Captured by modern-day slavery in Eyo

Sanusi’s two other novels, Kemi’s Journal and its sequel Zack’s Story (Nigerian editions published by Cassava Republic in 2006) explore the struggles an African-British couple living in London have with their Christian faith. Though dealing with serious issues, the stories are each told in a fresh and funny first person voice and make for an […]

Sanusi’s two other novels, Kemi’s Journal and its sequel Zack’s Story (Nigerian editions published by Cassava Republic in 2006) explore the struggles an African-British couple living in London have with their Christian faith. Though dealing with serious issues, the stories are each told in a fresh and funny first person voice and make for an enjoyable read. Eyo (Nairobi: WordAlive Publishers, 2009, 338 pages) also sucked me in so that I couldn’t put it down till I had finished it, but it told a much darker tale. Sanusi’s harrowing descriptions of the streets of Lagos and London remind me of Charles Dickens’ exposé of injustices in 19th century English society. The poor prey on the poor, kept in their place by a corrupt nouveau riche. 150 years later, nothing much has changed. Though I read Eyo last week, it has haunted me ever since, even in my dreams.

The protagonist Eyo is a ten-year-old girl living in Jungle City, the Ajegunle slum of Lagos, with her parents and two siblings. Her father is a drunk, and her mother supports the family by cooking food and sending the children out to hawk ice. In the midst of this squalor, there is a perceived door out—the chance for young people to illegally migrate to Europe, where they have the chance at education and work to help lift up their families in Nigeria. Or so goes the myth.

Eyo quickly discovers how false this hope is when her father’s friend Uncle Femi transports her to the UK to work as a domestic servant for an immigrant Nigerian family. In her story there are echoes of older portrayals of slavery in African literature and film. Ousmane Sembene’s first feature film La Noire De…/The Black Girl (1966), for example,  shows the story of a young girl from Senegal who follows a white family to France, thinking that she will continue to work as a nanny to their children. Instead, she is literally enslaved in their home and refused contact with the outside world. Much the same thing happens to Eyo, except that instead of being enslaved by Europeans she is enslaved by fellow Nigerians who refuse to let her go to school or even teach her English. While she suffers in their home, her plight becomes even worse when the family sends her away. The only glimmer of light in her dark life, as she transitions into a premature adulthood, comes in her encounter with the kind prostitute Bola and the compassionate Catholic priest and nun, who work London streets trying to help drug addicts and prostitutes.

Though the circumstances Sanusi describes are horrifying, she does not dehumanize her characters. Eyo, who survives the worst degradations a human being can suffer, has a rebellious spark. She is abused, yet, even when she is forced into patterns of acquiescence that she endures only by imagining she is a robot, she keeps clawing her way back to humanity. What is most striking is that though the book is filled with villains, Sanusi does not paint them flat. Narrated from multiple perspectives, the book allows the reader to peer into the minds of traffickers, pimps, and brothel madames. Presented with their backgrounds, we begin to understand the conditions that contributed to their depravity, even while we revile their actions.

There are a couple of places that made me pause. While the characters were well developed, there was a small inconsistency in the description of Bola, whose worthless husband urges her to work as a prostitute in Europe to send money back to the family. Earlier Bola is described as a “graduate” yet is later portrayed as having married young because her family didn’t have money. I was also a little surprised that questions of racism in the UK were almost completely missing from the novel.

Trained as I am to have the sharp eyes of a post-colonial critic, I was initially uncomfortable that most of the well-developed villains in the book were Nigerians, while the notable British characters were almost always sympathetic—from the kind neighbor Mrs. Richardson who first began to suspect that Eyo was being held against her will, to Mark who desires to save his prostitute lover “Pretty Woman”-style from her lifestyle by marrying her, to Sister Mary and Father Stephen, the Catholic nun and priest who try to help prostitutes escape the streets. Sanusi risks being accused of perpetuating what Teju Cole has recently called the “white Savior Industrial Complex.” However, as I thought more about it, I realized that the European villains were there, including the corrupt police chief who colludes with the brothel owner Big Madame and the thousands of perverted men whose patronage of prostitutes makes sex-slavery possible. Sanusi implicates unjust transnational structures, the incompetence of social services and immigration, and the perversions of British customers. It’s just that by placing Nigerian characters at the centre of the narrative, she pushes the European characters, both bad and good, to the margins. The book is not directed at Europeans so much as it is to Africans, exposing the corruption that occurs both at home and abroad. Sanusi indicates that a broad range of Nigerians are guilty of exploiting the most vulnerable: from the grassroots abuse of Eyo’s drunken father to the slave-trafficking of “elite” Nigerians abroad. Even those who are not directly involved are silently complicit: from women who quietly watch their husbands molest their children, to friends and family who observe trafficking but who do not report it, to the wealthy who do not adequately support rehabilitation services for women who escape sex slavery but who have no respectable profession to turn to. And though the story of Eyo’s imprisonment as a domestic slave, prevented from going to school and forced to cook, clean, babysit, and accede to the sexual whims of her employers, was set in the UK, the Nigerian reader is unsettled by the knowledge that this exploitation exists in Nigeria too—that children are subject to such horrors both at home and abroad.

Eyo is not a feel-good book, and the end will leave you haunted rather than with the warm closure of Sanusi’s other novels. Yet, it performs the important task of exposing the exploitation of characters often invisible in both Nigeria and Europe. On her website, Sanusi provides links to news about other Nigerian children and women who have suffered in the hands of modern-day slave traders. Her novel forces us to imagine ourselves in the place of the trafficked and traffickers, the abused and abusers. In doing so she makes it difficult to ever again be complacent when we see children being neglected and abused by those to whom they have been entrusted.