Second Class Citizen Themes

Second Class Citizen implicitly defines social class as how much freedom and respect a person receives: someone is a “first class citizen” if it’s easy for them to be free and respected, second class if not. Gender and race strongly influence a person’s social class: in general, men and racial majorities are “first class” while women and racial minorities are “second class.” Second Class Citizen illustrates the difficulties that Adah, a young Ibo woman…

Second Class Citizen presents culture as something that is inescapable and often oppressive, threatening individual freedom. As such, it suggests that the most resilient people are those who deploy cultural norms when they are beneficial and subvert them otherwise. The novel’s protagonist, a young Nigerian woman named Adah, recognizes when cultural norms support her freedom and deploys them (or subverts them) accordingly. Adah, who’s born during World War II, notices throughout her girlhood that…

Second Class Citizen shows how family life teaches children how to love; that is, people whose families taught them to love are capable of loving others as adults, while people who never learned to love from their families have great difficulty loving others in adulthood. This dynamic is clear in the marriage between protagonist Adah, a young Nigerian woman who immigrates to the UK in the early 1960s, and her abusive husband Francis…

In Second Class Citizen, people often treat education as a mere stepping-stone to good credentials and economic security. Yet the novel also shows that when people take formal and informal education seriously as a life-long project, they attain fulfillment and happiness that goes beyond mere economic security. The connection between education, economics, and happiness is clear in the life of the novel’s protagonist, Adah, a young Nigerian woman who immigrates to the UK…