Of Rape, Black Women and ‘Whitened’ Pudenda: Psychosexual Identity in the Ghanaian Neo-Slave Narrative

The enslaved Black female body was a significant site of sexual exploitation during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and fated to a long passage of sexual assault. Slavery was rife with various sexual aggressions like rape on the enslaved Black woman by both Black and white heterosexual men. In addition, to facilitate their sexual perversions, the white slave masters ‘whiten’ the Black identities of the female slaves by revoking the slaves’ African names and imposing on them white Euro-American names. This ‘whitened’ identity becomes a fetish for the slave masters as they fixate on the misrepresented Black female bodies to satisfy their sexual fantasies. Though scholarship has grappled with the issue of sexual violation in the slavery arena, (Foster 2019; Jennings 1990, Oduwobi 2017), the subject has not received the fullest attention. For instance, there exist significant gaps on the question of the psychosexual motivations which drive the white slave masters to ‘whiten’ and fixate on their Black female slaves. Situating the present paper in the period of proto-colonialism, the long period of European and African commercial interrelations when slavery thrived, this study adopts Frantz Fanon’s psychoanalytical framework on colonial sexuality as well as Freudian libido theory to discuss the interplay of sexuality and identity between the Black slave raider and the slave master with the enslaved Black woman, as well as the relationship between the white slave master and the Black enslaved woman. The study focuses on two Ghanaian neo-slave narratives: Joseph Baiden’s Seeds of Slavery (2018) and Manu Herbstein’s Ama (2002) and concludes amongst others that the quest to ‘whiten’ the enslaved Black woman is borne out of the slave master's irrepressible obsession with the Black female body.