Student Research submissions 2013 (2013 research options) Research essay

LITR 5831 World Literature Colonial-Postcolonial

Oyinna Ogbonna

November 24, 2013

Exploring the Relationships between Contemporary Transnational Migration from Nigeria to the West and Capitalism through Colonial and Postcolonial Novels and Literary Theory

“To be unhomed is not to be homeless, nor can the 'unhomely' be easily accommodated in that familiar division of social life into private and public spheres. The unhomely moment creeps up on you stealthily as your own shadow and suddenly you find yourself…taking the measure of your dwelling in a state of 'incredulous terror.' And it is at this point that the world first shrinks…and then expands enormously… The recesses of the domestic space become sites for the most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and the world become confused: and uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting." – Homi Bhabha (1994).

This essay will use the postcolonial novel, postcolonial and post-1975 migration theories to illustrate the links between capitalism and post-independence transnational movements between Africa and the West using Nigeria as a case study. Chinua Achebe’s novel, Things Fall Apart, presents an account of Igbo society in pre-colonial and early colonial times, after which he chronicles their subsequent displacement and gradual migration away from their ancestral homes in No Longer At Ease, There Was A Country, and The Education of a British-Protected Child.  Buchi Emecheta’s novels, The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood, describe the anxieties and challenges of living in an Igbo society newly introduced to capitalism, and how these resulted in movements from the villages to the cities, and from the cities to the West. In their books, contemporary Nigerian authors such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, and Chika Unigwe, draw attention to not only gender constructs and gender relations, but also the social problems following the series of military coups, leading up to contemporary emigration from Nigeria, during the 1990s to the present.[1]

In contemporary times, Nigeria has the highest emigration rate from West Africa to North America.^[2] Current estimates state that 165,481^[3] and 266,000 of United States residents claim Nigerian ancestry.^[4] Nigerians rank high among the African groups in the United States with the largest presence, as of 2010 census records, with a population of 219,309, followed by Ethiopia with a population of 173,592, Egypt with a population of 137,799, Ghana with a population of 124,696, and Kenya with a population of 88,519.^[5] Additionally, former imperial countries, such as Britain, France and Spain receive their large share of immigrants.

In other words, migration from non-Western countries to the West is at its highest, especially in the United States where immigration debates between human right activists, liberal and conservative politicians and the media, are heated. Impoverished people of color from former Western colonies are leaving their countries—having been ravaged, stripped of all useful resources and left with neo-colonial/imperial structures that sustain the Western economy—to Western regions in search of peace and better lives. In the era of “free market” global capitalism, however, Western metropoles live in fear of free movement between borders. More than the anxiety of encountering the racialized “other” in their territory, Westerners are concerned that migrants would overrun and plunge their countries in economic crises. But neocolonial and neo-imperial sponsored “violence, wars, political oppression, economic marginalization, dictatorships in the colonial world do not come without a price” (Nagy-Zekmi 2003; 176).

Now more than ever, the globe is feeling the impact of the legacy left behind by European colonial powers—the British, Spanish, Portuguese, France and the Netherlands—in the Americas, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, and Asia. Within the last four hundred years, people from all parts of the globe are dispersed and mixed through the migrations of populations, forced into slavery, starvation, economic necessity or the threat of genocide, all resulting from encounters with colonial and imperial powers. Not only has the ideology of racial purity fostered and shaped current notions of race, ethnicity, and nationality in a confused world, but these constructs have also at some point or the other led to violence in multicultural societies.

Delving deeper into the subject of transnational migration movements, it is prudent to begin with the fact that popular colonial travel narratives such as William Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Sir Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines not only fall into those category of novels that describes Africans, according to Ngugi Wa Thiong’o (Thiong’o 92), as either noble or evil, but they are also highly descriptive of the manners in which Western colonial powers and adventurers exploited and stripped African societies of their wealth through violence and other means. Most novels in this category begin with protagonists of European descent developing a high moral sense of duty towards saving the black heathens in Africa from hell or from themselves; other characters straight up admit they seek adventure and fortune. Four to five centuries ago, the continent known as Africa today was ripe and open for appropriating, slave trade, “elephant hunting,” mining “bright yellow stones” from diamond fields (Haggard 95), and other forms of wealth extraction. Moreover, those who chose settlement colonies—in their Eurocentric imagination—viewed these “newly discovered lands” as a sign from God to take over even if it meant exterminating or displacing indigenous populations, such as the Australian Aboriginals, the First Nations People in the Americas, and the natives of South Africa.

