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Abolition, Law, and the Osu Marriage Novel

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 November 2014

Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi
Taiwo Adetunji Osinubi*
Affiliation:
Department of English, The University of Western Ontario
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Abstract

This paper examines the representation of Osu slavery in Chinua Achebe’s No Longer at Ease. Whereas critics read the references to Osu as a minor subplot in the novel, this author suggests the dissipation of the Osu marriage plot illustrates the crisis of abolition within the context of anticolonial struggles. By situating Achebe’s novel alongside midcentury discourses on abolition, freedom, and marriage rights, the author argues that the novel’s form responds to the impasses between the abolitionist agendas of international law, the administrative mandate of colonial law, and indigenous Igbo agitations for and against the eradication of the Osu system. Key to this reading is the novel’s cursory reference to the 1956 bride price laws of eastern Nigeria. By narrativizing the failure of the 1956 legislation, Achebe reflects upon African implication in slavery as well as on the divergences between midcentury anticolonial internationalism and on-ground interpretations and improvisations of freedom.

Keywords

Chinua Achebeabolitionlawmarriage reformfreedom
Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 2 , Special Issue 1: Special Issue: Literature and Law , March 2015 , pp. 53 - 71
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

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References

1 I thank Neil ten Koortenaar, Ato Quayson, and the two reviewers for their comments on this paper. Funding for initial research was provided by a grant of the FQRSC.

2 Povinelli, Elizabeth, “Notes on Gridlock: Genealogy, Intimacy, Sexuality,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 215–238 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 215.

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4 For criticism on the novel, see Lawson, William, The Western Scar: The Theme of the Been-to in West African Fiction (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1982), 19–43 Google Scholar; Gikandi, Simon, Reading Chinua Achebe: Language and Ideology in Fiction (London: J. Currey; Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991), 78–100 Google Scholar; and Ogede, Ode, Achebe and the Politics of Representation: Form Against Itself, From Colonial Conquest and Occupation to Post-Independence Disillusionment (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001), 59–68 Google Scholar.

5 For discussions of slavery in Igboland, see Uchendu, Victor. C., “Slaves and Slavery in Igboland, Nigeria,” Slavery in Africa: Historical and Anthropological Perspectives, eds. Suzanne Miers and Igor Kopytoff (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 121–132 Google Scholar; Afigbo, A. E., The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southeastern Nigeria, 1885–1950 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2006)Google Scholar; Nwokeji, G. Ugo, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dike, Victor E., The Osu Caste System in Igboland: A Challenge for Nigerian Democracy (Sacramento, CA: Morris Publishing, 2002)Google Scholar; and Okeke, Igwebuike Romeo, The “Osu” Concept in Igboland: A Study of the Types of Slavery in Igbo-Speaking Areas of Nigeria (Enugu, Nigeria: Access Publishing, 1986)Google Scholar. For a discussion of Osu in the global context of similar cult or ritual slaveries, see Miers, Suzanne, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Walnut Creek, CA; Oxford: AltaMira Press, 2003), 436 Google Scholar.

6 Achebe, Chinua, No Longer at Ease (1960; New York: Anchor, 1994)Google Scholar; Amadi, Elechi, The Slave (London: Heinemann, 1978)Google Scholar; Emecheta, Buchi, The Bride Price: A Novel (New York: G. Braziller, 1976)Google Scholar.

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9 Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran distinguish between human bondage and slavery because slavery always evokes nuances of practices that have been legally abolished and deemed inexistent. Legal abolitions, they point out, often create a difference between surface and depth realities by leaving the “ideological and sociological foundations of slavery largely intact, while disrupting the prevailing social and political order enough to allow most slaves to take advantage of qualified opportunities” (16). Consequently, they insist “there are occasions when the current status quo can only be understood in terms of cumulative legacies and trajectories” (17). This distinction, which is crucial for African trajectories of slavery, is vital to understanding how and why Osu is termed slavery.

10 On the expectations of abolition and freedom, see Miers, Suzanne, “Slavery to Freedom in Sub-Saharan Africa: Expectations and Reality,” After Slavery: Emancipation and Its Discontents, ed. Howard Temperley (London: Frank Cass, 2000), 237–264 Google Scholar.

11 No Longer at Ease, 47–48.

12 The abolition of slavery in Africa differs from the abolitions in the Atlantic world, India, and the Indian Ocean basin. Kopytoff, Igor, “The Cultural Context of African Abolition,” The End of Slavery in Africa, eds. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 485–506 Google Scholar.

13 Killam, 49, and Gikandi, 80.

14 There are some regional variations in the names for and articulations of Osu. For detailed accounts, see Ezeanya, S. N., “The Osu (Cult-Slave) System in Igbo Land,” Journal of Religion in Africa. 1.1 (1967): 35–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Okafor, Jerome Njikwulim Chuckwu, The Challenge of Osu Caste System to the Igbo Christians (Onitsha: Veritas Publishing, 1993)Google Scholar; Nwaka, Geoffrey. I., “The Civil Rights Movement in Colonial Igboland,” The International Journal of African Historical Studies 18.3 (1985): 473–485 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 121, and Lovejoy, Paul E., Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 183–184 Google Scholar.

