The Joys of Motherhood

by Buchi Emecheta

THE LITERARY WORK

A novel set in southern Nigeria from 1909 to the late 1950s; published in English in 1979.

SYNOPSIS

The novel chronicles the life of an Igbo woman from her adolescence in the village of Ibuza in western Igboland, through her adult married life in Lagos. to her lonely death back in Ibuza,

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

The Novel in Focus

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

For More Information

Florence Onyebuchi (“Buchi”) Emecheta was born in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1944. Her childhood was divided between the large city of Lagos in southwestern Nigeria and the town of Ibuza in south-central Nigeria. She attended Christian schools, including the Methodist Girls’ High School in Lagos, and after marrying Sylvester Onwordi in 1960 she worked briefly at the U.S. Embassy there. Two years later she moved to London with her two children to join her husband who had emigrated there to pursue his studies. After separating from her husband in 1966, Emecheta struggled to support herself and her now five children while continuing her college education and fiction writing. In 1972 she published an autobiographical novel, In the Ditch, and two years later received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from the University of London. Emecheta wrote three more novels and two teleplays before she published what is usually regarded as her finest fiction—The Joys of Motherhood.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Colonial reorganization

The Joys of Motherhood ends as Nigeria is on the brink of becoming an independent republic. (Independence was achieved in 1960.) Its colonizers, the British, had been active in trading and missionary activities in the Niger River delta and along the rest of the West African coast since the seventeenth century, but formal rule over parts of present-day Nigeria dates only from the establishment of Lagos Colony in 1861. Over the course of the following five decades, a British sphere of influence to the north and east of Lagos was carved out by treaty and by conquest. Major British military actions against the kingdom of Benin in the late 1890s and against the powerful Aro people (a subset of the Igbo people, spelled “Ibo” in the novel) in 1902 were accompanied by numerous smaller-scale actions. Between 1904 and 1909, the British took control of approximately 16,000 square miles in southern Nigeria. It is in southern Nigeria that Ibuza (sometimes spelled Ibusa)—the hometown not only of Emecheta but also of her protagonist in The Joys of Motherhood—is located. By 1914, five years after the novel’s chronological starting point, the large and populous colony of Nigeria had been formed by the amalgamation of the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria with the colony of Lagos and the Protectorate of Northern Nigeria. In addition to dividing the area into districts overseen by European District Officers (also called Residents), the British designed “native courts” to be headed by “warrant chiefs” selected from local political leaders, including kings and chiefs.

Though the newly created “warrant chief” was expected to rule fairly on criminal and civil cases in accord with his people’s ethical and legal systems, many complained that he instead extorted money and unjustly deprived villagers of their possessions and rights. “Indirect rule” in Igboland resulted in a concentration of power in the hands of one individual that ran counter to the more egalitarian method of rule that had existed before colonialism. Before the coming of the British,

the heads of the lineage groups, known as elders, met informally and infrequently to interpret the ’laws’ and sanctions handed down from the supernatural world through the ancestors. The communities did not recognise the elders as chiefs but merely as intermediaries between the dead ancestors and the living. Individually, each elder exercised within his own lineage an informal kind of domestic authority. The work of government in the Ibo…communities [thus] was not formalised or institutionalised.”

(Anene, p. 258)

British rule had a significant impact on religious and cultural practices, family and household structures, employment patterns, and governance among the Igbo and other Nigerian peoples. For example, the British introduced many European consumer goods into Nigerian society and put taxes on property. These economic changes, combined with the rise of Christianity and Western-style education, caused many social changes as the earning power and needs of the individual came to matter more than the collective prosperity of the family household and the larger ethnic community. The British opposition to domestic slavery also changed village and family life considerably. From early on in their contact with the peoples of the Niger delta region, the British had strongly discouraged slavery and they outlawed the domestic slave trade in three separate proclamations in Lagos Colony and the Northern and Southern Protectorates in 1901.

The clash between the British and Africans over slavery is presented in The Joys of Motherhood through a local chiefs ambivalent attitude toward his slaves. Nwokocha Agbadi knows how important slaves are to his village household, but he also wishes to please the British. Eventually, he “stop[s] dealing in slaves” and “offer [s] freedom to the ones in his household. He even join [s] a group of leaders who encouraged slaves to return to their places of origin…. All those in his own compound who refused to go were adopted as his children” (Emecheta, The Joys of Motherhood, p. 35).