Africa was that luscious and succulent dark corner in the world where one could make his fortune by simply “snapping ivory from the natives” (Conrad 234). In addition to looting wealth and natural resources from natives, missionaries and colonial workers picked up the cross, “the white man’s burden” to liberate the “prehistoric” “ugly” “howling” “leaping” savages who “made horrid faces” from their barbaric ways (Conrad 260). In fact, it was the white immigrant’s mission to “suppress savage customs” and introduce civilization in the form of Christian religion and capitalism. And like Robinson Crusoe before them, the only way to go about this civilizing mission was to introduce Western education. The aim of the Christian missionary was to convert the people to the Christian faith, and this meant engaging in teaching the people a second language (Taiwo 1). At first, according to Oladele Taiwo in Culture and the Nigerian Novel, the Western government left the task of educating the natives to missionaries; however, they eventually became interested in education because of the need for clerks, civil servants, court messengers and teachers (2). The outcomes of this Western education were urbanization, nationalist movements and the African novel.

Western education not only created a work force in the colonies, it also created generations of creative writers who challenged those exaggerated negative images of Africa exploited by Western writers, travelers, missionaries and political adventurers throughout history (Taiwo 5). Furthermore, English studies in colonial settings involved studying Eurocentric literature that demeaned the colonized subject: the idiotic protagonist in Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, the “spiritual and mystical Africans” in Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa or the good African who cooperates with colonizers and help subjugates and sells out his people and community or the bad African who resisted to foreign conquest and occupation of his country (Thiong’o 92). “The reader’s sympathies are guided in such a way as to make him identify with Africans collaborating with colonialism and to make him distance himself from those offering political and military resistance to colonialism” (Thiong’o 92). Indeed as Chinua Achebe points out in The Education of a British Protected Child, “ Colonial rule was stronger than any marriage,” and since the Africans fought against it and lost, they had no other recourse as dispossessed people than to turn the powerlessness to good account and laugh, and thereby lift themselves out of desolation and despair (49). The generation of writers responded to this dispossession by challenging prominent colonial literature, but in even earlier times, their parents realized that times were changing and acted accordingly.

So not only did the African student encounter literature in colonial schools and universities in a way that defined and reinforced European superiority (Thiong’o 93), but also entire African communities were brainwashed into wanting Western goods, according to Jean Comaroff in “The Empire’s Old Clothes: Fashioning the Colonial Subject.” Thus, one of the defining moments in colonization history was marked—in the case of Africa as an extraction colony—by the British effort to incorporate African communities into a global economy of goods and signs (Comaroff 401). For instance, Flora Nwapa’s characters in her novels Idu (1970) and Efuru (1966) remark on how distillers faced heavy fines and imprisonment for producing the homemade local gin simply because it been banned in favor of imported whiskey. Furthermore, by the early nineteenth century, “commodity consumerism was indissolubly linked to the production of civilization (Comaroff 401). Thus, the campaign to cover up Africa’s “nakedness” was driven by capitalist interests. Achebe attests to this phenomena fleetingly but yet significant manner in Things Fall Apart; “…more people came to learn in his (Mr. Brown’s) school, and he encouraged them with gifts of singlets and towels” (181).

In Things Fall Apart, Achebe points out that worthy people sometimes joined the church and sent their children to school, in addition to the usual converts to Christianity of the slaves, outcasts and downtrodden, because they quickly realized that “the leaders of the land in the future would be men and women who had learned to read and write” otherwise, “strangers would come from other places to rule them” (Achebe 181). Furthermore, the white man had not only brought a government and religion, he had also introduced a more sophisticated trade system that involved the readily available palm oil and palm kernel trade, which resulted in the introduction of money in Igbo society (179). People began to work on their farms in the morning and went to school in the afternoons, gradually changing the African society from agrarian to one slowly drifting to a capitalist society (181).  Buchi Emecheta expands on this transition in her novel The Slave Girl in which one of her characters, an orphaned young man, Okolie sold his youngest and only sister to a wealthy relative living in the big city because “he needed money” and “did not want to work hard at farming” even though his father had left him with “a big farm that he did not know how to manage” (41). Amongst the reasons for his despair was the fact that he felt sad because he could not even afford to buy or encourage his little sister to save her savings from selling palm kernels to buy a European Lappa (76).  He eventually “sneaked off’ to join the other young people who had “emigrated to do what was known as ‘olu oyibo,’ the white man’s job” (80, 85).   

