International Research Journal of Police Science, Criminal Law and Criminology Vol. 2(1) pp. 1-5, June, 2013
Available online http://www.interesjournals.org/IRJPSCLC
Copyright ©2013 International Research Journals
Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria
E-mail: Fubaraangela@yahoo.com; Tel.: 08033131627
Abstract
When Lord Mansfield, the then Chief Justice of England gave his popular judgment in 1772 ruling that it was illegal to keep slaves and America endorsed this illegality in 1865, men of conscience and Nature herself heaved a sigh of relief. This nefarious activity of slave-trade and slavery, a major factor for
Black-African Diaspora still persists in different hues today. One of these is human trafficking packaged in a camouflage of irresistible flavour for the youth. Akachi Admora-Ezeigbo in a captivating narrative laden with figures, songs, series of flashback and tales depicts the social reality of human trafficking.
She employs a simple and intriguing language enriched with resources of literary ingredients of descriptive strategy and oral devices to portray the deceit, inhumanity, dismal life and degradation associated with 21 st
Century “Female-Slave-Trade” in her Trafficked.
Using Nneoma as the protagonist she raises and unveils a network of related contemporary social issues which form causative elements for such horrific torture and debasement. This work along with Ezeigbo’s resources of literary prowess makes a modest attempt at exploring her ingenuity, eloquence and window of escape provided to combat this violence unleashed on woman – kind of this century.
Keywords: Violence trafficked, poverty, corruption politics decadence, None Governmental Organization
(NGO).
INTRODUCTION
Concerned men and women of conscience have noted with anguish and dismay the ugly phenomenon and exploitation devastating the world: a global traffic in human beings. Human trafficking is a modern day slave trade which violets fundamental human rights. Haya
Rashed Al Khalifa, president of the General Assembly
United Nations Photo/Mark Garten calls human trafficking a multi-billion dollar industry that lines the packets of organized crime while exploiting innocent human beings.
Natalya Petkevick in her article in “United Chronicle” is worried that human trafficking, a form of slavery and slave trade persists in this 21 st
century. He informs that the year 2007 marks the 200 th
anniversary of abolition of
Trans-Atlantic slave trade but “modern slavery” has become more devious and brutal.
Petkevick who is also the Deputy Head of
Indeed poverty has been identified as a major factor exacerbating trafficking in human beings. Women and children are key target groups because of marginalization and limited economic resources. These are usually people from impoverished low income households.
Young girls running away from home or girls from families that expect their daughters to contribute to their support are easy targets for traffickers.
The phenomenon of trafficking is a scourge of international dimension which every country appear to have a share of the menace. Human trafficking succeeds with rhythmic pattern which the exploiters employ to attain their goal. This involves identification, coercion, deception, recruitment, violence, sexual exploitation and servitude. In Nigeria a study by the National Age for the
Prohibition of Trafficking/in Persons and other related
Administration of the President of Belarus, is right to believe that we can never defeat this social evil unless there is counteraction to factors such as poverty, gender inequality and lack of education and decisively address corruption which fuel the demand for trafficking. matters (NAPTIP), reveals that those involved in the illegal trade conduct it in seemingly descent manner and ease, that victims do not suspect any foul play. They get support of the family members of their victims under the pretext that they want to upgrade the financial status of

2 Int. Res. J. Police Sci. Criminal law Criminol. such impoverished homes. Most often the act is perpetrated by someone known to the victim and family.
Right from the family connection, the rhythm of odious journey into sex slavery commences. Victims are coerced, tricked, lured with flowery promises of a very bright future in the destination country (notably Europe,
Italy being top on the list).
This heinous transaction has taken such dimension that the world seems polluted by it. According to Apex
Children’s Agency, trafficking of girls and women to Italy and other European countries has slave – like characteristics of 18 th
century trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Painfully, many never reach their destinations as they may die through the harsh and difficult mode of the journey, while some may be abandoned or drowned.