Traditional beliefs and the introduction of Christianity

The traditional spiritual beliefs and religious practices of the various ethnic groups in southern Nigeria have much in common. Many of these traditional religions stress the importance of a supreme god and use the sky as a representative figure for that god. The Igbo view the earth as a sacred female entity and believe that other natural phenomena, such as the sun and rivers, are manifestations of the spirit world. Moreover, each Igbo has a personal god, called a chi, and is expected to offer prayers and sacrifices to that god.

A belief in witchcraft was also a part of many traditional Nigerian religions. Because witches were thought to cast spells on people to make them ill and die, epidemics that occurred in the colonial period frequently led to large-scale witch-hunts as people tried to discover the living source of the illness. Indigenous spiritual leaders/healers, called “medicine men” or dibia in the novel, not only offered curative herbs and charms but also sought to clear the community of evil by subjecting certain people to ordeals meant to discover which villagers were witches.

Beginning in the 1840s, Christian missionary work was conducted in many parts of southern Nigeria. In the early stages, much of the evangelization was undertaken by Africans who had been converted to Christianity and educated in England. The most important of these Nigerian-born Christians in the nineteenth century was Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba who had been sold as a slave but was set free when the British intercepted the slave ship in which he was being transported across the Atlantic Ocean. Educated first at a Church Missionary Society school in Sierra Leone and then at a school in London, Crowther became the first Anglican Bishop of the Niger region in 1864. Despite the presence of some other native-born Christian evangelists like Crowther, the majority of Christian missionaries were Europeans or North Americans. Catholic priests came from France while Methodist, Baptist, and other Protestant missionaries arrived from Britain and the United States. Because the missionaries focused on converting individual Africans rather than on convincing indigenous leaders to forfeit their old beliefs and adopt new ones, conversion rates remained low. Individual converts were often shunned by their communities because their new faith made necessary a rejection of most of the social and cultural aspects of indigenous life. An Igbo or other Nigerian who became a Christian would have to give up not only the many religious rituals and festivals that punctuated daily life but also the polygamous marriage structure that underpinned social organization.

Resistance to Christian evangelization and to British rule more generally was very strong in western Igboland (west of the Niger River, across from the important trading town of Onitsha). Rebellion blazed up most spectacularly at the turn of the century in the form of a secret society called the Ekumeku, whose members burned many mission stations and local court buildings and terrorized local chiefs known to be sympathetic to missionaries and the colonial government. “The most formidable opposition to the spread of missionary work was centred on Ibusa,” the town in which the novel takes place (Anene, p. 240). This opposition to European incursion is mentioned by the novel’s narrator: “In places like Asaba and Ibuza, Igbo towns in Western Nigeria, the inhabitants were very hostile to the arrival of Europeans, so that the few white people who came fled for their lives. The graves of many missionaries and explorers tucked inside the forest bushes tell this tale” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 142). In hopes of stamping out the Ekumeku, the British used local and foreign troops to attack villages controlled by the secret society, killing scores of people in the process and forcing large numbers of people from their homes.

Education

Western-style education was an important component of missionary activity in southern Nigeria. At the beginning of the twentieth century primary school education became widely available but secondary schools were located mostly in large cities like Lagos. Competition for entrance to these secondary schools was intense. In 1934 the country’s first university-level institution opened, the Yaba Higher College, but it offered only diplomas rather than degrees. Within secondary education, a focus on individual rights and the equality of all human beings contributed to the growth of the Nigerian independence movement, which strengthened from the early 1940s through the late 1950s.

Some people chose to gain advanced degrees abroad, but the cost of doing so was prohibitive to the vast majority of the population. Because of the heavy emphasis in schools on Christianity, the upward mobility offered by higher education sometimes entailed a rupture between the educated person and traditional life in Nigeria. In The Joys of Motherhood, the protagonist’s two eldest sons both receive an excellent education that requires much economic sacrifice on the part of their parents. However, this education alienates them from traditional Igbo religion and social customs, and both boys ultimately move to North America.

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CHI

“In many Nigerian traditional religions” writes historian I Elizabeth Isichei, “the individual worships an individual manifestation or emanation from the Supreme God, a kind of personalized providence. In Igbo, this is chi and Chukwu (Supreme God) is often explained as chi ukwu (great chi)” (Isichei, History of Nigeria, p. 284). The Western Igbo often visualize the chi not as solely a spiritual force but also as a person, perhaps an ancestor or other village inhabitant, who has been reincarnated in an individual at birth. The chi is thought to influence one’s life either for good or evil, depending on the amount and quality of the sacrifices and prayers offered to it. Therefore, it is imperative that one keep one’s chi happy and satisfied. In The Joys of Motherhood, Nnu Ego tries hard to lessen the difficulties in her life by remembering her chi, but her co-wife Adaku abandons the family household and indicates her liberation from traditional ways of life by abandoning her own chi altogether. She shouts to Nnu Ego, “My chi be damned! I am going to be a prostitute. Damn my chi!” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 168).