No Longer At Ease, Achebe’s sequel to Things Fall Apart, delves further into the changes that occurred in Nigerian/African societies following the introduction of religion, education. More importantly, it explores the introduction of capitalism and urbanization in African societies and how these resulted in not only the migration from rural regions to urban areas but also the genre of “been-to” novels and the problem of hybridized identities (a term used in describing those who have traveled, lived, and studied overseas as seen in Buchi Emecheta, Flora Nwapa, Chinua Achebe and many other Nigerian novelists from their generation). Umuofia sponsors Obi Okonkwo’s scholarship (Nwoye’s son and Okonkwo’s grandson from Things Fall Apart) to study law in England, and during the farewell ceremony guests congratulated Obi pressing “presents into his palm, to buy a pencil with, or exercise book or a loaf of bread for the journey, a shilling there and a penny there—substantial presents in a village where money was so rare, where men and women toiled from year to year to wrest a meager living from an unwilling and exhausted soil (13). In a poignant moment, an older guest addresses Obi;

“Today greatness has changed its tune. Titles are no longer great, neither are barns or large numbers of wives and children. Greatness is now in the things of the white man. And so we have changed our tune” (62). “In times past…Umuofia would have required of you to fight her wars… Today we send you to bring knowledge… We are sending you to learn book” (12).

In other words, the transition from a collectivist agrarian African society not only changed the value systems but also created a variety of anxieties rooted in these movements from the ancestral lands to the cities and overseas. For instance, when the president of Umuofia Progressive Union in No Longer At Ease points out that it was work that brought Igbos four hundred miles away from their ancestral home in Umuofia to Lagos, someone corrects him; “It is money, not work…we left plenty of work at home… Anyone who likes work can return home, take up his matchet and go into that bad bush between Umuofia and Mbaino. It will keep him occupied to his last days. The meeting agreed that it was money, not work, that brought them to Lagos” (91). Thus, introduction of Western culture in African societies not only meant taking on English or Christian names, language, but most importantly, education for the purpose of leadership and work. Abandoning the ancestral land by migrating from rural to urban areas for employment not only created a new working class, but also ensured the consumption of British goods. 

When Obi returns from his four-year sojourn in England, he finds that Nigeria has greatly changed. Apart from having to get used to the idea of the name Nigeria and the idea of Nigeria as a nation, he observes that the colonial powers are gradually handing power over to incompetent corrupt leaders; and thus, the nation has been set up to fail from the very beginning. The white colonial officer, Mr. Green, mocks Obi and his kind for getting unnecessary education and also made frequent predictions about the future of Nigeria as a failed nation.

It is true that the works of nationalism theorists such as Frantz Fanon in Wretched of the Earth (1963) and Benjamin Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983) are exceptionally useful in understanding why the new nations that emerged from former colonies failed. But fiction and nonfiction Nigerian novels serve the purpose of illustrating these theories in simpler terms. “The British,” Achebe writes in his Biafran memoirs, There Was a Country (2012), “were well aware of the inter-ethnic tensions and posturing for power among the three main ethnic groups… The structure of the country was such that there was an inbuilt power struggle among the ethnic groups, and of course those who were in power wanted to stay in power. The easiest and simplest way to retain it…was to appeal to tribal sentiments” (229, 232). Furthermore, corrupt English workers had been selected to oversee the rigging of Nigeria’s first election “so that its complaint friends in Northern Nigeria would win power, dominate the country, and serve British interests after independence” (229). As Achebe concludes in There Was a Country Britain’s active collaboration in selecting leaders changed Nigeria’s status from colonial to neocolonial status (443). “The British made certain…that power went to that conservative element in the country that had played no real part in the struggle for independence (234). The result, of course, was a three-year bloody civil war followed by the ongoing social and economic displacement that has led to mass migrations from Africa to the West in search of employment, safety and peace.

To further demonstrate how colonialism and neocolonialism led to mass movements from Nigeria to the West it is important to introduce some theory on migration movements from the global south to the West before looking into the post-1990 novel. For as long as Nigeria remained a colony and a British Protectorate, according to Achebe, Nigerians were allowed free movements into the United Kingdom and other countries where the British citizens are allowed entry. Achebe writes in The Education of a British-Protected Child that in 1957 all he needed to enter London as a “British Protected Person” was his passport, but once Nigeria became independent three years later in 1960, that “protection” ended and movements became more restricted (30-31).

