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Plot Account of Second-Class Citizen

6 minute read

duhool was born during the Second World War. Her father was a retired soldier while her mother was an ordinary housewife. As a girl, the parents thought she had no need for Western education. While they encouraged Boy, her younger brother, to go to school, they discouraged her from doing the same. For Ma, her mother, Adah just needed "a year or two... as long as she can write her name and count

Then she will learn to sew" (p. 9). Adah forced herself into the Methodist School where Mr Cole, their neighbour was a teacher. She tells Mr Cole, whose class Adah forced herself into: "I came to school my parents would not send me!" (p. 12) The police get to know that a parent would deliberately refuse to encourage her child to go school and have Ma arrested. For being the cause of Ma's arrest and punishment, Adah was later punished by her Pa: "Pa fished out the cane and gave her a few strokes for Ma's benefit" (p. 14). Not longer after, Pa dies and Ma remarries. Adah chooses to stay with her mother's relatives, where she is rather treated as a housemaid. A hardened offender, Adah proved to be stubborn, nicknamed "Ibo Tigress". The two-shilling secondary school form is secured from Adah's falsehood of claiming that she had lost the money. She passes the entrance to the Methodist Girls' School, and gets in addition a scholarship. Adah prefers marriage to any other thing after her graduation from the secondary school This is because she needs a home which she doesn't have, having lost her parents and having no kind- hearted extended family members to offer her a place of refuge or reprieve. However, she finds neither love nor home in her marriage to Francis. Adah has married a conservative, one who believes in the Igbo culture of denigrating women, one who believes he is his wife's boss and who does not believe that a man's primary duty is to cater for his immediate family.

In spite of her enormous contribution to the upkeep the family, her combining numerous chores, including the roles of breadwinner, mother, wife and children minder, Adah - whether in Nigeria or in England - has no love from her husband. Their coming to England where she had thought they would have a good environment to live, read and bring up their children in love and peace is a misplaced hope. Adah is prolific with children, a useful helpmate to her husband, a responsible mother, one who cared for Francis' parents and relations, she is not loved by anybody, including her husband whose studies by correspondence she sponsors. Francis has refused to engage in earning his daily bread except when occasionally he is compelled to do so; instead he is not embarrassed by the fact that his wife feeds him. Unlike what the Igbo culture accepts, Francis stays at home looking after the children and grumbling over it, while his wife goes out to look for what the nily would eat. Thus the narrator is not completely at home with the truth when she says that "Francis was an African through and through (30). The Igbo, nay the African culture, does not consider a man who depends on his wife materially as a sound fellow nor does the culture dignify a man who turns his wife into a punching bag. Francis resents Mr Okpara, a fellow Igbo in England, who reminds him that a man who cares little about his children's upbringing will soon realize that he will lose his manhood should the children get to know that "it was their mother that bought them clothes and food" (p. 174). It does not stop the lebo man from letting Francis know that if he wanted to hold the respect of his two sons, he'd better know what he was doing" (p. 174). The climax of Francis wickedness to his wife is his burning of thenwife's manuscript  Praised by Peggy and Mr Bill, for her manuscript, Francis who is given the same manuscript to read refuses to look at it. Instead, he burns it after calling it "rubbish" (p. 184). When Adah asks him if he can kill her child "because that is what you have done". Francis retorted: "I don't care if it (the manuscript) is your child or not. I have read it, and my family would never be happy if a wife of mine was permitted to write a book like that" (p. 187). This turns out to be the last straw that broke the camel's back. Adah goes away with her children and the fifth pregnancy  


 Background of Second-Class Citizen

The title of the novel is multibladed; it has meaning beyond the ordinary or common understanding of the expression. The word 'second-class' in the novel pertains to girls who in African culture are less rated than boys. Hence, in our novel, Boy is encouraged to go to school whereas Adah is discouraged from doing the same. Adah is rated a second-class citizen by her husband, Francis, who considers himself a first-class sex although Adah feeds him while he has no job. Where Adah and the husband live is evidently second-rate, and so occupied by second-class citizens. Adah's skin colour already classifies her as a second-class person. Her country having been ruled for so many years by the white man automatically makes her a second-class citizen. Being a foreigner in England, Adah does not enjoy the same status as those who own the place. This classification is so burdensome and it weighs heavily on Adah as she lives out her life real-time. Adah, the chief character, schooled in the 1950s. She didn't go through school because of her parents' desire to have her educated. In fact they wanted Boy, her younger brother, to be the educated one because he was a male. Girls then were to be married out once they managed to have primary education. At that time girls who went on to have secondary education, had educated parents or were lucky to relate with the church missions, particularly those run by nuns or had a scholarship grant. Adah Ofili was brilliant and was able to secure a scholarship which took her through secondary school.  With her two parents dead and hostile relatives who would have her as househelp rather than consider her as a relation, Adah preferred to be married at once. Although her age was below the official age for marriage, she got married off to Francis Obi whose age was close to hers. Both of them drearnt of an English education which would take them to England. They achieved this but each had his or her constraints. Francis had challenges with his education as an accountant to-be; Adah was the family breadwinner, constantly being impregnated and having a hostile and uncooperative husband. The fact was that Francis was a conservative person, a promoter of his Igbo culture in the subjugation of wives and a personal belief that there was nothing wrong with a wife working while the woman battled with a lot of problems, including a poor environment. Because she was a woman who was always giving birth, Adah could not retain her promising jobs. She thus suffered from discrimination and underrating. Even by the time she had had her fourth baby, Adah was not yet twenty-one. Bound up with the stress of one who was unloved and who had no one to complain to, Adah was so shocked that Francis, ratheran be eated by her wife's creativeness is an upcoming writer, burnt her first manuscript, The Bride price. With the ill treatment came the last straw:"she could forgive him all he had done before, but pot this one" (p. 187), Thus began their separation as a married couple.