Osayimwense Osa

teaches at the Bendel

Osayimwense Osa
State University,
Ekpoma, Nigeria. He
previously taught at
the University of
Houston (Texas). His
recent books are Buchi Emecheta's
Nigerian Youth
Literature and The B r i d e P r i c e :
Foundation--Essays
in Children's
Literature a n d Youth
A Nondidactic
Literature (both 1987,
Paramount Publishers,
Nigerian Youth Novel
Benin City, Nigeria).

Perhaps the biblical injunction, "Train up a child in the w a y he

should go: and w h e n he is old, he will not depart f r o m it" (Prov-
erbs 2 2:6) endorses didacticism in children's literature. In almost all
cultures o f the world, adults process almost everything that reaches
children, and b o o k s are no exception. Adult audiences stand be-
t w e e n the publication of a b o o k and the child audience for the
b o o k . James Steele Smith writes:

A Critical Approach to Adults m a y use b o o k s to s h a p e a c h i l d ' s values, to create o r c h a n g e

Children's Literature, his ideals. Such c o u n s e l , e m b o d i e d in fiction, p o e t r y , o r n o n f i c t i o n ,
p. 66 m a y c o v e r a t r e m e n d o u s range o f b e h a v i o r m a t t e r s - - o b e d i e n c e , in-
d e p e n d e n c e . . . b e i n g h o n e s t . For m a n y p a r e n t s t h e b o o k is still
p r i m a r i l y a m o r a l agent, a n i n f l u e n c e u p o n b e l i e f a n d behavior.

Nilsen and Donelson, Alleen Pace Nilsen and Ken D o n e l s o n regard didacticism in y o u n g
Literature f o r Today's adult literature as a m y t h that c o m e s closest to being true. Writing
Young
a b o u t British y o u n g adult literature and the staggering n u m b e r of
A m e r i c a n y o u n g adult novels, Sheila Ray o b s e r v e d that " d e s p i t e
Ray, "The their o u t s p o k e n coverage o f a w i d e range o f controversial topics,
development of the the majority of teenage novels tend to reinforce conventional and
teenage novel," p. 63
establishment attitudes." To Richard E Abrahamson, old p e o p l e in
Abrahamson, "The literature for adolescents act as teachers and personifications of
elderly person as a values w o r t h living for. In the age-old tradition, the old teach the
significant adult in
adolescent literature" young.

Children's Literature in Education 9 1988 Agathon Press, Inc. Vol. 19, No. 3

1 70
B u c h i E m e c h e t a ' s The Bride Price 1 71

This is not different in Nigeria and the rest o f Africa. C o n t e m p o r a r y

y o u t h novels in Nigeria are nearly all overridingly didactic in na-
ture. In part, this may be due to the newness o f the g e n r e - - e a r l y
adolescent literature in America was also didactic. But in Nigeria,
didacticism is an integral part o f juvenile literature. In Agbo Areo's
Agbo Areo, Director! Director!, Akinduro Falana, the y o u n g protagonist o f the novel,
originally goes into an illegal business, not so m u c h o n a c c o u n t o f
materialistic greed, but because he has been dismissed from school
for leading a riot, and he needs to retrieve his image of himself.
Apart from Director!, w h o s e moral value lies in its ability to help
the reader u n d e r s t a n d the moral predicament of materialism, Nige-
Osa, "Didacticism in rian y o u t h novels are simplistic moralizing pieces. According to
Nigerian young adult May Hill Arbuthnot, "didactic b o o k s may u n d e r s c o r e a lesson, but
literature"; Arbuthnot,
Children and Books they also encourage prigs." It is not the business of literature to
p r o d u c e prigs or n a r r o w m i n d e d youths. Solid didactic w o r k s are
parodied literary w o r k s lending no r o o m for mental reflections.

Buchi Emecheta's The B r i d e Price stands apart from conventional

Buchi Emecheta, The didactic novels. It is blunt and to some extent satiric in its depiction
Bride Price o f a traditional society in Africa, the Ibuza Ibo Community. For
Emecheta, w o m e n constitute the most oppressed~ the most under-
privileged, and the most unfortunate o f all the underprivileged
groups, and she has made the c h a m p i o n i n g o f the cause of w o m a n -
h o o d in Africa her o w n peculiar territory. Her novels are replete
with detailed presentation of the experiences of w o m e n and girls
Eustace Palmer, "A w h o have been exploited, degraded, enslaved, brutalized and
powerful female voice abused by men, and her b o o k s are infused with a sense of the
in the African novel"
unfairness of society. One w o u l d expect Emecheta's works to be
strongly emotional, but they are not.