Colonial-era Lagos

Over the course of the colonial era, Lagos gradually became the most populous and most important of Nigeria’s metropolitan cities. Located in the western part of Nigeria’s southern coastal region, Lagos played an important role in the West African slave trade of the early nineteenth century. After Britain declared the exporting of slaves to be illegal in 1807, Lagos became attractive to illicit slave traders anxious to use a harbor removed from the Niger delta ports on which the antislavery blockade concentrated most of its efforts. Other kinds of trade were also conducted through Lagos, and in 1861 the town was annexed by Great Britain. Britain appointed a governor to administer the new colony, and from this foothold on the coast British colonial officials pushed into the interior through a combination of trading, missionary activities, and military actions. By the early twentieth century Lagos had also become home to a large percentage of the Western-educated black elite who would later be instrumental in Nigeria’s transition from colony to independent republic. Mostly Christians, members of this African elite filled positions in business, entered professions such as the law, or held jobs in the lower levels of the civil service.

Like other Nigerian cities such as Kano, Ibadan, and Port Harcourt, Lagos witnessed much migration from rural areas during the first half of the twentieth century. In addition to its original inhabitants, Lagos came to include Igbo, Hausa, Fulani, and members of many other ethnic groups. For instance, the number of Igbo living in Lagos grew from only 291 in 1911 to 31,887 in 1951. By that year, the Igbo represented nearly 45 percent of the non-Yoruba inhabitants of Lagos (Isichei, A History of the Igbo People, p. 214). Sometimes the groups coexisted peacefully, but at other times tensions flared up. These tensions were aggravated, if not created, by the differing treatment the British accorded to the various groups. The British viewed the Igbo as good domestic workers, as reflected in The Joys of Motherhood by the protagonist’s husband, who launders clothes for a white couple. The Hausa, in contrast, impressed the British as good soldiers, and consequently found employment as army troops and policemen. Their role as enforcers of British rule made the Hausa feared and hated by many other ethnic groups. Similarly, the Yoruba, the dominant group in the region of Lagos, came to hold a prominent position in Nigerian politics after independence and therefore often seemed to aid the colonial government in the suppression of other Nigerian peoples. Branches of the region-wide ethnic improvement unions existed in Lagos to help migrants maintain a sense of ethnic community. Unions such as the Egbado Union, the Ibo State Union, and the Uratta Improvement Union provided opportunities for social interaction as well as legal aid and scholarships. They also offered a level of political organization that eventually helped apply pressure to end the colonial system in Nigeria.

Status of Igbo women

In traditional Igbo society, women had various responsibilities in relation to their families and their communities. Generally, a girl would help her mother until adolescence. The girl usually married in her teenage years, at which point she moved to the household, or compound, of her husband’s family, where she prepared meals and performed other domestic tasks. Virtually everywhere in Igboland, women would work at planting and harvesting yams as well. Many Igbo women became heavily involved in trading activities. Polygamous households were the norm, with each of the wives possessing her own house and a small garden. Her ability to bear children was crucial to her standing in the community, partly because large families were so important in the subsistence economy. A woman who did not bear a child after marriage sometimes returned to her father’s household, as young Nnu Ego does during her first marriage in The Joys of Motherhood.

Though they exerted little influence in the political decision-making process, Igbo women did hold some public sway through their own social organizations. Most important were the inyemedi (wives of a lineage) and umuada (daughters of a lineage) associations. The women held meetings—called mikiri—in which they discussed trading, cultivation, social and religious rituals, and offenses against the moral code of the society. In the towns of Asaba and Onitsha, both located near Ibuza, women took part in religious activities; in many other sections of Igboland, however, women were not allowed to visit shrines or possess certain religious objects. A few women managed to gain titles that were similar to those granted to men. The most coveted title was the omu, who served as head of the women’s omu society, which controlled the marketplace and local trading, and also acted as a pressure group on the council of chiefs. It was mandatory for leaders of the omu society to attend meetings of the councils of chiefs and elders. An omu’s exact role, however, depended on the particular Igbo community; in communities that had a head chief, she was his equivalent. However, her political power was not equal to that of a chief, and “her councillors did not possess most of the powers and privileges of the chiefs” (Mba, p. 24).

