The postcolonial world as a cargo globe: ideas of inequality in early Ghanaian fiction, 1968–1977

Reconstructing the thinking on inequality of Ghanaian writers-cum-intellectuals Ama Ata Aidoo and Ayi Kwei Armah, this article contributes to the burgeoning research on inequality in literature and to global and African intellectual history. While both authors have mainly been studied by literary scholars, little work has been done to focus explicitly on their ideas about global inequality. This article investigates how ideas of inequality and concepts of an unequal world figure in the writers' early fictional works and unfolds how these authors were influenced by their trajectories within transatlantic intellectual networks, including key inequality thinkers such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah and Walter Rodney. In their early novels, both writers reactivated the enslaved figure to counter the widespread rhetoric of emancipation of the early independence period, articulating neo-colonial critiques based on an anachronistic use of slavery-related metaphors and conceptions of the postcolonial world as a "cargo globe."