The Slave Girl
A novel by the Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta, first published in 1977. It follows Ojebeta, an Igbo girl in early twentieth-century Nigeria who, orphaned by an epidemic, is sold into domestic servitude by her own brother. The book traces her years of unfree labor and her eventual return home, using one woman's life to examine how colonialism, custom, and gender all narrow her choices. Emecheta writes plainly and without melodrama, letting the events carry the weight. It is a compact, readable entry point to her larger body of work about West African women's lives.