Research Article
Child Labour as Ecological Violence: Figuration and Transfiguration in Bate Besong’s Beasts of No Nation and Bole Butake’s Family Saga
Mackeus Nguni*
Issue:
Volume 14, Issue 4, August 2026
Pages:
92-102
Received:
19 August 2026
Accepted:
1 September 2026
Published:
18 September 2026
DOI:
10.11648/j.ijla.20261404.11
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Abstract: Child labour has received considerable attention as a socio-economic and human-rights problem, but its possible symbolic relationship with ecological violence and spiritual disruption remains underexplored in African literary criticism. This study examines Bate Besong's Beasts of No Nation and Bole Butake's Family Saga to explore how the exploitation of vulnerable labouring bodies is represented and transfigured into a broader critique of extractive violence. Drawing on a composite framework that integrates Marxist Literary Criticism with African eco-spiritual thought, the study analyses the relationship between class-based exploitation (child labour), ecological violence, and disrupted continuity. The findings show that the two plays represent child labour through images of degrading work, exhaustion, pollution, appropriation, bodily violation, and unequal power. These textual patterns reveal a shared extractive logic through which vulnerable bodies are consumed for the benefit of dominant structures. Within an African eco-spiritual interpretive framework, this logic enables a transfigurative reading in which the exploitation of the child structurally and metaphorically corresponds to the violence infested on landscapes and the disruption of relationships that sustain communal and spiritual continuity. The study further demonstrates that the two plays offer different dramatic visions: Beasts of No Nation exposes the persistence of systemic oppression and the failure of resistance, whereas Family Saga moves more visibly toward dialogue, collective memory, and relational restoration. On the basis of this comparative reading, the study proposes an African communalistic ethic of labour as the researcher's normative response rather than as a direct programme jointly prescribed by the two playwrights. The article contributes an African-inflected ecocritical perspective to the study of child labour in African drama by connecting socio-economic exploitation with ecological violence and spiritual discontinuity.
Abstract: Child labour has received considerable attention as a socio-economic and human-rights problem, but its possible symbolic relationship with ecological violence and spiritual disruption remains underexplored in African literary criticism. This study examines Bate Besong's Beasts of No Nation and Bole Butake's Family Saga to explore how the exploitati...
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