Those that reach their destination are sold off to prostitution rackets where they are engaged in different kinds of commercial sex work. The health risks of rape, forced sex, sexual exploitation occasioned by human trafficking are myriad and threatening. It is believed that bribes are commonly paid to vicious officials or the police to procure documents at border crossing. The false documents and passports make it difficult to identify and trace trafficked persons.
This is the reality of the global social ill of the twenty first century, a lucrative business of human right abuse involving debt bondage, forced labour, rape, torture, imprisonment and murder. This criminality forms a lucrative business with high monetary returns attractive to crime syndicates. The United Nations Office on Drugs and crime notes that over the past decade trafficking in human beings has reached epidemic proportions. No country is immuned. They estimate that more than
700,000 people worldwide are trafficked into forced labour and prostitution each year. In more recent times about “80 percent of victims trafficked across international borders, about 70 percent of these are females trafficked for sexual exploitation” (p.23).
A cockerel will always crow when in danger. Literary
Cockerels cannot afford to be silent while the world is beset by this heinous monster called human trafficking.
An erudite scholar and poet, Niyi Osundare has brilliantly declared that “literature; that pre-eminent offspring of verbal exchange is tyranny’s … ultimate nemesis” (p.2)
He further affirms that: Literature matters not only because it provides us with diversion and pleasure, but also because it creates positive dreams which can serve as alternative – antidote – to our pervasive nightmare
(p.4).
Jean Paul Sartre sums this up in his treatis “What is literature”, viewing literature as a vehicle for social change. It is not surprising that Ezeigbo, a feminist
African literary cockerel (artist) speaks with a dissecting voice against trafficking in her novel, Trafficked, to stimulate conscience for positive social change.
Unveiling the Rhythm
Trafficked is a narrative set in Nigeria where Ezeigbo evokes the socio-political milieu of poverty, corruption and bad governance of inept management of the country’s huge mineral resources. In this fictional world,
Nneoma, a young girl of eighteen years from poor home is lured and trafficked from Nigeria via Italy to Britain.
Using Nneoma as the protagonist among fifteen other young girls who are trafficked, Eziegbo exposes atrocities associated with human trafficking. This work sets out to study Ezeigbo’s captivating narrative laden with figures, song, reminiscence deployed to depict the social reality of human trafficking. Individual voices of the trafficked and deportees are accented for the reader to get a vivid picture of the enormity of the slavery and sexual servitude of the present age. The study concludes with the modest attempt provided to combat and sooth the thorns inflicted by violence of trafficking.
The narrative begins in medias res where the reader sees Nneoma as she descends gently from her flight.
The aircraft is metaphorically described as “a silvery mechanical bird in the afternoon glare”. The personification of “afternoon glare” is extended to the
“middle of the day when the sun flaunted its nakedness, shooting its rays like a machine gun and driving people into houses and other shelters” (p. 1) Here the reader immediately notices the sophistication of an artist who has control of figures of language. She uses these solid image to introduce a deportee’s arrival to Nigeria full of fear and shame, “A feeling of dread rose from the pit of her stomach ploughed upward until it reached her throat
She and the fifteen humiliated young women shuffle out of the aircraft, past the crew who stood aside watching them as if they were lappers or slaves disembarking from a slave ship”(p. 1) Nneoma steps back into the landscape of her beginning “with all its jagged points and potholes which seems more treacherous. …” (P. 5).
The author in a flash back describes Nneoma’s family as one with “Betrayal of various hues… (Which) misfortune had dogged with horrendous consistency” (p.
5). Before Nneoma was trafficked she saw herself having nothing to hope for because of her poverty-ridden home.
However, Nneoma had advantages which she was unable to explore at adult age of eighteen. She was pretty and lovable such that her father petted and spoilt her to the disapproval of her own mother, Adaeze, who would always warn her husband, Ogukwe:
…You can go on spoiling her if you wish.
You are the one that will regret it later.
Do not say I did not warn you (p. 11).
