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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Second Class Citizen, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Class, Gender, and Race
Culture vs. Individual Freedom
Motherhood and Art
Family and Love
Economics vs. Aspiration in Education
Summary
Analysis
Adah realizes that she has a dream when she is about eight years old, though she doesn’t know her exact age because her family—disappointed that she wasn’t a boy—didn’t record her birthday (she knows she was born sometime during World War II).
Adah’s Ma and other women from Ibuza who live in Lagos are preparing to celebrate the homecoming of the first Ibuza man to become a lawyer in the UK. Adults from Ibuza don’t like Lagos because there, the law prevents you from venting your temper on your enemies. Meanwhile, people around Adah talk about the UK like it’s sacred and the lawyer, Lawyer Nweze, like he’s a “Messiah” who will defend Ibuza. Adah’s Ma makes outfits for the women planning to celebrate the lawyer. She uses scrap material from the outfits to make a dress for Adah. Pleased, Adah asks to go celebrate the lawyer’s homecoming too—but realizes she won’t be allowed, because she has school.
Ibuza, also written “Ibusa” or “Igbuzo,” is a community in southern Nigeria whose population is Ibo/Igbo, one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria. The adults from Ibuza don’t like Lagos, which is Nigeria’s largest city and was its capital at the time this book was written (the capital became Abuja in 1991), implicitly because they find its law-focused culture restrictive of their individual freedom. Yet they talk about Lawyer Nweze as if he is a sacred savior, a “Messiah,” because he studied law in the UK, which suggests they respect education. It also suggests that they associate Englishness with a higher value or class status, possibly because Nigeria was a colony of the UK until 1960, when Nigeria became independent.
Themes
Ibo people take education seriously, as a path out of material hardship. Ibo families make their children attend school, though boys tend to get more schooling than girls. In a flashback, Adah’s younger brother Boy is attending school but she isn’t—her Ma thinks Adah will only need basic literacy and numeracy before she starts a trade. Every day, when Adah walks Boy to his English-language-only prep school, she feels jealous and thinks that her Pa would have sent her to school already if her mother hadn’t interfered.
This passage explicitly claims that Ibo/Igbo people value education but also that they value it as a path to economic security, not for its own sake. Adah’s parents send her brother to school but not her, though she’s the older child, making clear that they believe girls don’t need as much education as boys. Adah blames her mother more than her father for this state of affairs—hinting that women can perpetuate a sexist culture as much as men do.
Themes
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One day, bored at home, Adah decides to sneak off to school: not Boy’s fancy prep school, but the inexpensive Methodist school where her family’s neighbor Mr. Cole works. When she enters Mr. Cole’s classroom, the students, shocked, laugh hysterically. Mr. Cole smiles and leads Adah to an empty seat. Adah announces that because her parents haven’t sent her to school, she has sought it out herself.
Adah seeks an education out of boredom (and, implicitly, jealousy of Boy) rather than a desire to learn, which suggests that, as a child, she doesn’t yet understand education’s full value. Her motives for announcing that her parents haven’t sent her to school aren’t made explicit, but she may be trying to publicly shame them so that they’ll send her to school in the future. If so, it shows Adah’s savvy at manipulating cultural norms despite her low cultural status.
Themes
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After school ends, Mr. Cole tells Adah that she needs to return home and that if her parents don’t want her coming to school, he will teach her her letters independently. Adah doesn’t want to go home: Pa will just beat her with a cane a little, but Ma will hit her and criticize her endlessly. (In the future, Adah will have trouble making female friends because of her fractious childhood relationship with Ma.)
Adah’s culture may value girls less than boys generally, but Mr. Cole’s generous offer to teach her outside of school hours makes clear that some people nevertheless care about girls’ education. Meanwhile, the revelation that Adah’s relationship to her Ma will permanently impair her ability to make female friends emphasizes the importance of people’s early family relationships to their later relationships as adults.
Themes
When Mr. Cole walks Adah home, she discovers that someone has called the police on Ma for “child neglect.” The family goes to the police station, where the police force Ma to drink gari, uncooked cassava flour mixed with water. They threaten to charge her if she doesn’t drink it all. Then one policeman tells Ma to let Adah go to school, because she seems to want to learn. This pronouncement causes Ma to stare at Adah with “fear, love and wonder.”
