Second Class Citizen

by Buchi Emecheta

  The headmaster at her school did not believe his ears when Adah told him that she was going to sit for the common entrance examination. He looked at her kwashiorkor-ridden body for a very long time then shrugged his shoulders. “One can never tell with you Ibos. You’re the greatest mystery the good God has created.” So he put her name down.

  Sometimes the thought that she might not be able to pay the fees crossed her mind. But she did not let that worry her. She had read somewhere that there was some sort of scholarship for the five or so children who did best in the exam. She was going to compete for one of those places. She was so determined that not even the fact that her number was nine hundred and forty-seven frightened her. She was going to that school, and that was that!

  But how was she to tell them at home? She had stopped liking Cousin Vincent. Every time she knelt down to pray, she used to tell God to send him to hell. She did not believe in that stuff of loving your enemy. After all, God did not like the Devil, so why should she pray for the man who had the heart to cane her for a good two hours with a koboko? When Cousin Vincent failed his Cambridge School Certificate examinations, Adah burst out laughing. God had heard her prayers.

  The entrance examination was to take place on a Saturday. That was going to be very difficult. How was she to get away? Another lie? She could not do that again. She would be discovered, and they would stop her from taking the examination; so she told her uncle, Ma’s brother, that she was going to sit for the examination. The funniest thing was that nobody even asked her where she got the money from. Nobody wanted to know. As long as she was not asking for money from anybody, and as long as she had done her Saturday job, she could go to the devil for all they cared!

  Occasionally, the mother of the house, Ma’s sister-in-law, would ask how she proposed to get the money for the school fees and remind her that her father was dead. In response, Adah’s mind would flutter with fear, but she never told anyone she was dreaming of winning a scholarship. That was too big an ambition for a girl like her to express.

  She was aware that nobody was interested in her since Pa died. Even if she had failed, she would have accepted it as one of the hurdles of life. But she did not fail. She not only passed the entrance examination. But she got a scholarship with full board. She never knew whether she came first or second or even third, but she was one of the best children that year.

  Since then she had started to be overawed by the Presence. It existed right beside her, just like a companion. It comforted her during the long school holidays when she could not go home, because there was no home for her to go to.

  She was very happy at the Methodist Girls’ School especially during the first four years. However, a cloud of indecision started to loom when her school days were coming to an end. It was incredible how quickly five years could pass! She would have liked to linger there, in the boarding house; to stretch each day into a year and each year into a century. But that was impossible. The final day came and she was quite unprepared for life outside. She had some vague plans about what she was going to do; she was going to continue her education, she was going to go to Ibadan University to read Classics and she was going to teach at the end of it all.

  Well, there was one thing she had not bargained for. To read for a degree, to read for the entrance examination, or even for more “A” levels, one needed a home. Not just any home where there would be trouble today and fights tomorrow, but a good, quiet atmosphere where she could study in peace.

  Adah could not find a home like that. In Lagos, at that time, teenagers were not allowed to live by themselves, and if the teenager happened to be a girl as well, living alone would be asking for trouble. In short, Adah had to marry.

  Francis was a very quiet young man who was reading to be an accountant. Adah congratulated herself on her marriage. At least he was not an old baldie, neither was he a “made man” then, though there was no doubt that he was going to be made one day. To Adah the greatest advantage was that she could go on studying at her own pace. She got great satisfaction, too, from the fact that Francis was too poor to pay the five hundred pounds bride-price Ma and the other members of her family were asking. She was such an expensive bride because she was “college trained”, even though none of them had contributed to her education. The anger of her people was so intense that none of them came to her wedding.

  That wedding itself was a hilarious affair. Francis and Adah were both under age, and the only witness, Francis’s mother, had to sign with her thumb. The whole affair started off on the wrong foot. They had forgotten to buy a ring, and the skinny man with a black bow tie refused to marry them, even when Adah assured him that a piece of string would do until they got home.

  “I’ve never heard of such a wedding!” the man declared, sweating in his tight collar.

  “Please marry us without a ring because, you see, before we can get to Ebute-Metta, you will have closed for the day!” Adah begged.

  “Never mind about that, you just come back tomorrow with a ring and I will marry you.”

