Second Class Citizen Study Guide

Buchi Emecheta was born Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta on July 21, 1944. Her parents were a railway worker named Jeremy Nwabudinke and a former enslaved woman—sold by her brother and freed only after her “owner” died—named Alice Emecheta. When Emecheta was eight, her father died. Two years later, she won a scholarship to Methodist Girls’ High School in Lagos, the oldest girls’ high school in Nigeria. At age 16, she graduated and married a student named Sylvester Onwordi. They had a daughter in 1960 and a son in 1961. After Onwordi moved to London to continue his education, Emecheta and their children joined him in 1962. Between 1962 and 1966, she had three more children. Onwordi, an abusive husband, burned the manuscript of the first novel Emecheta wrote. Afterwards, while pregnant with their fifth child, Emecheta left him. From 1965–1969, she supported her five children by working as a library officer in London’s British Museum. Later, while working another job, she became a sociology student at the University of London. Emecheta began writing columns for the British newspaper The New Statesman about being Black in England. In 1972, the same year she earned her BSc in sociology, she published her first novel, In the Ditch, which was somewhat based on her columns. In 1974, she published another novel, Second Class Citizen, loosely based on her childhood in Nigeria and her abusive marriage. In addition to writing 14 novels over the course of her career, Emecheta also wrote a memoir, Head above Water (1984), two children’s books, and several plays. After suffering a major stroke in 2010, she died in London in 2017.

In the 18th century, the British Empire established forts in West Africa, including in the region that became Nigeria. Beginning in the mid-19th century, large-scale Christian missions, both Protestant and Catholic, began operating in Nigeria, attempting to convert the indigenous population. The area around Lagos, Nigeria’s largest city, became a colony of the British Crown in 1861, but the British Empire did not annex all Nigeria as a colony until 1914 after years of violent military conflict between British-aligned forces and native governments such as the Ijuebu Kingdom. Colonial Nigeria yoked together a variety of African ethnic groups, most prominently the Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo/Ibo, under a foreign government. Throughout Nigeria’s colonization, indigenous peoples resisted and protested foreign English rule; at the same time, many Nigerian students traveled to England to study. In 1960, Nigeria became independent from England. The first Republic of Nigeria lasted until 1966, when a military coup led by Lieutenant-Colonel Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and Major Emmanuel Arinze Ifeajuna overthrew the republican government. This coup eventually led to the Nigerian civil war known as the Biafran War (1967–1970), in which a predominantly Igbo region calling itself Biafra attempted to secede from Nigeria. England supported Nigeria in the civil war, which ended with Biafran defeat (involving atrocities against the Igbo ethnic group) and a unified Nigeria. During the 1960s, many Nigerians immigrated to England to escape political violence.

Like Second Class Citizen (1974), Buchi Emecheta’s first novel, In the Ditch (1972), has as its protagonist a Nigerian immigrant to England named Adah, loosely based on Emecheta herself. The two novels were published in a single volume as Adah’s Story in 1983. In Second Class Citizen, Adah writes a manuscript for a novel called The Bride Price, which her abusive husband Francis burns before she can type it up. Emecheta’s abusive husband Sylvester Onwordi really did burn the manuscript of her first novel, which Emecheta rewrote entirely and published as The Bride Price in 1976—suggesting that Emecheta closely modeled Adah’s traumatic experiences and artistic growth on her own. Second Class Citizen explicitly mentions that the Christian Bible and famous English playwright William Shakespeare (1564–1616) inspire Adah’s writing style in English—which implies that the Bible and Shakespeare were major influences for Emecheta’s writing style too. Second Class Citizen also suggests that famous Nigerian novelists Chinua Achebe (1930–2013, Things Fall Apart) and Flora Nwapa (1931–1993, Efuru), as well as African-American novelist James Baldwin (1924–1987, Go Tell It on the Mountain), are inspirations for Adah/Emecheta. Contemporary Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born 1977) has publicly expressed admiration for Emecheta’s work. Like Second Class Citizen, Adichie’s 2013 novel Americanah narrates the immigration of a young Nigerian woman to a white-dominated country (in this case, the U.S.) and the racism she experiences as an African immigrant.