Novel
Second-Class Citizen
Buchi Emecheta · 1974
Synopsis
Adah grows up in Lagos, where girls are not sent to school; she makes her own way there, gets a post as a librarian at the American consulate and marries Francis, a student. She pays for her husband's trip to London, then joins him there with the eldest children. She discovers landlords who refuse Black tenants, the cold, the welfare office, and a husband who beats her when she talks about contraception. She works, reads, begins to write; he burns her manuscript.
Context
The book was published in London by Allison and Busby, one hundred and seventy-four pages, under the direction of Margaret Busby; George Braziller brought it out in the United States the following year. It is the second instalment of the chronicles that its author drew from her own life, after the one of 1972, and the two were later combined in a single volume. The French translation appeared under a title in the masculine, which critics have noted, English not marking gender.
Who it is for
One hundred and seventy pages in unadorned English, which goes straight to the point. It is better to know that housing was then refused to Black people in London, with no one hiding it.
Prizes and reception
The book established its author as the voice of African women of the diaspora, and it is on the curriculum of Nigerian schools as well as of postcolonial studies.