MEMORIALISING WEST AFRICAN MULTIPLE FORMS OF SLAVERY IN YAA GYASI'S HOMEGOING AND BUCHI EMECHETA'S THE SLAVE GIRL

ABSTRACT Slavery has historically been widespread in Africa and it has been categorized into indigenous slavery and exported slavery depending on whether or not slave were traded beyond the continent. As much as different scholars have examined the representation of exported slavery in Literary texts, studies juxtaposing the representing of indigenous and exported slavery has been limited. Therefore, this study attempts a Comparative analysis of Yaa Gyasi's Homegoing and Buchi Emecheta's The Slave Girl with a view to explore how the texts memorialises the multiple forms of slavery in West Africa. These texts are selected because of their rich portrayals of different forms of slavery. The study will be subjected to literary analysis, which involves a focused analysis of their characters and themes.The study adopts New Historicism as it's theoretical framework. The study shows that both novels reconstructed slavery as layered and pervasive, Homegoing foregrounded chattel, sexual, psychological, domestic, and colonial forms, while The Slave Girl highlighted kin-based servitude, domestic slavery, and colonial exploitation. It also found convergences in gendered oppression and differences in narrative scale and setting. Further analysis showed Homegoing traced intergenerational trauma across continents, exposing how violence and silencing produced inherited identity fractures. The Slave Girl situated bondage within colonial Nigeria, revealing betrayal, commodification, and cultural displacement in kinship systems. Both texts memorialised slavery as lived trauma shaping personal selves, family lines, and communal memory. This study concludes that the two novels recover silenced histories and render slavery an enduring inheritance shaping identity and memory. Keywords:Slavery, West Africa, Memory.