Colonization lessened women’s already minimal formal public roles. Until 1929 no woman was appointed a warrant chief, and no woman held the position of court clerk, interpreter, or messenger. Women did not participate in the army or the police force. They occasionally took direct action, however, against aspects of the colonial regime that they perceived as oppressive. One especially important rebellion was the so-called “Women’s War” of 1929. In several eastern provinces, the women of various ethnic groups (especially the Igbo) came to believe, erroneously as it turned out, that women would be taxed for the first time. Angered by this information, thousands of women participated in demonstrations, lootings, and torchings of native courts and factories. Fifty-five women were killed in the disturbances. The participants called their actions a “women’s war”—ogu umunwanyi—but the colonial administration dubbed them the “Aba Women’s Riots.” The women sought some voice in the selection of the warrant chiefs, and achieved a modicum of success—the selection process was changed and a few women were hired to work in the native courts. Women continued to be involved in protests throughout Nigeria through the end of the colonial era.

In urban settings during the colonial era, polygyny, or marriage to more than one wife, became burdensome to women in ways that it had not been in the villages. Whereas in a village each wife had a separate house where she and her children lived, in big cities like Lagos the co-wives and all the children often were forced, for economic reasons, to share one house or apartment. The cooperation and friendship that had often existed between co-wives in the large village compounds disappeared in tight living spaces. In The Joys of Motherhood, the problems of urban polygyny become clear in the failure of joint action between the first and second wives of Nnaife Owulum. In Igbo villages, co-wives sometimes banded together to protest unfair treatment by their shared husband, but Nnaife’s wives, Nnu Ego and Adaku, fail in their one attempt at joint action—a cooking strike intended to awaken Nnaife to the negative consequences of his unwise spending habits.

The impact of World War II

World War II (1939-45) was significant in the transition of Nigeria from colony to independent nation. With Europe only a distant entity for most Nigerians, all but the highly educated elite found it difficult to understand precisely which countries or peoples were at war and why. Frequently paired with that lack of knowledge was anger that the Africans had to fight for and in these unknown countries. As one character in Emecheta’s novel says, “Why can’t they fight their own wars? Why drag us innocent Africans into it?” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 148). Many black Nigerian nationalists supported the British because of Britain’s opposition to German racial theories and because of the belief that British democracy was preferable to fascism. Promised good pay while in the armed forces and guaranteed employment after the war ended, many Nigerian men enlisted; by 1941, 418 Europeans and 16,000 Nigerians had entered the Nigerian armed forces (Olusanya, p. 46). Upon returning from service—mostly performed in other British colonies, such as Burma—many enlistees failed to find adequate jobs and faulted the British for reneging on their promises. The high unemployment and inflation that followed the war contributed to the dissatisfaction with colonial rule that had been on the rise for decades.

World War II also contributed to the nationalist movement by affording many Nigerian men the chance to come into contact with a range of classes of white people. Whereas previously they had known only the relatively wealthy and well-educated colonial class in Nigeria, now they met Europeans “who were farmers and private soldiers, traders and shopkeepers, bootblacks and servants like themselves” (Crowder, p. 270). Contact with “average” British people convinced many Nigerians, previously daunted by the rich and powerful British colonialists, that they could successfully lobby for independence. Nnaife, husband of the novel’s main character, Nnu Ego, gets to see a different side of the British when he works for a time on a British ship plying the African coast during the early years of the war. Returning home, he enlightens Nnu Ego and his neighbors as to the drinking habits of the British. He says he has seen the “white men” on board the ship drinking “Scotch Whisky.” When Nnu Ego expresses astonishment, “Nnaife laugh[s], the bitter laugh of a man who ha[s] become very cynical, who now realise[s] that in this world there is no pure person. A man who in those last months had discovered that he had been revering a false image and that under white skins, just as under black ones, all humans are the same” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 111).

During and immediately following the war many nationalist groups pushed for independence. Nigerians had become aware of the hypocrisy behind the British claim that World War II had been fought for democracy and freedom even as the United Kingdom maintained an iron grip on its colonies around the world. Partly in response to political agitation by such groups as the Nigerian Union of Students, the government devised new constitutions in 1945 and— this time with input from Nigerians—in 1950-51. This last constitution created a federal system that ultimately made ethnic divisions more pronounced toward the end of the time period covered by the novel. In 1960 Britain relinquished its colonial control over the country and Nigeria became an independent republic. The novel looks ahead to both the potential and the difficulties that characterized post-independence Nigeria. The following conversation takes place between Nnu Ego and two Igbo men in mid-1950s Lagos. One of these men, Ubani, observes, “Things are changing fast…. They say that in the not-too-distant future we shall be ruling ourselves, making our own laws.”

