Cannibalising the African immigrant woman: Human trafficking as represented in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street

Abstract

In pursuit of greener pastures, African women seek jobs in the West through their trusted kin, including husbands, mothers and close friends, often getting lured into sex work on arrival in diaspora. Through the representation of this situation in Amma Darko’s Beyond the Horizon and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street, this paper aims to demonstrate that while mainly it is the men and husbands who enroll and subject unwilling and desperate women, wives and partners into prostitution, conniving women also exploit the precarity and desperation of the newly arrived to recruit and entrap them into sex business that least benefits the entrapped women. The cannibalisation of women by women is underwritten by the status of the newly arrived illegal immigrants. As such, they cannot look for formal employment without risking arrest, detention and deportation. With their passports confiscated, their precarious state and unwillingness to go back home with nothing after heroic departures makes them easy prey for the unscrupulous queens of the underworld who control the economy of pleasure. Using both the feminist and postcolonialist approaches, this paper addresses the disruption of family units resulting from human trafficking.