The saying that “mothers know best” holds true as we shall see later. Adaeze is proven right when at eighteen
Nneoma becomes spoilt and self-centered. Without recourse to her humble family that has not only shown so

much love and preference but also given her some level of education up to National Certificate of Education
(NCE), she abandons her home without a thought for
Ofomata (her fiancé) who had paid her bride price, she just disappears (p.17). We see her again being interrogated by law enforcement agents as trafficked, about to be deported. Listen to the rhythm of the commencement of her ordeal as she responds to the questions by the police:
I went to Italy with a woman who promised to help me and some other girls to get jobs. She said it was easy to get jobs there and that we could migrate to Britain after a while if we wanted. … She was called Madam Dollar
(p.15).
A man, a British “half-caste or Mulatto” called Baron buys her and takes her to United Kingdom from Italy “who told her (Nneoma) he had bought her” (p.16). Memory assumes terrible clarity. Poetically Nneoma echoes her arrest and detention while in London in this sing-song lines:
That cold morning
A dawn raid on arrest
Whisked off to a police station
From the house of South West London
Ending up in a detention centre (p. 14)
This arrest brings Nneoma back to Nigeria to a rehabilitation home: Oasis Youth Centre for Skills
Development.
At the rehabilitation centre where Nneoma meets other inmates, Ezeigbo employs the technique of reminiscence.
She positions the narrative such that “Memory assumes terrible clarity”(p.4) or what Chioma Opara calls “Fleshing out memory”(1). The two deportees, Nneoma and Efe, like the four women who constitute the Oluada in
Ezeigbo’s Last of the Strong Ones rend their voices to unfurl the causative elements for sexual servitude. The causative elements of poverty, religious violence (where people kill themselves with impunity) are unveiled in their narration. In Nneoma’s voice the author rhetorically questions with audible intrusions: “How could a country that destroyed its men, women and children hope to survive? Wasn’t this an act of suicide?” (p.92). In her reminiscence Efe gives a picture of her excruciatingly poor family. She gets “employment” to work in Britain after attending an “interview” in Nigeria. Instead of Britain she is taken to Italy and sold to a woman called Madam
Gold, a vicious Nigerian woman. Hear her as she “fleshes out memory”:
Madam Gold sold me to a pimp – a white man after four years of slaving for her. I worked for my new owner two years before I escaped, then I fled to Verona and teamed up with a prostitute I met there. … Then the police arrested me and I was deported (pp. 100).
While conveying Nneoma’s reminiscence the author adopts dramatic narrative gear as though the action is happening in the present. Nneoma begins her story in first person, as she flees home on a Friday morning
Fubara 3 without the knowledge of her family:
In no time, they get passports and flight tickets for us, and keep them. They show us pictures of the schools where we will be teaching and give us appointment letters signed by people with English names. … For the first time we hear we will go to Italy. … In Italy I discover I am trafficked. … Life is hell in Rome – we are always walking the night, selling sex to Italian men and foreigner.
… When I am difficult the men beat me … Madam Dollar says “you must pay me back every kobo I used to by you”
(p. 128 – 130).
Through the strategy of reminiscence conveyed in dramatic narrative mode, Ezeigbo gives a picture of the rhythm of trafficking from identification, deceit to sexual servitude and bondage.
Poverty as Figures
All through the narrative there are echoes of poverty and deprivation. In many passages the author uses narrative ingredients such as dialogue and direct exposition to convey the level of poverty in the society. Here is dialogue between a porter at the Jaja House at the
University of Lagos and Ofomata who is also a student in the same University.
Porter: Have you heard what’s happened.
Ofomata: I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about
Porter: There was an explosion in Ejigbor. People were siphoning fuel from oil pipeline and it caught fire. … Over two hundred people were roasted alive.
Ofomata: Oh, my God it has happened again: will they never learn.
