What is it about?
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 anti-colonial struggles. By situating Achebe’s novel alongside mid-century 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 mid-century anti-colonial internationalism and on-ground interpretations and improvisations of freedom.
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Why is it important?
It reads Achebe's novel as a response to local impasses in dreams of an international mid-century world of rights and universal recognition of the human.
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This page is a summary of: Abolition, Law, and the Osu Marriage Novel, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, November 2014, Cambridge University Press,
DOI: 10.1017/pli.2014.24.
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