Paper short abstract:

This paper interrogates European-African sexual alliances in four novels, reading blackness and whiteness (in fact, racial difference) as bargaining chips with varying connotations of power, dominance, and influence.

Paper long abstract:

Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King which encapsulates the human struggle, irrespective of race, with adjusting to the unfamiliar says a lot about reading migration stories through multifocal lenses. The features of Africa to Europe migrations identified in Cajetan Iheka and Jack Taylor (2018: 5-6) also apply to the Europe to Africa migrations because, what else do migration stories all over the world do if not portray the conditions that propel migrants to move, their experiences abroad, relationship to the homeland, and the negotiation of a possible return? We establish this in the paper by tracing the sexual relationships between European migrants and Africans in selected African novels.

Several countries in Africa in recent times have seen sex tourism on the rise. The tourist-attraction combination is usually of older European men/women versus younger African men/women. It is too simplistic to dismiss these relationships as exploitative, with the Europeans doing the exploiting and the Africans being the exploited. Representations of these sexual alliances in some African novels question the idea of sexploitation and suggest these relationships as more of ‘resource exchange’. This paper interrogates black-white sexual alliances in four novels: Camara Laye’s The Radiance of the King, Ferdinand Oyono’s Houseboy, Jude Dibia’s Blackbird and Kaine Agary’s Yellow-Yellow. At the risk of destroying the stereotyping of the African as exotic sex object (alongside the Asian), blackness and whiteness (in fact, racial difference) are both read in the novels as sexual bargaining chips with varying connotations of power, dominance, and influence.