Porter: It is poverty … yes; it is a result of poverty of the masses and corruption of our leaders . What do you expect the poor to do? Accept staying hungry in a land with plenty of money… ? You will see the explosion will never end as long as there is mass poverty (all my emphasis, p. 100).
The author has used this short dialogue as in many other passages to reveal the level of poverty hinged on corruption of leaders and the mismanagement of the infrastructure. Money is in the hands of the rulers. The poor masses no longer have value for their lives because of depravity. They rather would die in a furnace out of desperation struggling, seeking resources for daily meal.
Ezeigbo also employs the strategy of rumination to dish out information. Ofomata’s rumination informs that soldiers overthrow government after government “as if to rule was their birthright”. To reinforce the decadence in the country the author makes the reader to “eavesdrop” into his (Ofomata’s) thought:
Civilians were back in power now but little had changed really, he thought. Corruption was rife, injustice stamped about like a monster and poverty ravaged the population
(my emphasis p. 35) Mismanagement and corruption are dramatized; injustice shown as a metaphoric monster and

4 Int. Res. J. Police Sci. Criminal law Criminol. poverty is personified as instrument of distruction all tied to corruption. The author also deploys episodic mode of narration to frown at the decadence (corruption) even in the university. Lecturers extort money from students for grades. University dons practically demean themselves by asking favours, money, petrol, car tyres and the like from students. Ofomata not only had to buy tyres for his lecturer, Mr. Komolafe, but also had to give a loan [which would never be paid] of fifty thousand naira to Mr.
Ogamba on demand in order to avoid victimization in the course of his academic work. Below is a poetic solidarity song presented in a dramatic mode:
Solidarity for ever
Aluta continue
Solidarity for ever
We are fighting for our right
All we are saying give us our right (p. 172)
The solidarity affirmation uttered in poetic sing-song demonstrates one of the passages the author uses as suspense to give vital information. This solidarity outburst introduces students’ demonstration where two thousand male and female students barricade the university gate with boulders, abandoned vehicles and empty drums.
“They drove away the unarmed security guards and locked the gate. Government vehicles … seized and used to ferry students…” (p. 159). At their press conference the president of the students’ union declares:
We are tired of our education and welfare being trifled with by both the government and the university authorities (p.159).
The quotations above show that the country has been driven to a state of anarchy by corruption. Men who are supposed to be security guards are unarmed. Students become lawless to authorities who are themselves lawless government that is powerless because of corruption, while the destructive “monster” and the personified poverty reigns. The author intrusively emphasis that, corruption “is a faceless cabal which suck the country’s blood (p. 104)”.
A state ruled by corruption and mismanagement of resources leads to riots. This is not only found in the university alone but prevalent in several sectors of the society. Lives are constantly destroyed, properties looted.
Violent attacks are reported among Christians and
Muslems, communal conflicts abound such that gory images of dead and wounded people lay in the streets.
Burnt and charred churches stand forlornly grieving her congregation. Under the prevailing circumstance, a frustrated woman who is likely familiar with the trafficking transaction whimpers indignantly, summing up the social disaster with this litany of woes.
Ike agwugom I’m tired of this country: nothing works, constant power cuts, infernal heat, robbery with violence, bribery and corruption, strikes, student unrest, religious riots… It’s terrible… Ozugo it’s enough. … It will be a longtime before I come back here gain (pp. 196-7).
The Disaster and Government
The factors above sum up the causative elements for human trafficking. Governments and society have failed.
Do individuals have a share in the blame? Nneoma the protagonist might not have been trafficked because she does not only have some good education but also engaged to be married to Ofomata who is seen as successful in his society. Adaeze, a decerning mother, captures Nneoma’s life poetically in these two-sentence metaphors portraying her as a bad fruit:
Good fruit takes time to ripen,
Bad fruit ripes prematurely. (p. 171)
Her father Ogukwe endorses this utterance with yet another imagery:
After the winged termite has cruised in the air,
It will fall down for a toad to eat it (p. 171).