In response Nnu Ego asks, excitedly, “Do you mean we’ll have a black District Officer in a place like Ibuza? And a Nigerian Reverend Father, and all our doctors Nigerian?”

Nnu Ego’s son answers in the affirmative, but a man named Nwakusor expresses significant reservations about the success of the coming changes in making the average person’s life better. He wonders, “[T]hese new Nigerians, will they do the job well?” (Joys of’Motherhood, p. 199).

The Novel in Focus

Plot summary

Centering on a fictional Igbo woman’s life in colonial Nigeria, the novel opens in 1934 in Lagos, a city in southwestern Nigeria. The first chapter focuses on the actions and thoughts of a young woman named Nnu Ego as she runs with desperation toward a bridge from which she plans to throw herself. The novel then shifts in time and location, taking the reader back 25 years to 1909, and eastward from Lagos to the Igbo town of Ibuza. The reader learns about Nnu Ego’s parents, the circumstances of her birth, and her life up to the alarming moment in 1934 with which the novel begins.

Nnu Ego’s mother, Ona, was a strong and beautiful woman from an influential family, who refused to marry her lover, a local chief named Nwokocha Agbadi (who himself had seven wives and another mistress), because she was expected to provide a male heir for her aging father who had no sons. If she were to marry, any male child of the union would become part of the husband’s family. Upon becoming pregnant by Agbadi, Ona promises that if the child is a girl she will give her to Agbadi to rear. She does indeed give birth to a girl, whom Agbadi names Nnu Ego—literally “a thousand cowries”—because of her remarkable beauty. Boding ill for the beautiful baby’s future, however, is the determination made by the dibia, or medicine man, that the baby’s chi, or personal god, is a slave woman violently killed just a few days before Ona conceived Nnu Ego. He determines the identity of the chi by linking a large lump found on baby Nnu Ego’s head with a lump that appeared on the slave woman’s head as she was being beaten.

At age 17 Nnu Ego is married to a handsome man named Amatokwu, but she becomes depressed when she fails to become pregnant and Amatokwu takes a second wife who gives birth to a son very soon after her introduction to the household. Though jealous of the second wife, Nnu Ego is close to the child, even breast-feeding him during the second wife’s absence. When Amatokwu beats Nnu Ego after seeing this tenderness between her and the child, Nnu Ego’s father comes to the compound and takes Nnu Ego home with him. Her father then arranges for her to marry Nnaife Owulum, an overweight, homely man who lives in Lagos and launders clothes for a white couple named Meers. Though disappointed in her husband and feeling lonely in this rapidly growing city of seemingly countless ethnic groups and languages, Nnu Ego rejoices when she finally has a child, a boy whom they name Ngozi. The boy dies within a few weeks, however, and it is at this point that the novel returns to the scene depicted on its opening page: Nnu Ego running through the streets, preparing to commit suicide in shock that her only child has died. An Ibuza man who happens to see her on the bridge prevents her from fulfilling this death wish and Nnu Ego resumes her difficult life with her husband. She soon gives birth to another boy, Oshiaju, but just as her life seems to be settling into a pleasant routine, Nnaife is left without a job when his employers, the Meerses, return to England at the start of World War II. Eventually Nnaife gets work on a ship that travels to Fernando Póo, an island off the West African coast. During his absence, Nnu Ego bears another son, Adimabua, then has to move with her children from the small rooms they had occupied on the Meerses’ estate to an apartment owned by a Yoruba man. When Nnaife returns from the ship, he hears of his elder brother’s death and rushes to Ibuza to assume his responsibilities for the brother’s household. Nnu Ego must contend with the introduction of other people into her own household when Nnaife returns from Ibuza with the brother’s youngest wife, Adaku, and her young daughter in tow. Soon, both Nnu Ego and Adaku are pregnant, and Nnu Ego gives birth nine months later to twin girls, Taiwo and Kehinde. Nnaife is happy now that he has daughters whose bride prices he expects will pay for the older boys’ higher education. Adaku gives birth to a boy who soon becomes ill and dies. More trouble lurks ahead.

