Analysis Of Abina And The Important Men

What the Meaning of the Word “Is” Is. Trevor Getz’s and Liz Clarke’s Abina and the Important Men takes place along the Gold Coast of Africa in the late 1870’s after the proscription of slavery in the British colonies. This graphic novel predominantly follows a court case in which the titular character Abina Mansah accuses Quamina Eddo of subjecting her to slavery. Through a misrepresentation of slavery and a misplaced sense of personhood, the court rules Eddo not guilty of the accusation of slavery. This decision not only exemplifies the era’s complacence with oppression, but also the ethically corrupted motivations underpinning British imperialism that would later influence racist policies in other Western countries and promote a false understanding genetics. For the duration of this paper, a “slave” is defined as one who is non-consensually subjected to work or to captivity with little to no pay, and “consensual agreement” is understood to not be coerced and to possess a reasonable degree of autonomy. By this standard, Abina is clearly distinguished as a slave, though it is not clear if she maintains this status for the entirety of her life. While she was bought and sold as property by her first husband Yaw Awoah, she …show more content…
By introduction of the fallacious defense of Eddo’s slavery, the authors display the general complacency amongst the franchised towards the institution of de facto slavery that riddled imperialistic expansion. Moreover, the narration and asides expose the underpinnings of imperialism as being rationalized through the masturbatory corruption of Enlightenment ethics that later serve as the scaffold for the racist sentiments that underlie pseudoscientific claims of racial genetic