Second Class Citizen: Chapter 2: Escape into Elitism Summary & Analysis

Adah quotes Matthew 10:16, in which Jesus instructs his disciples to be “wise as serpents” but “harmless as doves,” to justify stealing money for her exam fees. Adah is distorting a culturally powerful belief system, Christianity, to serve herself—and clearly knows that she is doing so, which shows her savvy. The “Image” in Adah’s mind is likely the same entity as the “Presence,” Adah’s personification of her dream of traveling to the UK.

Adah knows that she twisted the meaning of the Bible to justify stealing the two shillings—yet she also feels like a “martyr” when she is punished, which implies she to some extent believes her own justifications and has imbued her quest to get an education with an almost religious value.

Adah has to excel at her examinations simply to have the chance to go to high school, which emphasizes how, as a girl, she has to do better than her brother to access the same opportunities. Oddly, though Adah was just severely beaten for stealing, no one asks how she paid for her exams; this lack of curiosity shows how little Adah’s extended family cares about her. This lack of care explains Adah’s growing attachment to the personified “Presence” of her dream.

Adah doesn’t protest the sexist cultural norms that inhibit unmarried teenage girls’ freedom to move around. Instead, she takes steps to increase her freedom within those cultural norms—by getting married to a young, poor boy, someone less likely to get in her way than the older, richer men her family wanted her to marry. While it remains to be seen whether Adah’s marriage is a good decision, her actions show how well she understands sexist cultural norms and her determination to pursue her aspirations and education despite them. Meanwhile, her relatives’ refusal to attend her wedding because they didn’t make money from it shows how little they care for Adah.

When Adah’s mother signs with her thumbprint, it implies that she can’t write, emphasizing again that women are often denied educational opportunities in this cultural context. Adah’s depression after the wedding hints that she didn’t want to marry Francis, even though marrying Francis allowed her to circumvent cultural restrictions on single girls’ behavior. Her happiness at having a baby despite her young age, which may seem counterintuitive to some readers, indicates that she wants to be a mother even if she didn’t particularly want to be a wife.

Francis assumes that he gets to decide whether Adah takes a job or not, revealing that he shares the sexist cultural assumptions of this time (Nigeria in the early 1960s) that husbands have a right to make unilateral decisions about their wives’ lives. He also worries that his coworkers will laugh at him if Adah makes more money than he does, betraying his insecurity and perhaps foreshadowing conflict between him and Adah in the future. Francis’s father, meanwhile, advises Francis to exploit Adah economically because her family is no longer around to do so—advice that hints Adah’s in-laws don’t value her as a person any more than her extended family did.

When Adah shares her dream of traveling to the UK, Francis immediately imagines going by himself while Adah works to support him, their children, and her in-laws. This reaction shows his selfishness: he wants to appropriate Adah’s dream for himself while leaving her to do the work that makes the dream possible. By contrast, Adah wants to turn her whole family into “elites.” However, her only point of comparison for an “elite” is Lawyer Nweze, who seems odd in that he has done nothing for his own people and instead made his fortune defending people from a different ethnic group (the Hausa). Adah feels she is becoming “elite” because she has maids and because she’s fertile. This suggests that, despite her nascent understanding of her own value as a person, Adah still accepts cultural values according to which people are worthwhile only if they’re rich and women are worthwhile primarily for bearing children.

This passage suggests that Adah wants to travel to the UK partly to flee her own Ibo/Igbo culture, where family elders have great sway over younger people’s decisions. But she also wants to escape reminders of her unloving family, who don’t visit her even after she gives birth to her first child because they believe she hasn’t made enough of her education—the education that she had to fight every step of the way to get.

This passage makes a broad generalization about “African” culture: it suggests not only that the entire continent shares a traditional culture but that that culture is sexist, believing men can order their wives around. Regardless of the truth of this claim, Francis’s announcement shows his insensitivity to Adah’s feelings: he casually blames his “old-fashioned” father for keeping Adah at home but never acknowledges that going to the UK was Adah’s dream first, not his.

Adah married Francis to further her educational goals, but she was willing to love him and felt she was coming to love him. His poor treatment of her here, however, badly damages “the romantic side of her life,” which suggests that Adah, to feel love for Francis, needs him to reciprocate that love in some meaningful way. Adah’s anger here constitutes a thoroughgoing rejection of the early-60s Nigerian cultural norms according to which husbands tell their wives what to do. But rather than attack those norms directly, she plans to undermine them by manipulating the people around her. These plans show Adah’s powerless position in the family but also her determination and savvy.

Earlier in the novel, Adah quoted the Bible to justify stealing money for her entrance exam fees. Now, she quotes Matthew 22:21 to justify the sin of idolatry (worshipping what Christians would consider false gods). Adah’s cultural flexibility (not to mention Francis’s sporadic commitment to being a Jehovah’s Witness) suggests that religion is a cultural phenomenon which people can endorse or subvert depending on whether it benefits them at the time.

Up to this point, Adah has met—and manipulated—cultural expectations around marriage and motherhood to achieve her educational goals. In this scene, by contrast, the novel shows the limits of Adah’s ability to control her responses: she can’t cry on command for Francis even when she’s sad, but an incommunicable, personal memory evoking the “finality” of her Pa’s death makes her break down.

Adah clearly wants to love and be loved by Francis. Though she already wanted to travel to the UK, Francis’s doubts about her love motivate her to join him as quickly as possible. And once again, she manipulates her family by claiming her worth will increase if they allow her to do what she wants, just as she did when she fought to go to school as a girl.

Though Adah’s family disapproves of her marriage to Francis, it is Boy—not Adah’s in-laws—who weeps for her departure from Nigeria. Adah spontaneously cries over Boy’s tears as she wasn’t able, at first, to cry for Francis. This set of reactions suggests that despite the cultural belief system that states Adah has been “bought” by Francis’s family and no longer belongs to the same family as Boy, the siblings still love one another. (The phrase “though on credit” refers to the fact that Francis’s family was too poor at the time of Adah’s marriage to pay her bride-price.)