  They were married the following day. It was the saddest day in Adah’s whole life. She did not mind having to go home in a bus, neither did she mind not marrying in white, which she hated anyway, but still she was sad, very sad, for months after the marriage at the register office.

  Soon, however, things improved. Adah gave birth to a daughter and she and Francis were both delighted with the baby.

  Then, after endless interviews and form fillings, Adah was selected to work as a librarian in the American Consulate Library at Campbell Street. The size of her pay packet worried Francis a little, and he had to ask his Pa for advice.

  “Do you think our marriage will last if I allow Adah to go and work for the Americans? Her pay will be three times my own. My colleagues at work will laugh at me. What do you think I should do?”

  “You are a fool of a man, you are. Where will she take the money to? Her people? Her people, who did not even come to congratulate her on the arrival of baby Titi? Her relatives, who did not care whether she lived or died? The money is for you, can’t you see? Let her go and work for a million Americans and bring, their money here, into this house. It is your luck. You made a good choice in marriage, son.”

  Francis was as delighted as a schoolboy. Adah would have to be protected, especially on the pay days. On the first pay day, Adah was to be paid about sixty pounds or so. Neither Adah nor Francis had ever seen such a fantastic sum. It was decided that Francis should work only a half day in his office, and then take a bus to meet Adah, in order to be a bodyguard for his wife and their money. Both husband and wife carried the money to Tinubu Square in Adah’s work bag like a delicate baby. They talked about their plans for this sudden prosperity.

  “We are ahead of all our colleagues, you know,” Francis remarked.

  “God is wonderful! Fancy me earning such a fantastic sum. Our new baby is going to be very lucky.”

  “If he happens to be a boy we’ll call him Kennedy.”

  “And if a girl, we’ll call her Jacqueline.”

  There was a long pause during which the young couple eyed a man in an agbada robe suspiciously.

  “Some of these rogues do smell money, you know,” Francis whispered.

  “Yes, I know,” nodded Adah.

  Francis clutched the raffia bag tightly to his chest, and frowned in the direction of the unsupecting man.

  “I have been thinking,” Adah said, all of a sudden. “I used to dream that one day I would go to the United Kingdom. Why don’t we save and go, now that we shall be able to afford it? We can take our children with us. Everybody goes to the United Kingdom now. I’ll be glad if we can go too.”

  The smile on Francis’s face was like a warm sunshine after a thunderous rain. It spread from ear to ear on his beardless face. He would be very happy if they could make it. He would finish his accountancy and Adah would read librarianship. He would go first, and Adah would send him twenty pounds every month; she was to save for
her fare and that of the children, she was to feed herself and the children whilst they were still in Lagos and pay the rent and help in paying the school fees of some of Francis’s seven sisters.

  Adah did not in the least mind being saddled with all these responsibilities even though her bride-price had not been paid. It never occurred to her to save her new high salary for her bride-price. She knew that all she did would go towards making her young family into a family of Ibo Élites, just like Lawyer Nweze of Ibuza, who by then had become a Minister in Northern Nigeria. That lawyer was a funny man, Adah thought. He did not come to the South, to Ibuza, to give the people of the town electricity, nor did he come to worship the river Oboshi. He just stayed put in the North, making barrels and barrels of money. When Adah was still at the American Consulate news appeared in the Nigerian papers that Lawyer Nweze was defending a Hausa multi-millionaire. They said the millionaire was so rich that he had a railway line built right down to his palace door. The man had eight Rolls-Royces. After the case, Nweze ended up a millionaire himself. Adah still wondered how that happened, because the millionaire was jailed for forging notes in his great palace. Francis and Adah sometimes wondered what he had paid Nweze with.

  In any case that was Nweze’s headache, not Adah Obi’s! As far as she was concerned, her dreams were all coming true. Her marriage was less than eighteen months old, yet she already had four maids, two were paid three pounds each, the other two were paid their fees for secondary schools. These two, Cecilia and Angelina, were Francis’s sisters. These four girls did all the work in the house. All Adah had to do was to go to the American library, work till two-thirty, come home and be waited on hand and foot, and in the evening be made love to. She did not disappoint her parents-in-law on that score. For, apart from the fact that she earned enough money to keep them all going, she was very prolific which, among the Ibos, is still the greatest asset a woman can have. A woman would be forgiven everything as long as she produced children. Adah was so fast on this score that she was given the nickname “Touch Not” among the other wives of her age group. “As soon as her husband touches her, she gets a swollen tummy,” they used to laugh.