Unlike Emecheta, Chinua Achebe and other African male writers

c o n v e y a view of a male d o m i n a t e d society in w h i c h the w o m e n are
quite contented. For example, in Achebe's Things Fall A p a r t ,
Chinua Achebe, Things " O k o n k w o ruled his h o u s e h o l d with a heavy hand. His wives espe-
Fall Apart cially the youngest, lived in perpetual fear of his fiery temper, and
so did his little children." In The B r i d e Price, Emecheta uses the
fortunes of y o u n g Aku-nna to castigate traditions and to point to
the s h o r t c o m i n g s of forced marriage and its devastating conse-
quences o n an adolescent girl. The passing away o f Aku-nna's
father gives Emecheta an o p p o r t u n i t y to point bluntly at the insigni-
ficance o f the w o m a n in an African h o m e :

The Bride Place, p. 28
It is so even today in Nigeria: when you have lost your father, you
have lost your parents. Your mother is only a woman, and women
are supposed to be boneless. A fatherless family is a family without a
head, a family without shelter, a family without parents, in fact a
non-existing family. Such traditions do not change very much.
1 72 Children's Literature in E d u c a t i o n

Emecheta says in S e c o n d Class C i t i z e n , " t h o u g h a girl may be

Buchi Emecheta, c o u n t e d as one child a b o y was like four children put together."
Second Class Citizen, Emecheta's adolescent heroine, Aku-nna, realizes painfully after her
p. 68
father's death that her education is virtually over. She is kept in
school only because her stay there will increase her bride price. It is
this gulf b e t w e e n the p r e m i u m value o n boys and the insignificance
o f girls, a m o n g other things, that Emecheta attacks in The B r i d e
Price.

At thirteen, Aku-nna begins to fall in love with Chike, an o s u (out-

cast), and displays some ambition to succeed in school. W i t h o u t
taking cognizance o f her feelings and her school work, O k o n k w o ' s
h o u s e h o l d hastens to m a r r y her off at a bride price that w o u l d help
O k o n k w o to get the Eze title. Unlike Chike, w h o is courageous
e n o u g h to s h o w his love in a civilized m a n n e r to Aku-nna, de-
f o r m e d Okoboshi crudely shows his feelings by kidnapping and
attempting to rape h e r - - a n action accepted by Ibuza Community.
She escapes, however, by telling a lie to the effect that her virginity
had been lost to Chike, the osu. For " l o s i n g " her virginity, she is
beaten mercilessly by Okoboshi's relations and s h u n n e d by Ibuza
Community. While the traditional Ibuza C o m m u n i t y endorses
these crude actions o f the d e f o r m e d Okoboshi, it does not endorse
the civilized one o f Chike w h o is a social outcast by virtue of the
fact that one of his ancestors was sold into slavery.

Buchi Emecheta uses Okoboshi's deformity to reflect his bestiality,

especially in his attempt at c o n s u m m a t i n g his forced marriage to
Aku-nna after kidnapping her:

The Bride Place, The very next minute he was upon her, pulling her roughly by the
pp. 137-138 arm, twisting the arm so much that she screamed out in pain. He
forced her onto the bed, still holding on to her arm, which she felt
going numb . . . then she kicked him in the chest, he slapped her
very hard, and she could smell the gin on his breath . . . . His chest
was heaving up and down like a disturbed sea.

Unreceptive to Okoboshi's bestial advances, "a kind of strength

came to her, from w h e r e she did not know. She k n e w only that, for
once in her life, she intended to stand up for herself, to fight for
herself for her h o n o u r " (p. 136). As far as Aku-nna is c o n c e r n e d ,
only Chike the o s u is her sweet lover in the sterile Ibuza. Painfully
e n o u g h for her, Ibuza society rejects him. She muses: " H o w simple
our lives w o u l d have been but for the interference of our parents"
(p. 139). Young Aku-nna is caught in the web of Ibuza traditions
and is quite helpless for a while. For Eustace Palmer:

Palmer, "A powerful Emecheta regards traditional society as one of the forces encourag-
female voice," p. 21 ing the degradation of the female. Male chauvinism is surely at its
B u c h i E m e c h e t a ' s The Bride Price 1 73

peak in traditional society where females are regarded by males as

little better than goods and chattels. If they are wives, then their
main use is as vehicles for procreating children.., if they are daugh-
ters, the father's only interest in them relates to the amount of money
they will bring into his coffers in the form of bride price.

Aku-nna's e l o p e m e n t with Chike to Ughelli, at the age of fifteen, is

her final expression o f complete disgust with traditions, and her
way of satisfying a major n e e d - - s e l f - w o r t h . Although Aku-nna dies
in childbirth, she is satisfied w i t h the brief pleasant p e r i o d w i t h
The Bride Price, p. 167 Chike: " O u r love will never die, let us call her Joy too, the same
name we gave to the bed o n w h i c h she was conceived." Emecheta
concludes the novel thus:

So it was that Chike and Aku-nna substantiated the traditional super-

stition they had unknowingly set out to eradicate. Every girl born in
Ibuza after Aku-nna's death was told her story, to reinforce the old
taboos of the land. If a girl wishes to live long and see her qhildren's
children, she must accept the husband chosen for her by he~ people,
and the bride price must be paid. If the bride price was not paid she
would never survive the birth of her first child. It was a psychologi-
cal hold over every young girl that would continue to exist, even in
the face of every modernisation, until the present day. Why this is so
is, as the saying goes, anybody's guess. (p. 168)

The relationship b e t w e e n content and form appears simple super-

ficially, but it is quite dense. A superficial reading of the novel may
lead one to c o n c l u d e that the novel is didactic and that the author's
didactic c o n c e r n is in seeming to stress the need for c o n f o r m i t y to
traditional cultural ways o f life. Actually, to reach such a c o n c l u s i o n
is a misjudgement o f the i m p o r t a n c e of the plot and the role o f the
narrator. Emecheta's narrative voice has a meditative weariness. She
presents herself as an author disillusioned but not so cynical as to
think that traditions w h i c h seem i n h u m a n and barbaric will last
forever. However objective she tries to be, it is difficult to eliminate
her personal style, w h i c h is the medium, the substance, out of
w h i c h event, character, and plot are woven.

