27 pages • 54 minutes read
Ovo AdaghaThe Plantation
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
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.
War
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. Toward the beginning of the story, Namidi ignores the village women. In trying to keep his secret about the gasoline, Namidi thinks, “Some riches are too hard won” (78). This thought is central to how the village is structured by men and their actions, with rewards and riches to be won or lost.
As soon as the villagers discover Namidi’s secret, the plantation fills with people trying to gather gasoline. Adagha describes these interactions as war-like, suggesting that violence is just below the surface of this subsistence society. The narrator says, “Away to the right, to the left, and all around, the plantation sparked with keen contest as the people jostled and fought each other for space around the site” (82). Their pans and buckets filled with gasoline become “weapons of survival” (82) as people battle for gasoline and wealth.
This war at the plantation is reflected in the play of Ochuko and his friend Onome. Pretending to be soldiers, they act out war before the explosion makes their pretend violence all too real. Just as violence is just beneath the surface of the subsistence society, the explosive gasoline is beneath the surface of the plantation’s soil.
School
The missionary school is a symbol both of Namidi’s poverty and the unavailability of escape routes. The school bells and their repetitive noise remind Namidi of his low station in life. He feels “diminished each time he [sees] his boy playing in the sand while the school bells [ring] in the distance” (79). Rather than being a symbol of hope and upward mobility, the school represents the hopelessness of Namidi’s situation and motivates his desperate plan to collect gasoline.
Namidi believes that education is the key to leaving poverty. The school was created by outsiders, and it exists on the outskirts of the village, apart from the poverty that Namidi finds so awful. These missionaries, like the men from the city who install pipelines, are symbols of foreign influence and outside wealth. Namidi is reminded of this disparity between his status and that of the missionaries and their students by the image of Ochuko’s ill-fitting pants. The implication in this description is that Ochuko wears a pale imitation of a school uniform and a poor version of the khakis worn by men from the city.
