Class, Gender, and Race Theme Analysis

She was not even quite sure that she was exactly eight, because, you see, she was a girl. She was a girl who had arrived when everyone was expecting and predicting a boy. So, since she was such a disappointment to her parents, to her immediate family, to her tribe, nobody thought of recording her birth. She was so insignificant.

Boy was now all alone. He had to work very hard to keep the family name going. Adah had dropped out of it. She had become an Obi instead of the Ofili she used to be. Boy had resented this, but his presence at the wharf showed that he had accepted the fact that in Africa, and among the Ibos in particular, a girl was little more than a piece of property.

Adah was quietened [sic] by the sharpness in his voice. The sharpness seemed to say to her: “It is allowed for African males to come and get civilised in England. But that privilege has not been extended to females yet.” […] It was a sad indication of what was coming, but she prayed that the two of them would be strong enough to accept civilisation into their relationship.

“You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos […] you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an élite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”

Everybody talked and speculated. The trouble was that Ada was like a peacock, who kept wanting to win all the time. Only first-class citizens lived with their children, not the blacks.

Adah could not stop thinking about her discovery that whites were just as fallible as everyone else. There were bad whites and good whites, just as there were bad blacks and good blacks! Why, then did they claim to be superior?

Among her people, she could have killed Trudy, and other mothers would have stood solidly behind her. Now, she was not even given the joy of knocking senseless this fat, loose-fleshed woman with dyed hair and pussy-cat eyes. She belonged to the nation of people who had introduced “law and order.”

This was where she differed from Francis and the others. They believed that one had to start with the inferior and stay there, because being black meant being inferior. Well, Adah did not yet believe that wholly, but what she did know was that being regarded as inferior had a psychological effect on her. The result was that she started to act in the way expected of her because she was still new in England, but after a while, she was not going to accept it from anyone. She was going to regard herself as the equal of any white.

You come to behave and act like a mad person if you are surrounded by mad people. Was that what people called adaptation? she wondered.

These groups of men calculated that with independence would come prosperity, the opportunity for self-rule, poshy vacant jobs, and more money, plenty of it. One had to be eligible for these jobs, though, thought these men. The only place to secure this eligibility, this passport to prosperity, was England. They must come to England, get a quick degree in Law and go back to rule their country. What could be more suitable?

Nearly all the failures married white women. Maybe it was the only way of boosting their egos, or was it a way of getting even with their colonial masters? Any woman would do, as long as she was white.

“I brought my children here to save them from the clutches of your family, and, God help me, they are going back as different people; never, never are they going to be the type of person you are. My sons will learn to treat their wives as people, individuals, not like goats that have been taught to talk.”

At least some of the provisions of the Welfare State worked for both second- and first-class citizens alike.

Why was it necessary to have a husband brought into an issue like this? Could not the woman be given the opportunity of exercising her own will? Whatever happened, she was not going to have any more children.