The migration pattern from Africa to the West that followed the termination of British “protection” after Nigeria’s independence is well documented in works of fiction, nonfiction, and scholarly articles across disciplines. In his 2007 essay titled "On Mbabuike's Nigerian American Intellectual Journeys: A Personal Tribute,” Chudi Uwazuruike gives an account of what he calls the “Nigerian brain drain or intellectual migration waves” to the United States, beginning in the late 1940s till the present. Concerned with the social conditions of Nigerians scattered all over the world in what he calls “unplanned sojourns” that has created Nigerian Diaspora communities, Uwazurike lists five trajectories in the academic engagement of Nigerians with Americans beginning with the education of the first ceremonial president of Nigeria, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe at the historic black college of Pennsylvania, in 1928, after which the second wave arrived between the late 1930s and 1940s (Uwazurike 112).

The third wave of intellectuals—sponsored through United States Department scholarships and individual and private scholarships, including Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations—arrived in the U.S around the early 1960s during the Nigerian independence to study the sciences, medicine, agronomy, and enroll in various doctoral programs (Uwazurike 113). Most Nigerian students of this third wave, according to the author, returned to their homeland to serve their country using the education they gained from the West. The fourth wave, however, began with the self-exiled returnees’ “second missionary journey,” following the crises that began with the Nigerian-Biafran Civil War, and the economic disasters of the 1980s, which culminated in the military regimes of terror during the 1990s, ending in the fifth wave of the intellectual migration  (Uwazurike 114-115).  The author goes on to narrate the tragedies experienced on a societal and individual level as a result of these migrations.

The fourth and fifth waves of intellectual migration were the most devastating to both the Nigerian individual and Nigerian society as a whole. According to the author, the middle-aged American trained Nigerians returned to America without job guarantees; some with children and wives in tow,[6] while many others left their families behind (Uwazurike 114, 115). These migrants of the fourth and fifth wave not only lost opportunities from being uprooted in their homelands at their ages, they also faced an uncertain future in America, as they had little or no networks to pave the way for them in their adopted countries. Furthermore, according to the author, these migrants often longed for home, but could not or would not move back even when Nigeria made the transition from military rule to democracy because stability and security was still elusive in the homeland (Uwazurike 115).

These waves of the Nigerian “brain drain” or intellectual migration culminates in what Uwazurike describes as the new generation: the one million strong Nigerian American youth born in the United States, with the older ones in their twenties and thirties gaining education and forging strong careers within America (Uwazurike 115-116). More importantly, the author believes this generation of Nigerian-Americans born in the United States since 1980 are the first cohort of black people to be free in the past five hundred years to think big, act continental, invest in the global economy and reject the inferiority inflicted on people of color (Uwazurike 116). The five waves of Nigerian migrants to America and their descendants, the new generation, amid the negativity resulting from sensationalizing and generalizing scams to all Nigerians, have managed to build strong communities in their adopted home and contribute to the essence of the United States in many ways (Uwazurike 116-117).

It is important to point out that these diasporic movements are being more or less replicated in historical metropole destinations, especially in the United Kingdom and other parts of Europe. Buchi Emecheta’s novels In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), and Destination Biafra (1982) further demonstrates the tensions, identity confusion, and anxieties that followed colonial rule and Nigeria’s struggle with urbanization and nationhood after independence. Moreover, Emecheta’s novels also map out a similar trajectory of movement from Nigeria to the Britain to Uwazurike’s model. The post 1990 Nigerian novel by post-independence generation of novelists, such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chris Abani, and Chika Unigwe, establish links between contemporary African diasporic movements to the West and colonialism, neocolonialism and capitalism in Africa. Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Purple Hibiscus (2003), That Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and Americanah (2013); Chris Abani’s GraceLand (2004), and Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street (2009) not only explore gender constructions and relations in Nigerian society as well as in the West, they most importantly analyze the social problems in Nigeria—from colonialism to independence and from civilian to military rule—and how these led to the post-1990 emigration from Nigeria.  

