by Michelle Kyoko Crowson
Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree—translated by J.M. Coetzee—is a portrait of slavery and dislocation. First published and translated in the 1980s, the novel is a first-person account of a nameless young African girl and former slave who has clawed her way to a peculiar sort of freedom. She was torn from her home village at a young age, and proceeded to spend her youth in sexual slavery to several rich men in a prosperous coastal town. Her last owner, a sea captain in search of inland adventure, drags her along on his journey to the African interior in search of a mythical city. The narrator accompanies her new master on an expedition into unfamiliar terrain and the party gets lost, wandering into increasingly dangerous territory. One by one her travel companions die or disappear, until she finds herself alone in the veld, finally finding shelter in the hollow of a massive baobab tree. The baobab has a thick trunk that expands and contracts with the seasons. When we first encounter the narrator she is wedged in the tree’s hollow. With few tools to help her survive and no means to measure the passage of time, she spends her new life in a solitary and malnourished state, filling her days with memories of the past. We come to understand the story of her life through these recollections, starting with her first experience as a slave and ending with her journey to the baobab tree.