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Class, Gender, and Race
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Second Class Citizen, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
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 people mistreat her because she is female. Yet Adah uses the misogynistic cultural norms around her—early marriage, subordination of wives to husbands—to achieve her goals. First, she marries Francis when they are both teenagers because the marriage allows her to live in Lagos and get a university education, which she would not have been able to do as a single girl. Second, she convinces her in-laws that she will earn more money—for Francis’s and their benefit, not her own—if she can travel to the UK with Francis to continue her education. Once in the UK, Adah quickly adopts as many cultural freedoms allowed to women as she can find. At the same time, she resolves to fight the anti-Black racism that she encounters in English culture.
By contrast, Adah’s husband Francis is not able to analyze, judge, and react quickly to new cultural situations. In the UK, he simply accepts anti-Black racism, embracing a prejudiced view of himself as a “second class citizen.” Additionally, he fails to understand Adah’s newfound freedom, assuming that he can exploit her economically forever because they are married with children. The clash between Adah’s cultural savvy and Francis’s failure to adapt ultimately lead to his escalating physical and verbal abuse. Ultimately, Adah leaves him, and the novel implies that she eventually makes a life for herself while Francis fails to do the same for himself. Thus, the novel suggests that people must learn to manipulate the inescapable, often oppressive cultural norms that surround them to protect their freedoms and succeed.
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Culture vs. Individual Freedom ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Culture vs. Individual Freedom appears in each chapter of Second Class Citizen. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Culture vs. Individual Freedom Quotes in Second Class Citizen
Below you will find the important quotes in Second Class Citizen related to the theme of Culture vs. Individual Freedom.
Chapter 1: Childhood
Quotes
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.
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Chapter 2: Escape into Elitism
Quotes
That was the trouble with Jesus, He never answered you; He never really gave you a sign of what to do in such a tempting situation. Anybody could twist what He said to suit his own interpretation.
The relatives wiped their eyes and stared at Adah. What was the matter with her? Wives cried in the presence of their departing husbands, not when they had gone and could not see the tears!
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.
Chapter 3: A Cold Welcome
Quotes
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.”
Chapter 5: An Expensive Lesson
Quotes
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.”
Chapter 6: “Sorry, No Coloureds”
Quotes
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.
Chapter 8: Role Acceptance
Quotes
But the one thing Adah could not stand was when a group of people took a portion of the Bible, interpreted it the way that suited them and then asked her to swallow it like that, whole. She became suspicious. She did not mind it if Francis believed it, except when it disturbed his studies or if either of the children needed a blood transfusion and he refused.
Chapter 9: Learning the Rules
Quotes
When in Rome, do as Rome does. When in University College Hospital in Gower Street, do as they do in University College Hospital in Gower Street. Neat, that.
“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.”
Chapter 10: Applying the Rules
Quotes
If we humans could rationalise about dates and all that, she believed that God, who made the humans who could rationalise and come to terms with things, would be able to rationalise still more. So, having equipped herself with this idea, she did not share Mrs Noble’s distress. The long and short of it was that she had no money for Christmas; God would understand.
At least some of the provisions of the Welfare State worked for both second- and first-class citizens alike.
Chapter 12: The Collapse
Quotes
“Don’t you remember, or have you forgotten, the saying of our people, that a husband and his wife always build their home for many things but particularly for quarrels? A home is where you quarrel in.” Adah nodded, she did remember.
She should have asked Mr Okpara whether the old people lived in one room, whether the men gave babies to their wives in such quick succession.