While Abani and Adichie focus on emigration from Nigeria to the United States and England, Belgium Nigerian author Unigwe takes it a step further by introducing another problematic form of global migration, the smuggling and trafficking of young Nigerian women to Europe for the purposes of prostitution. Unigwe links the social problems arising from urbanization and consumerism in post-1990 Nigeria to emigration from Nigeria to Western destinations. On Black Sisters’ Street specifically deals with gender, race and class in relation to global capitalism beginning with the transatlantic slave trade to colonialism and neocolonialism in former Western colonies, and finally, migration from Africa to Europe to gratify Western consumers through sex work. Interestingly, just as we see in our American immigration debates, research and literature suggest that European governments, non-for profit organizations and scholars place blame solely on the women and the corrupt Nigerian government. Nigerian scholars admit that extreme poverty and urbanization as a factor in sex work migration; however, Unigwe, showcases this manifestation as a two-way street, involving the Nigerian and European governments at the societal level, as well as the sex workers and their customers at the individual level. 

According to Jorgen Carling in his article, “Trafficking in Women from Nigeria to Europe,” the Western European market has become increasingly globalized in the last fifteen years (Jorgen 2005). Nigerians represent the largest group of prostitutes among Eastern European, Southeast Asian, Latin American and other women from Sub-Saharan Africa (Jorgen 2005). In “Migration, Human Smuggling and Trafficking from Nigeria to Europe, a research report for the International Organization for Migration, Jorgen Carling writes that Nigerian emigration to Europe has gained so much attention from European governments because some elements of this migration flow has been linked to human trafficking and smuggling, and other sordid activities (Carling 2006). The business of human trafficking and smuggling, while not entirely for the purposes of the purposes of sex labor, has strong associations with prostitution. Furthermore, the unique thing about the Nigerian prostitution, besides the staggering numbers, is in the method of their migration into Europe. Nigerian prostitutes tend to be very young women, adolescent girls, teenagers, and women in their early twenties, who are trafficked; that is, deceived, scared and manipulated into situations of exploitation (Okojie et al., 2003; Jorgen 2005).

To be more explicit as I present a brief outline of gender theory in relation to consumerism and migration without digressing too far, it must be pointed out that ever since the transatlantic slavery, people of African descent and other peoples of color have shouldered the burdens of consumerism and sexual depravities of the so-called West, in the form of wealth extraction and in the form of sexual exploitation. In the era of “decolonization” and nationalism, the former imperialists/colonizers “handed over” power to carefully selected puppets that would further their interests of the West. It is no surprise at all that the elite ruling class of former colonies govern their homelands in the same manner—extracting wealth and resources at an alarming rate and exchanging favors for sex. Surely, this is the case with Nigeria and the poor women Carling described as having migrated to Europe from the Niger Delta, the oil rich region that fuels luxury cars in the West and lines the pockets of the Nigerian elite with their Western partners. This phenomenon is what Dr. Kwame Nkrumah has defined as neocolonialism:

“…the worst form of imperialism…it means power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the imperial power had to explain and justify at home the actions it was taking abroad…In the colony those who served the ruling imperial power could at least look to its protection against any violent move by their opponent. With neo-colonialism neither is the case” (Nkrumah 1965).

Furthermore, migrating across borders for sex work/gratification is nothing new, certainly not to Western consumers. Angela Davis in Women, Race and Class (1982), bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), Cynthia Enloe in Bananas, Beaches and Bases (2000), Kamala Kempadoo in Sun, Sex, and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean (1999) and Andrea Marie Bertone in “Sexual Trafficking in Women: International Political Economy and the Politics of Sex, demonstrate the role of the West in shaping and exoticizing women of color worldwide. (Think of Sarah Baartman christened the Hottentot Venus by her European exploiters, and Josephine Baker in her banana skirt). Hence the international sex trade system in which women are forced by one reason or the other to become mail order brides, prostitute in brothels, and engage in sex tourism, pornography, and militarized sex. These authors establish the fact that all forms of sexual exploitation of women of color—for instance, sex tourism in the Caribbean, migrant prostitution in Europe, militarized prostitution in Vietnam and the Philippines, and trafficking of women through Africa and Arab regions and Eastern Europe to the West—are vestiges of the transnational sex trade industry, Western dominance. Kempadoo particularly believes that past and present disruptions in the global economies, such as in the industrial era, slavery, imperialism, colonialism systems, led to the creation and consolidation of sex industries in former colonies (Kempadoo 1999).  

