The republic of therapy: triage and sovereignty in West Africa's time of AIDS

contemporary social problems were often placed at the heels of Europe in acts having more to do with politics than historical accuracy. Metaphor makes a number of such assertions that risk depicting a romanticized pre-slave trade Africa whose agency is subordinated to Europeans. Other examples of this include suggesting the transatlantic slave trade was responsible for “the failed [postcolonial] states that indirectly resulted from it” (179), and qualifying the transition from acephalous communities to centralized polities as tragic, without analyzing why this might be so (2). Another challenge of Murphy’s undertaking, and one to which she readily admits, is that metaphors are open-ended. Consequently, their relationships to the transatlantic slave trade in particular are difficult to establish. So when she suggests, for example, that Ben Okri’s image of a river serving as a road connecting to the rest of the world signifies “the moment when slave-trading ships reached the coast and introduced a ‘New World’ to unsuspecting and undesiring African people” (80), one is left wondering why this reading should be more convincing than a dozen others, and why transatlantic slavery is singled out and divorced from broader historical patterns of trade and enslavement affecting Africa over la longue durée. Despite these shortcomings, with arguments illuminating the manner in which memories of the transatlantic slave trade continue to find expression in Africa, and careful readings of some of Anglophone Africa’s most important novels, Metaphor and the Slave Trade in West African Literature is a valuable contribution to our understanding of postcolonial Anglophone African literature and the transatlantic slave trade’s continuing place in the African imagination. While its somewhat labyrinthine structure makes it unsuitable for undergraduates, and its lack of rigorous historical analysis renders it questionable to historians, it will be a valuable resource for those interested in the authors under study, the Black Atlantic, and slavery in African literature.