Revisiting the Shadow of Slavery: Women and Trauma in Attah's Hundred Wells of Salaga

This paper seeks to explore how women recount the pains slavery subjected them to in Attah’s Hundred Wells of Salaga. Women who were enslaved in pre-colonial Ghana were seen as chattel by their slave masters and were exploited by slave raiders. This paper argues that Attah’s novel presents women who were captured in slavery and subjected to a series of oppressions. The findings of the study indicated that women who were captured in slavery were faced with sexual exploitation and hard labour. Also, women were normally subjected to physical torture and forced to walk long distances from one town to another, thereby putting them in agony, which led to the death of many. The study employs the psychoanalytic theory of trauma as the lens for the study.