  Later, in England, writing about that time of her life almost with nostalgia, she used to ask herself why she had not been content with that sort of life, cushioned by the love of her parents-in-law, spoilt by her servants and respected by Francis’s younger sisters. As for her mother-in-law, she was everything that Ma was not: quiet, beautiful, and motherly. Some of Adah’s friends used to think that she was Adah’s real mother, they were so close. But she suspected somewhere in her heart that the contentment she had then was superficial. She did not know her husband very well because, as most young African wives know, most of the decisions about their own lives had to be referred first to Big Pa, Francis’s father, then to his mother, then discussed amongst the brothers of the family before Adah was referred to. She found all this ridiculous, the more so if the discussion involved finance. After all, she would have to pay for the plan in most cases but the decision would have been made behind her back. Of course Francis was simply a puppet in such cases, and so was she. They could not refuse. They had to bow down to their elders.

  Elders or no elders, they were going to live their own lives. It would have been fairer if some of the elders were from her own side of the family. But both Adah’s parents were dead by then. Ma had died, aged thirty-eight, when Adah was in hospital having Titi, so she felt cheated in a way.

  Cheated by the fact that neither her Pa nor Ma had lived to see any of her children; cheated by the fact that she was bringing so much joy into her husband’s house and none into hers. Boy never visited her, neither did any of her cousins and uncles. They felt Adah had let them down. They said Adah should have continued her education and become a doctor, since she had managed to struggle through secondary school. But nobody talked of who was going to support her, nobody talked of where she was going to live. So she found herself alone once more, forced into a situation dictated by society in which, as an individual, she had little choice. She would rather that she and her husband, whom she was beginning to love, moved to new surroundings, a new country and among new people. So she said special prayers to God, asking Him to make Pa agree to their going to the land of her dreams, the United Kingdom! Just like her Pa, she still said the name United Kingdom in a whisper, even when talking to God about it, but now she felt it was coming nearer to her. She was beginning to believe she would go to England.

  Francis broke the good news to her one day after their evening meal. Pa had agreed, he said. Adah was so full of happiness that she started to dance an African calypso. So they were going at last! She was soon going to be called “been-to”, which was a Lagos phrase for those who had “been to” England. Francis allowed her to finish before he dropped the bomb-shell.

  “You know how old-fashioned Father is.”

  Adah knew and nodded, startled by her husband’s grave tones.

  “Father does not approve of women going to the UK. But you see, you will pay for me, and look after yourself, and within three years, I’ll be back. Father said you’re earning more than most people who have been to England. Why lose your good job just to go and see London? They say it is just like Lagos.”

  Francis was an African through and through. A much more civilised man would probably have found a better way of saying this to his wife. But to him, he was the male, and he was right to tell her what she was going to do. Adah, from the day of her registry marriage, had seen the romantic side of her life being shattered, like broken glass, about her. Francis had had a very expensive education at Hussey College in Warri, but his outlook on life was pure African. He had had little opportunity of coming in contact with Europeans as Adah had. Those God-forsaken missionaries! They had taught Adah all the niceties of life, they taught her by the Bible, where a woman was supposed to be ready to give in to her man at any time, and she was to be much more precious to her husband than rubies. It was all right for a man who had seen rubies before and knew their worth. What of a man who would throw rubies away, thinking that they were useless stones? What was she to do now? Cry? It was too late. Who were these people anyway? Illiterate parents, who thought they knew a great deal of a curious kind of philosophy by which she was not going to bring up her children. There was no point in arguing with Francis, there was no need to ask him who he thought he was. He just would not understand. “Be as cunning as a serpent but as harmless as a dove,” she quoted to herself. So she was to stay in Nigeria, finance her husband, give his parents expensive gifts occasionally, help in paying the school fees for some of the girls, look after her young children and what then, rot? So this was where her great dream had led her. She should have married one of the baldies. It was too late now, not even a baldy would have her. All she had to do was to change the situation, and that she was determined to do. She pretended to be all for the plan. Of course she would stay in Lagos and look after the family; of course she would send him money regularly and, if possible, move in with her mother-in-law. Francis was not to worry about her at all, everything was going to work out well.