Great personal and financial problems beset Nnu Ego after Nnaife is practically forced into the army and shipped off to Burma to fight for the British Empire in a war that he does not fully understand. During Nnaife’s absence, Nnu Ego returns to Ibuza, where she witnesses the death of her ailing father and gives birth to a boy who is given the name Nnamdio—meaning “my father lives on”—because of his striking resemblance to Nnu Ego’s father, Nwokocha Agbadi. Upon her return to Lagos eight months after her departure, she finds life increasingly difficult, primarily because her own poverty contrasts so sharply with the prosperity Adaku has been able to gain through trading during Nnu Ego’s long sojourn in the village of her birth. After an argument between the two women, Adaku is censured by her male Igbo relatives in Lagos for failing to produce sons, so she decides to leave the apartment in the hopes of becoming rich and giving her girls a good education through work as a prostitute and market vendor.

Adaku’s departure decreases Nnu Ego’s mental anguish but not her economic problems. With the promised money from Nnaife nowhere in sight and with her own stock of money nearly depleted, she must do backbreaking labor—gathering, cutting, and selling firewood—to pay the rent, feed the children, and send the boys to school. Just after she makes the difficult decision to remove the boys from school because she can no longer afford the school fees, Nnu Ego receives a windfall in the form of £60 from Nnaife that had been sitting, undelivered, at army headquarters. This large sum of money enables her to continue the boys’ education, rent a large market stall, and create a considerable savings account. Nnaife then returns from the war and decides to get another wife in Ibuza. He brings back a kind and jolly 16-year-old girl named Okpo, with whom Nnu Ego gets along relatively well. He decides to send the eldest son, Oshiaju, to a prestigious and expensive boarding school in the city of Warri. Over the next few years, Nnu Ego becomes pregnant twice more. She has another set of twin girls, Obiageli and Malachi, and later gives birth, alone and depressed, to a stillborn baby during a period of intense dissatisfaction with her life. Not only has she and the rest of the family had to move to a mud house in an area of Lagos without running water, but she has slowly come to realize that her two eldest sons are becoming alienated from her due to their Western-style education.

From this point onward, the novel focuses on the mostly negative impact the children’s actions and thoughts have on their parents. In the traditional way of life, parents cared for their male children and made sacrifices on their behalf with the expectation that those children would take care of them in their old age. They took care of their female children’s basic needs and sought proper matches for them with the understanding that the bride prices they drew would offer financial compensation for those years of rearing. Unfortunately for Nnu Ego and Nnaife, Oshiaju does not see the importance of this reciprocal relationship, and decides that he will take a scholarship to study science in the United States rather than work at a relatively well-paid government job in Nigeria. Similarly, Adimabua goes away to a boarding school and ultimately emigrates to Canada. The parents are accorded

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NAMES IN IGBO CULTURE

Children in Igbo society receive multiple names, often including names that reflect the position of the parents at the time of the child’s birth or their hopes for the child’s future. The name of Nnu Ego’s first child, Ngozi, meaning “blessing’ reflects in part Nnu Ego’s appreciation of her good fortune at having escaped the infertility that plagued her in her first marriage. Other popular Igbo names include the days of the week. Thus, a nwa (child) born on Afo market day may be called “Nwafo’ or “child of Afo/’ Nnu Ego’s last two children, female twins, are given names that capture the potential for triumph and disaster in postcolonial Nigeria. One is named Obiageli, meaning “she who has come to enjoy wealth/’ and the other is called Malachi) meaning “you do not know what tomorrow will bring” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 187). Still other names acknowledge the power of the supreme god in relation to the birth of the child: examples include Chienyekwa,“God has given”; Chikwe,“God agrees”; and Chinaelo,“God reckons” (Njoku, p. 188). Finally colonialism and Christianity introduced European saints’ names into the mix, which led to many parents in the twentieth century giving their children European Christian first names or middle names.

great respect because of the scholarly achievements of their sons—“Everybody referred to Nnu Ego, as she proudly carried her back-breaking firewood up from the waterside, as the mother of very clever children.” But the respect offers them little solace, in view of the fact that they have lost touch with their eldest children and will remain poor (Joys of Motherhood, p. 197). The female children also cause great mental anguish. Though Taiwo pleases Nnaife by marrying a husband he has chosen for her, Kehinde goes against the wishes of her father by running away from home to marry a Muslim Yoruba man, the son of a butcher.

Kehinde’s action has serious consequences for the unity of the family, since Nnaife is ultimately given a five-year prison sentence after attacking the Yoruba man’s family with a cutlass. This sentence is quietly commuted to a few months in prison upon the condition that Nnaife leave Lagos. He ultimately returns to Ibuza. Leaving one of the younger set of twins with Taiwo and her new husband, Nnu Ego also leaves Lagos and goes to Ibuza with her youngest son and daughter. Rejected by her husband’s family because of the pain her children have caused him, she must live apart from him and Okpo (his third wife), and she dies several years later “with no child to hold her hand and no friend to talk to her. She had never really made many friends, so busy had she been building up her joys as a mother” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 224). Her geographically scattered children return to the village to honor her memory. They build a shrine “so that her grandchildren could appeal to her should they be barren” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 224). Even after her death, however, the community considers her a “wicked woman” because “however many people appealed to her to make women fertile, she never did” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 224).