Although this imagery spoken spontaneously by
Adaeze and her husband is used in reference to
Hannah’s (Nneoma’s elder sister) romance with the self acclaimed Apostle, Prophet Elias, it also aptly describes
Nneoma’s life as the trafficked and as a deportee. This metaphor by extension serves as warning to many youths likely to be lured into trafficking business. Nneoma, a fruit of impatience, has cruised in the air as a victim of the trafficked and has fallen down for a toad to eat. Listen to this dehumanizing down-trodden exposure. She relays this to us in one of the moments when her “memory assumes watery presence”. The author in direct transmission intrudes into Nneoma’s memory to expose this to the reader:
Nneoma… remembered the times Baron had asked her to plait his thick glossy hair. Each time she did it, he would have an erection. After she had completed the task, he would grab her and rape her (p.95).
The account given above demonstrates the reality of sexual servitude.
Nneoma is a younger generation of the Oluada yet so different in stature. The Oluada (voice of women) in the last Ezeigbo’s of the Strong Ones who where faced with almost impossible situations and difficulties, with patient perseverance, became women of influence, position and wealth in their community. In the midst of raging wars by the colonialist these women stood firm, planned and successfully worked with the men. Historical female figures like Queen Kambasa of Bonny and Queen Amina of Zaria are among women who were not lacking in vision. They firmly participated in the political, social and economic activities in their prevailing rigid male dominated societies under which they lived and made remarkable contributions to the welfare of their communities. They left indelible foot prints for successive generations. What has Nneoma left for her generation: an aching heart, beginning with her penurious family?
Ofomata, devasted over her sudden disappearance sees her as “selfish, arrogant and callous” (p.252).

Ezeigbo uses the Oasis Youth Centre for Skill
Development a non governmental organization (NGO) as a transforming ground. This rehabilitation centre accepts and equips her in this transformation ground. Nneoma and other deportees are equipped with skills in various fields of their interest. Nneoma is trained to be selfemployed as a fashion designer and with admission to study Business Education at the University; she is indeed equipped for life. Perhaps she and her ilk might regenerate to not just the “strong ones” but also one of the purposeful powerful ones in the society.
CONCLUSION
The causative elements of human trafficking along with its rhythmic violence and exploitation are made real in the
Trafficked. Ezeigbo deploys the skill of narrative rhetoric in figures, dramatization in dialogues, flash back, songs, poem, reminiscence and various picture images to expose the monstrous exploitation of human beings.
Reminiscence not only serves as a tool for purging out of emotion but also reveals the depth of sexual servitude involved in the trafficking industry. Corruption and bad governance has produced a riotous society being strangulated by poverty. Poverty itself becomes instrument that produces this lucrative business for organized crime which keeps young people especially women in sexual servitude and bondage. Young people in the bid to flee from poverty get trapped. The deep pain of dehumanization involved in human trafficking can never be erased but can be soothed and possibly healed as Nneoma lulls herself with these verses:
Time stood still
Memory strived the soul
The mind re-lived the agony
That would not pass
That could not fade
Though time, pain had dulled
Sufferer be of good courage
Time changes every thing
Heals all wounds (p. 135)
This is why the author has creatively provided a window of escape through education to equip the young with knowledge which is power. Ezeigbo is calling various
Fubara 5 bodies and non governmental organizations to provide facilities like the Oasis Youth Centre for Skills
Development to empower the youth. For society to be sane, productive and progressive the corrupt must never be left unpunished. Dr. Okmolafe is finally sent to nine months jail while his cohorts stand the danger of termination of their appointments. This is a welcomed denouement that gives hope.
The cockerel has crowed for the world to hear, turn around and embattle the scourge of human trafficking.
Once more the world needs that courageous combat by
William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, and Thormas
Clarkson (18th century) against trade in human beings.
Again a declaration similar to Lord Mansfield’s towards the battle against slavery and slave–trade in 1772 will make the world begin to celebrate the anniversaries of the conquest against human trafficking in this twenty first century and beyond.
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