Commodified Hope: Migration, Gender, and the Moral Economy of Trafficking in Contemporary African Fiction

Trafficking persists not only because people are forced to move, but because they are made to believe that movement is the only viable path to survival. It thrives in the charged space where aspiration meets constraint, and where hope itself becomes a tradable resource. This article examines the dynamics of human trafficking in Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters' Street and Kwei Quartey’s Last Seen in Lapaz, arguing that trafficking operates as a moral economy in which gendered precarity, migration desire, and economic vulnerability converge. Moving beyond dominant frameworks that cast trafficked women solely as passive victims, the study foregrounds the complex interplay of agency, coercion, and aspiration that structures their experiences. Drawing on recent interdisciplinary scholarship on migration, labour, and trafficking, the article introduces the concept of “commodified hope” to explain how imagined futures are mobilised, priced, and exploited within transnational and intra-African trafficking networks. It demonstrates how both novels refract trafficking not merely as an act of violence, but as a system sustained by debt, surveillance, and the circulation of power between victims and intermediaries. By analysing narrative patterns of recruitment, bodily commodification, and structural control, the study reveals how trafficking is embedded in broader socio-economic conditions rather than isolated criminal acts. The article concludes that contemporary African fiction offers a critical lens for rethinking trafficking as a relational and systemic phenomenon, one that implicates not only traffickers but also the socio-economic structures and aspirations that make exploitation possible. In doing so, it contributes to ongoing debates by reframing trafficking as an economy of desire as much as an economy of coercion.