Ownership in male-female and in colonial relations

At one point during the testimony she gives at her husband’s trial, Nnu Ego says, “Nnaife is the head of our family. He owns me, just like God in the sky owns us” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 217). Here, Nnu Ego compares married women in traditional Nigerian society to possessions and links a husband’s power to the authority that God appears to have over human beings. Nnaife confirms a sense of ownership over his wives when he says to Nnu Ego: “Did I not pay your bride price? Am I not your owner?” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 98). In some villages, when a man died, any wife that survived him became the responsibility or property of that man’s brother or other male relative. According to tradition, a married woman’s children belonged to her husband, as did any money she might earn. Nnu Ego perceives herself as a slave not only to her husband’s will but also to that of her children. Though she never directly challenges either form of slavery, she does pray for release from the familial obligations that limit her personal freedom:

“God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled in herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage?” she prayed desperately …“Yes, I have many children, but what do I have to feed them on? On my life. I have to work myself to the bone to look after them, I have to give them my all. And if I am lucky enough to die in peace, I even have to give them my soul. They will worship my dead spirit to provide for them: it will be hailed as a good spirit so long as there are plenty of yams and children in the family, but if anything should go wrong, if a young wife does not conceive or there is a famine, my dead spirit will be blamed. When will I be free?”

(Joys of Motherhood, pp. 186-87)

A casualty of “progress,” Nnu Ego dies alone, caught in a changing time that brought more independence for children.

Unlike Nnu Ego, who never vocally expresses her dissatisfaction with her position, Nnaife’s second wife, Adaku, whose name means “daughter of wealth,” rebels against her society’s strictures. Anxious to provide a good life for her two daughters and to enjoy more personal freedom, Adaku leaves Nnaife’s Lagos household. After working as a prostitute for a short time, she rents a large market stall and soon makes enough money to have fine clothes and to send both girls to excellent schools. Late in the novel, she gently reminds Nnu Ego that the old ways of Igbo society, including male ownership of females, no longer have the force they once had. “Nnaife does not own anybody, not in the new Nigeria” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 218). One wife holds tenaciously to old prescriptions for her behavior while the other breaks new ground.

The Joys of Motherhood draws a parallel between traditional and colonial societies, presenting colonialism as a case of unfair and illegal ownership of one group of human beings by another. In a discussion of the Nigerian political situation at the outbreak of World War II, one character says, “I think we are on the side of the British. They own Nigeria, you know” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 98). An incredulous Nnu Ego wonders if the British also own the town of Ibuza. Through this depiction of colonialism as ownership, the novel presents men in a slavelike position similar to that of Nigerian women. Soon after her arrival in Lagos, Nnu Ego remarks that low-status work done for the English inhabitants of Lagos has turned Nigerian men into slaves: “[M]y father released his slaves because the white man says it is illegal. Yet these our husbands are like slaves, don’t you think?” (Joys of Motherhood, p. 51).

Sources and literary context

In her 1986 autobiography, Head Above Water, Buchi Emecheta describes a clash with her eldest daughter, Chiedu, that played a crucial role in her depiction of the lonely and forgotten mother in The Joys of Motherhood. In December 1976, Chiedu, then 15, asked her mother to transfer her to an expensive private school. When Emecheta refused to do so because of the tightness of the family budget, Chiedu left the apartment and went to live for a time with her father, from whom Emecheta had been separated in the mid-1960s. Astonished at this betrayal, Emecheta “banged away [on the typewriter] the whole of Christmas, the whole of January 1977, and by the end of that month, almost six weeks after Chiedu left, The Joys of Motherhood was finished” (Emecheta, Head Above Water, p. 224). Another part of the novel probably inspired by the author’s personal experience is Nnaife’s service in the British army during World War II. While growing up, Emecheta was sometimes referred to as “the daughter of the one who went and fought and killed a bad man called Hitler” (Emecheta, Head Above Water, p. 12). Though he had not, of course, killed Hitler, Emecheta’s father did fight in Burma, just as Nnaife does in the novel.