  “My father told me I made a right decision the day I said I was going to marry you. You know what he told me? No? I’ll tell you. He said to me, ‘Adah trained herself. She learnt very early to let her common sense guide her. She has the makings of a woman who would think before she acts. Very few women can do that, I tell you’.”

  They both burst out laughing.

  “Father was right, was he not?” Francis wanted to be reassured.

  Yes, your father was more right that he knew, Adah thought to herself. First of all Francis must go, then she would get down to work on her in-laws, and work on them very hard until they let her go.

  Plans for Francis’s departure were soon under way. He got together everything he needed in no time at all. It cost Adah a small fortune though, because it was bribery all the way through. To get a passport in those days, one had to bribe even t
he messenger at the passport office. Curiously enough, the office was manned by policemen. Even the man at the top, whose fee was twenty pounds, was a policeman. All his subordinates were paid five pounds each. Francis and Adah lived on Francis’s income, and spent all Adah’s on the preparation for his departure.

  The night before he left Nigeria, Francis took a group photograph with his family and Adah’s little girl. Adah refused to pose for the photograph. She did not know why, but just did not wish to appear in it. Maybe it was because she was too big with the new child, but she knew the photographer could have cleverly disguised that! A relative of theirs came to make a special prayer to the river Oboshi. Some pieces of kolanut were brought by Francis’s mother, and these were broken by the relative, then they were thrown into a circle on the floor, drawn with a chalk. A long prayer was sung to the goddess, who was four hundred miles away in Ibuza. She was requested to guide Francis, to keep him from the evil eye of white girls, to make him pass his examinations in good time, to bless him with all the money in England, to bless him with every thing that was good in England; she was requested especially to forget him when circulating diseases and anything plaguey. This confused Adah. Was Oboshi responsible for the lives of people in England too? she wondered. In any case, at the end of it all, they were all ordered to eat the pieces of kolanut, which they munched with great satisfaction.

  That was the trouble with being a believer in all these transcendent Beings. One did not know when one aroused the anger of one or the other. For instance, did their chewing of the kolanuts offered to Oboshi automatically make them the enemies of Jehovah?

  Well, Adah debated with herself, Oboshi being such a powerful goddess might be able to protect them from the wrath of other gods. But Adah’s being a Christian complicated the issue all the more. Didn’t the God of the Christians, whom Adah believed in, tell Moses somewhere that he was a jealous God “visiting the iniquity of fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me”? That God would hate them for chewing those pieces of kolanut, Adah was sure. Nothing would deaden her guilty conscience; not even the fact that her mother-in-law, who was a devout Catholic, bought the kolanuts, nor the fact that she was munching away happily herself. Adah looked at Francis, who carried the Bible every weekend, telling people the “good news of the kingdom” from a twopenny magazine called the Watchtower. Well, it was all right for her mother-in-law - she would quickly go to the padre, who lived round the corner at St Paul’s church and confess it all to him. The padre would then give her absolution. That would free her conscience to sin again if she liked. As for Francis, he became a Jehovah’s Witness whenever he felt like it, or when he could use it as an excuse for being selfish. When Adah was ill with their first baby, Francis had given his blood to save her life, forgetting that the Witnesses were not supposed to do that. When he was busy with his preparation for coming to England, he forgot his Watchtower and Awake. He also forgot that coming to England was seeking after materialism which he preached to Adah was not only evil but unnecessary, because Armageddon was round the corner. It was all right for them, but she did not know whom to turn to herself. There was no padre she could confess to in the church she attended. She belonged to the Church of England. They had nothing like Watchtower and Awake, neither had they any system of absolution; they left a guilty person with a nasty conscience. But wait a minute, she told herself, didn’t Jesus say to the Pharisees that one should give unto Caesar what was Caesar’s and to God what was His? Well, that was what they were doing. She could quote the Holy Book to support it. There was nothing to worry about.