This paper analyzes Aphra Behn's 1688 novella Oroonoko as an early English-language work engaging with slavery, race, and colonialism. It examines how Behn constructs her African protagonist as a "Noble Negro," complicating European distinctions between noble savages and enslaved Africans. The paper explores the novella's implicit critique of the slave trade, its portrayal of European colonial attitudes toward indigenous and African peoples, its treatment of gender and female agency through the character of Imoinda, and the tension between Oroonoko's aristocratic identity and his enslaved condition. Together, these themes reveal the complex and sometimes contradictory ways that 17th-century European literature began grappling with race, power, and imperial expansion.
Aphra Behn's Oroonoko is a tale of a Coramantien prince and victorious general, Oroonoko, who loses his heart to the lovely Imoinda. First published in 1688, when African slavery through the barbaric trans-Atlantic slave trade had become established as an economic, transcontinental system, the tale draws on popular literary themes of aristocratic romance, social censure, and travel narrative. It reflects several ways in which the British were beginning to view cultural and racial disparities, as well as their own contribution to the slave trade and colonialism. Behn's tale, broadly considered, is one text that demonstrates how European literature on the subjects of slavery, colonization, and race evolved over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Oroonoko's inspirational speech to his fellow slaves clearly marks Behn's work as among the very first English-language fictional works to speak out against slavery. The lead character addresses his fellow slaves thus:
"And why, my dear friends and fellow-sufferers, should we be slaves to an unknown people? No, but we are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools and cowards: and the support of rogues and renegades that have abandoned their country for rapine, murders, thefts and villainies. And shall we render obedience to such a degenerate race, who have not one human virtue left to distinguish them from the vilest creatures? Will you, I say, suffer the lash from such hands?" (Behn, p. 128)
While Indians qualify as "unfamiliar" and "other," they inevitably figure in the author's discussion of the "Noble Savage" — a concept that, beginning in the 16th century, called to mind among Europeans the appeal of reverting to a simpler way of life. People taken from Africa and coerced into slavery were often seen as retaining a ferocity and lack of discipline that distinguished them from this idealized figure. Oroonoko, however, appears to cloud the divide between Noble Savage representatives — the Indians — and African persons as embodiments of wildness.
Behn breaches the two categories by placing Oroonoko, a unique African protagonist, within the domain of noble savages, thereby giving rise to a "Noble Negro" tradition. In doing so, she effectively lifts Oroonoko's character from racial stereotype, transforming him into the tale's honourable and chivalrous protagonist. She develops a new literary space for portraying the actual, if scarcely acknowledged, characteristics of Black individuals. However, this revolutionary insertion of a Black protagonist into white fiction is a risky and nearly unfeasible endeavour that generates irreconcilable tension in the author's narrative voice.
The speech rendered by Oroonoko also raised a concern closely associated with the Royal African Company regarding independent traders' tendency to abduct key African dignitaries such as princes. The counterproductive unrest produced among slave communities in America as a result of capturing African nobles taught the Europeans a lesson: not to seize African aristocrats as long as their subjects continued supporting them. Oroonoko graphically demonstrates the basis of protests against the African slavery business. Furthermore, as that period witnessed constant resistance to the royal trading monopoly, the novel quietly stresses the economic value of monopoly and rebukes the instability caused by figures like the captain responsible for abducting Oroonoko.
One scene in the novel depicts the slaves opposing one another, with the majority's "racial difference" underscored and mocked. The Europeanized Oroonoko draws a distinction between himself and his peers' apparent weakness and indecisiveness, lumping them all into the group of colonial others. Oroonoko reiterates his royal status and authority among the English colonialists, positioning his fellow countrymen as "others" — separate from eloquent individuals such as himself — rather than aligning them against the degenerate Europeans. He asserts the appropriateness of a royal's worldview, in keeping with the author's own rigid royalist standpoint.
"Slave trade economics and colonial power dynamics"
"Indigenous peoples, Imoinda, and patriarchal violence"
"Freedom, sexual politics, and the slave-master dichotomy"
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