Ma’s arrest for “child neglect” shows that culture and law control people not only through peer pressure but through the exercise of force: Ma could be imprisoned if people judge her parenting negligent. Ma’s look of “fear, love, and wonder” at Adah implies that—despite their difficult relationship—Ma does care about Adah and admires her desire for an education, albeit while fearing that desire and failing to understand it.
Themes
Back at home, Adah’s Pa hits her with a cane a few times. Afterward, he calls her “nne nne,” a nickname that means “Father’s mother.” Pa’s mother, who died when he was very young, promised to be reincarnated as his daughter to return to him. When Adah was born, Pa gave her various nicknames referencing this history, several of which included the word “Adah”—so Adah she became. After this incident, Pa starts sending Adah to Boy’s fancy prep school. Unfortunately, Pa dies shortly thereafter—and both Adah and Boy are sent to a worse school.
Though Pa canes Adah, Adah does not seem to find the caning particularly harsh. Afterwards, Pa calls her by a loving nickname and sends her to the same fancy school as her brother rather than a less expensive school. These actions suggest that Pa punished Adah only because she got her Ma in trouble and so Pa felt punishment was culturally appropriate—otherwise, Pa seems to dote on his daughter. As such, his death foreshadows grief and trouble for Adah.
Themes
In the present, Ma gets angry at Adah for asking to skip school to celebrate Lawyer Nweze: after all, Adah got Ma sent to the police station with how much she wanted an education just a month earlier. Adah’s Ma and the other women, who are ignorant of “the so-called joys of civilisation” like monthly payments and pollution, go happily to celebrate the lawyer. The Europeans arriving on the same boat as the lawyer gawp at the women; one takes pictures.
Adah’s desire to skip school—after disobeying her parents to go to school—implies that she wanted to go because she didn’t want to be treated as “lesser” than her brother due to her gender, not because she understands yet the value of education. The ironic contrast between the happy Nigerian celebrants and the gawking European tourists, who presumably know the “so-called joys of civilisation,” implies that European culture does not make its people happy despite its pretentions to superiority.
Themes
The next Sunday, the Ibuza men have a meal with Lawyer Nweze to celebrate his return (they couldn’t get work off to meet him upon his arrival). Pa is disgusted at Lawyer Nweze’s newfound preference for soft meat, but he’s glad Lawyer Nweze did not return with a white woman—or Ibuza’s river goddess Oboshi would have given him leprosy. Later, in the 1970s, an adult Adah will laugh at such superstitions, though they still comprise part of her identity.
Adah can laugh at her culture’s superstitions, but that culture and those superstitions will still contribute to who she is. This fact indicates that people can’t truly shed their original culture, even if they can reject it, manipulate it, or achieve ironic distance from it.
Themes
In later years, someone will discover oil near the river Oboshi and predominantly white oil workers will exploit the river. None of them get leprosy. Neither do the Hausa soldiers who kill some people from Ibuza, nor does the Ibuza girl who marries a white man from America. Oboshi is more progressive than many people from Ibuza, it seems.
This ironic commentary on the goddess Oboshi shows that the novel’s narrator shares Adah’s ironic, humorous, skeptical attitude toward the religious and cultural beliefs of Adah’s Pa and the other adults who raised her.
Themes
After Lawyer Nweze’s return, Adah realized that she had a dream to travel to the UK. She kept her dream secret, because as the female child of Pa, who worked on railroads; and Ma, who only read the Bible and the Anglican hymnal, everyone would think she was crazy. Nevertheless, Adah’s aspiration lives with her “like a Presence.”
Adah believes that people will be skeptical of her dream to travel internationally because she is a girl, because her father is working-class, and because her mother is not highly educated. This belief illustrates how a person’s class position—which is based on gender, family income, or family educational status—can dictate what other people think is possible or appropriate for them to do. The capitalization of “Presence” implies that Adah sees her dream almost as another person, since names for people are usually capitalized.
Themes