15 Lovejoy, , Transformations, 121 Google Scholar.

16 For the articulation of Osu slavery with the Atlantic slave trade see Ezikeojiaku, Ichie P. A.. “Osu Social Outcasts and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora, eds. C. Brown and P. Lovejoy (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), 79–86 Google Scholar, and Okafor, Jerome Njikwulimchuckwu, The Challenge of Osu Caste System to the Igbo Christians (Onitsha: Veritas Publishing, 1993)Google Scholar.

17 These include the prohibition of physical injury, rape, and maltreatment. These specifications make sense only in the context of deteriorating treatment of other slaves and people.

18 Okafor, 31.

19 Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (1958; New York: Anchor, 1994).

20 No Longer at Ease, 82.

21 Ibid., 65.

22 Ibid., 65.

23 For historical overviews of these contexts, see two essays by Ehiedu E. G. Iweriebor. Iweriebor, Ehiedu E. G., “Nationalism and the Struggle for Freedom, 1880–1960,” The Foundations of Nigeria: Essays in Honour of Toyin Falola, ed. Adebayo Oyebade, (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003), 79–105 Google Scholar, and E. G. Iweriebor, “Radicalism and the National Liberation Struggles, 1930–1950), The Foundations of Nigeria: Essays in Honour of Toyin Falola, ed. Adebayo Oyebade (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 2003), 107–25.

24 For an account of the paradoxical rights discourses within British colonies, see chapters 2, 5, and 6 of Ibhawoh, Bonny, Imperialism and Human Rights: Colonial Discourses of Rights and Liberties in African History (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

25 These complex articulations of freedom are best understood within a larger climate of general change and adaptation under colonial rule. For an introduction, see chapter 2 of Njoku, Rapahel Chijioke, African Cultural Values: Igbo Political Leadership in Colonial Nigeria, 1900–1966 (New York and London: Routledge, 2006)Google Scholar.

26 For an account of the freedom agitations and rebellions of the so-called Ohu slaves, see Brown, Carolyn A., “Contestation and Identity Transformation under Colonialism: Emancipation Struggles in South Nkanu, 1920–1935.” Repercussions of the Atlantic Slave Trade: The Interior of the Bight of Biafra and the African Diaspora, eds. C. Brown and P. Lovejoy, (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), 259–273 Google Scholar.

27 See Nwaka and chapter 5 of Ibhawoh.

28 See Nwaka.

29 For the development of abolition in treaties and conventions from 1814 to 1966, see Burchill, Richard, “The Tangled Role of International Law in Africa and Its Contribution to the Eradication of Slavery,” Slavery, Migration and Contemporary Bondage in Africa, eds. Joel Quirk and Darshan Vigneswaran (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2011), 251–275 Google Scholar. For an overview of international slavery conventions starting in 1815, see Bales, Kevin and Robbins, Peter, “No One Shall Be Held in Slavery or Servitude: A Critical Analysis of International Slavery Conventions,” Human Rights Review 2 2 (2001): 18–45 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Welch, Claude E. Jr., “Defining Contemporary Forms of Slavery: Updating a Venerable NGO,” Human Rights Quarterly 31 (2009): 70–128 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 For an overview of abolition in Africa, see Kopytoff’s “The Cultural Context of African Abolition” and Richard Roberts and Suzanne Miers’s “The End of Slavery in Africa.”

31 Miers, 2003, 20.

32 The Brussels conference was triggered by events in Central and East Africa. Organized at the instigation of British government, but hosted by King Leopold in Brussels, it was to debate the eradication of the African export trade in slaves, but ended up providing European powers with monopolies on arms and liquor traffic. See Miers’s Slavery in Twentieth Century, 20–23. For an abbreviated account of British antislavery and European colonialism, see chapters 1 through 3 of Quirk’s, Joel The Anti-Slavery Project: From the Slave Trade to Human Trafficking (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

33 For an overview, see Ohadike, Don, “The Decline of Slavery Among Igbo People,” The End of Slavery in Africa, ed. Suzanne Miers and Richard Roberts (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 437–461 Google Scholar.

34 This definition has become something of a standard definition upon which the following definitions have been based. See Quirk and Vigneswaran, 7. For an overview of the definitions of slavery, see Allain, Jean, “The Legal Definition of Slavery into the Twenty-First Century,” The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary, ed. Jean Allain, 199–219 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also the Bellagio-Harvard Guidelines on the Legal Parameters of Slavery at: http://www.law.qub.ac.uk/schools/SchoolofLaw/Research/HumanRightsCentre/Resources/Bellagio-HarvardGuidelinesontheLegalParametersofSlavery/. For commentaries and critiques of this definition, see the essays in section 3 of Jean Allain’s edited volume, The Legal Understandings of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

35 Kopytoff, 494–95.

36 No Longer at Ease, 146–47.

37 Ibid., 53.

38 Povinelli, 218.

39 Ibid.

40 Ogede, 67–68.

41 Gasché, Rodolphe, Of Minimal Things: Studies on the Notion of Relation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 263–270 Google Scholar.

42 No Longer at Ease, 41 and 152.

43 Ibid., 81.

44 Ibid., 152.

45 Ibid., 189.

46 On the functions of sponsorship in the fiction of Achebe, see Osinubi, Taiwo Adetunji, “Cold War Sponsorships: Chinua Achebe and the Dialectics of Collaboration,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.4 (2014): 410–422 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 No Longer at Ease, 77.

48 Ibid., 94.

49 Ibid., 181.

50 Ibid., 193–94.