Innes is a Senior Lecturer in English, African, and Caribbean Literature at the University of Kent at Canterbury, England. In the following excerpt, she focuses on the theme of social conflict in "Vengeful Creditor. "

There could scarcely be a sharper contrast with the traditional setting and mode of "Akueke" than "Vengeful Creditor," published almost a decade later in the first Issue of Okike. Opening not in a small rural village hut but in a busy urban supermarket' and characterizing a confident, wealthy working woman who is also a wife and mother, we seem to have moved a long distance from the world of Akueke and the psychological isolation that was her lot. Nor is there the compassion and suspended judgement which hovers over the dilemma of all the characters in the earlier story, male and female alike; here the same and judgement is directed sharply against Mrs...