So it is not surprising that in a failed nation such as Nigeria where resources are monopolized and controlled by the elite and foreign powers leaving nothing for the poor and unconnected, young women and girls from even poorer backgrounds are ending up in the West as prostitutes, voluntarily or not. It is not surprising that after many years of living through poverty, hunger, unemployment and a disastrous civil war people are emigrating at alarming from Africa to Western destinations to seek fortunes, employment, and pursue their destinies…just like white travelers, adventurers, missionaries, and colonial workers did for many years in Africa and other colonies. For the people born in colonized societies it is all about survival. In other words, consumerism—capitalism—is not only interwoven with gender, class and race, but it is also explicitly linked to contemporary movements from former colonies to imperialist countries.

As scholars from all disciplines, especially Western scholars, continue to untangle the webs created by global encounters, it is very important to link these global problems to its origins in order to find lasting solutions. It is not enough to blame poverty and its related factors on corrupt non-West governments without looking inward. What has become clear to me in these readings is that Western conquest and exploitation structures from centuries of unbridled dominance in non-Western region have resulted in a Catch-22 boomerang effect. Colonial literature and other genres of British literature was—if not completely conscientious and honest about the natives they encountered—more or less upfront about why Europeans needed to travel as missionaries, workers, adventurers and colonizing forces to Africa, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East—population growth, inheritance policies, greed, curiosity, unemployment, poverty and the good old moral obligation to save the savages by bringing them into the Christian fold. In fact, literature teaches us that people of European descent, for many years, enjoyed unrestricted movements between borders, cities, countries, and across continents. Isn’t it interesting that today—in the Western imagination and collective amnesia—immigrants from former colonies are suddenly a burden and liability for the West to shoulder? 

References:

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Achebe, Chinua. No Longer at Ease. New York: Anchor Books, 1994.

Achebe, Chinua. The Education of a British-Protected Child. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. eBook.

Achebe, Chinua. There Was a Country. New York: The Penguin Press, 2012.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Half of a Yellow Sun. New York: Anchor Books, 2006. eBook.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Purple Hibiscus. New York: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2003. eBook.

Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi. Americanah. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. eBook.

Bertone, Andrea. "Sexual Trafficking in Women: International Political Economy and the Politics of Sex." Gender Issues. Winter (2000).

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Carling , Jorgen. "Migration, Human Smuggling and Trafficking from Nigeria to Europe." International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO). (2006).

Carling , Jorgen. "Trafficking in Women from Nigeria to Europe." Migration Information Source: First Thought, Authoritative Data, Global Reach. (2005): n. page. Web. 19 Aug. 2013. <http://www.migrationinformation.org/feature/display.cfm?ID=318>.

Comaroff, Jean. “The Empire’s Old Clothes: Fashioning the Colonial Subject.” Situated lives: Gender and Culture in Everyday Life. Ed. Louise Lamphene et al., New York: Routledge 1997.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Blackwood Magazine, 1889. eBook.

Davis, Angela. Women, Race and Class . Great Britain: The Women's Press Ltd, 1982.

Emecheta, Buchi. The Slave Girl. New York: George Braziller, Inc, 1977.

Emecheta, Buchi. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller, Inc, 1979. eBook.

Emecheta, Buchi. Second-Class Citizen. New York: George Braziller, Inc, 1975. eBook.

Enloe , Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.

Haggard, Rider Henry. King Solomon’s Mines. Great Britain: Cassel and Company, Limited. 1907. eBook.

hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. South End Press, 1992.

Kempadoo, Kamala. Sun, Sex and Gold: Tourism and Sex Work in the Caribbean. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999.

Nagy-Zekmi, Silvia. "Images of Sheherazade [1] Representations of the Postcolonial Female Subject." Journal of Gender Studies. Vol. 12.4 (2003).

Nwapa, Flora. Efuru. London: Cox & Wyman Ltd., 1966.

Nwapa, Flora. Idu. London: Heinemann Educational Books: African Writers Series, 1970.

Nkrumah, Kwame . "Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism." Thomas Nelson & Sons Ltd.,. (1965).

Okojie, Christiana, Obehi Okojie, et al. "Trafficking of Nigerian Girls to Italy." Report of Field Survey in Edo State, Nigeria. (2003).

Taiwo, Oladele. Culture and the Nigerian Novel. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976.

Thiong’o, Ngugi Wa. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. Oxford: James Curry, 1986.

Unigwe, Chika. On Black Sisters Street. New York: Random House, 2009.

Uwazurike, Chudi. "On Mbabuike's Nigerian American Intellectual Journeys: A Personal Tribute." Dialectical Anthropology. (2007): 111-125.