The narrator does not say anything positive about traditional ways
of life discussed in the novel. All those aspects of tradition it con-
siders, such as making s o m e o n e an osu or outcast, and the c u s t o m
of "bride price," are considered to s h o w the destructive side of
such practices. In spite of the fact that Chike's father is one of the
wealthiest and one o f the most educated people in Ibuza C o m m u -
nity, he and his family are regarded as slaves (osus) since one of his
ancestors had been sold into slavery. For purposes of tradition and
custom, Chike, an osu, c a n n o t m a r r y a freeborn like Aku-nna. De-
spite this social taboo, Chike and Aku-nna elope to marry. This
rebellion brings about the death o f their baby in childbirth and the
1 74 Children's Literature in E d u c a t i o n

death of Aku-nna herself later. Even o n her deathbed, however,

Aku-nna insists that her marriage has b e e n a h a p p y o n e and that
the choice o f the n a m e " J o y " should reflect the happiness of the
union.

Certainly in this case one m a y say that Aku-nna's short-lived happi-

ness did bring m o r e joy than an arranged marriage by tradition
might have brought. Such a marriage w o u l d have b e e n d e t e r m i n e d
by material (the bride price), not h u m a n gain. Not only does tradi-
tion in this novel never take a step in the right direction, but those
w h o rebel against t r a d i t i o n - - t h e girl, the y o u n g man, and his
f a t h e r - - a r e always seen in the best o f lights. T h e y are the ones w h o
m a k e the h u m a n m o v e s even at the cost of material sacrifice, and
their shortcomings, if they can be v i e w e d as such, are forgivable. In
o t h e r words, the plot seems to say, a short and sweet marriage is
better than a d r a w n - o u t life of m i s e r y w i t h the w r o n g partner. Even
this, however, is not the p o i n t o f the novel. T h e narrator's role here
is quite significant.

The narrator's c o m m e n t at the e n d of the novel, " i f a girl w i s h e d to

live long and see her children's children, she m u s t accept the hus-
b a n d c h o s e n for her by her people, and the bride price must be
paid," does not m e a n that p e o p l e ought to c o n f o r m to tradition, as
a superficial reading might lead o n e to conclude. Rather, given the
plot, it m e a n s - - a n d this does s e e m to be the p o i n t of the b o o k - -
that n o n c o n f o r m i s m against i n h u m a n customs seems to lead to
disaster. Isn't this chilling and shocking? Isn't this s o m e t h i n g w e
should protest and fight against ( p e r h a p s unto death)? The narrator
is o m n i s c i e n t and leads us into the thoughts of those we should
s y m p a t h i z e w i t h - - t h u s playing the classic role o f an omniscient
narrator; but, it seems, the a u t h o r does not w a n t her w o r k to be
obviously didactic, and therefore she makes the narrator hold b a c k
w h e n it c o m e s to direct criticism. Emecheta, in o t h e r words, wants
her readers to be active, wants t h e m to p u t t w o and t w o together,
for t h e n their sense o f revulsion will be s t r o n g l y realized. In short,
the b o o k , for all its protest, seems a beautiful example o f nondidac-
tic art.

References
Abrahamson, Richard E, "The elderly person as a significant adult in
adolescent literature," Arizona English Bulletin, 1976, 18(3), 189.
Achebe, Chinua, Things Fall Apart. London: Heinemann (African Writers
Series), 1958.
Arbuthnot, May Hill, Children and Books, p. 11. Glenview, Ill.: Scott
Foresman, 1964.
Areo, Agbo, Director! London: Macmillan, 1977.
B u c h i E m e c h e t a ' s The Bride Price 175

Emecheta, Buchi, The Bride Price. London: Fontana/Collins, 1976. Refer-

ences are to this edition.
Emecheta, Buchi, Second Class Citizen. London: Allison and Busby, 1974.
Nilsen, Alleen Pace, and Donelson, Ken, Literature for Today's Young.
Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1985.
Osa, Osayimwense, "Didacticism in Nigerian young adult literature," Jour-
nal o f Readin~ 1985, 29(3).
Palmer, Eustace, "A powerful female voice in the African novel: intro-
ducing the novels of Buchi Emecheta," New Literature Review, 1981,
No. 11, 21.
Ray, Sheila, "The development of the teenage novel," in Reluctant to
Read?, John L. Foster, ed. London: Ward Lock Educational, 1977.
Smith, James Steel, A Critical Approach to Children's Literature. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.