The Plantation

The plantation is more than just the title of Adagha’s story. Called an “emblem of life” (76), the plantation represents the theme of nature, depicting its power. It functions as the stage for the final contest between civilization and nature. Like the gourd that Namidi fills with gasoline and that is made from rubber trees found in the plantation, the farm hides the intrusion of human activity. The pipelines can’t be seen, but they eventually rupture, suggesting their inferiority to the natural world that Namidi finds suffocating and diminishing in its material poverty.

The plantation is powerful; the narrator says that although it suffers “from the endless trampling of feet” of villagers collecting gasoline, it “took it all in” (82). But the foreignness of the oil, like the foreign colonial power, is rejected by this natural site. Fire destroys much of the village. And the swamps may swallow the village as if humans had never lived there.

While there is no official war or battle in “The Plantation,” the motif of war, battles, and conflict in terms of Namidi’s marriage and the commotion at the plantation reinforces the themes of struggle both between people and the natural world and between men and women.