to bring them to the coast for trade. Past and present are brought together in a continuum rather than as the rupture of the Middle Passage.