The Joys of Motherhood differs from male-authored African literature of the 1960s and ’70s. Male novelists offered two extremes in their depiction of women—the saintly mother, portrayed as the highest feminine ideal, or the debased prostitute (see Jagua Nana , for example, also covered in African Literature and Its Times). The Joys of Motherhood provides a strong corrective to novels authored by males because it realistically portrays the suffering experienced by women who try to fulfill the role of perfect mother and wife. Like Efuru by Flora Nwapa (also covered in African Literature and Its Times), Emecheta’s novel focuses on everyday women’s lives, portraying both positive and negative aspects of women’s experiences. Whereas Efuru features a relatively unconventional protagonist, The Joys of Motherhood portrays the suffering experienced by women who try to fulfill the traditionally sanctioned role of perfect mother and wife.

Critics generally view Emecheta’s novels as providing an authentic representation of African women… [through] her portrayal of … social and historical context. In The Joys of Motherhood, this contextualization… constitutes Emecheta’s strongest statement in response to male idealizations of motherhood.

(Stratton, p. 113)

Emecheta started her writing career with two autobiographical accounts of a Nigerian woman in London—In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974). She then turned to earlier times—colonial Nigeria in the 1940s and 1950s (The Bride Price, 1976) and early twentieth-century Igbo life (The Slave Girl, 1977, which was based partly on the life experiences of Emecheta’s mother, Alice Obanje Ojebeta Emecheta). Addressing Nigerian culture from the 1910s through the 1950s, The Joys of Motherhood encompasses a larger swath of Nigerian colonial history, synthesizing Emecheta’s historical and social concerns into one literary work.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Was Written

Political instability

The 1960s and 1970s saw considerable economic and political turmoil in Nigeria. A parliamentary democracy existed from the time of independence in 1960 to January 1966, when a coup led mostly by Igbo army officers took place. Another coup occurred in July and led to the massacre of the Igbo living in northern Nigeria. In response to this decimation and to the discovery of oil in Southeast and South Central Nigeria, most of Igboland attempted to secede from Nigeria in 1967 and form an independent country, the Republic of Biafra. The civil war that ensued lasted more than 30 months before the secessionists were defeated. The next 10 years (1970-80) were marked by more coups and unfulfilled promises of a return to democracy. However, when Emecheta wrote The Joys of Motherhood concrete steps were being taken to reintroduce civilian rule. In 1977 and 1978 a new constitution was drafted, a voter list was created, and a ban on forming political parties was lifted. Elections were held in 1979, the same year in which the novel was published, and on October 1st of that year Nigeria returned to civilian rule.

Status of women in 1970s Nigeria

After independence, the number of educated women expanded greatly, and most educated married women worked outside the home. The increase in educational and professional opportunities for women was not accompanied, however, by a lessening of their overall burden. A lack of conveniences such as supermarkets, prepared foods, and mechanized appliances, combined with the refusal of many Nigerian men to participate in domestic duties, meant that Nigerian women continued to spend large periods of the day taking care of domestic matters.

A symposium initiated in 1974 by the Nigerian Association of University Women exposed some concerns of Nigeria’s female population during the decade. Whereas the continued practice of polygyny created resentment among some middle-class women, women in trade showed little anxiety over the issue. In fact, a number expressed a desire for the household help of co-wives, a “convenience” that made it more possible to engage in trade. On the other hand, they objected to the breakdown of certain aspects of the traditional polygynous marriage. Once, the first wife had exercised authority over later wives, but in the 1970s she was sometimes “relegated to the background by an uncaring husband” and the younger wife did not necessarily “keep her lower and deferent place within the polygynous family” (Women in Nigeria Today, p. 123).

On the positive side, 1970s society allowed women more chance to acquire an education and participate in public life. This, however, reduced the ability of a woman to rely on sisters, daughters, and other women as helpmates, and so did not have an altogether positive effect. Likewise changes in the economy sometimes detracted from a husband’s ability to meet much of the financial burden of supporting a wife and children, placing it more fully on her shoulders than it had been in the past.

Reviews

The Joys of Motherhood met with a generally favorable reception, and was frequently praised as a technically more refined and more complex treatment of the issues of women’s oppression, race relations, and colonialism/post-colonialism than had already appeared in Buchi Emecheta’s four earlier novels. Though generally applauding the quality of her style, critics could not agree on how best to interpret Emecheta’s presentation of women’s struggles—indeed, one critic classified The Joys of Motherhood as Emecheta’s “most controversial” novel (Fishburn, p. 104). Noting both the failure of the heroine, Nnu Ego, to escape her oppressive situation in Lagos and the sympathetic portrayal of traditional Igbo life, a few female critics questioned Emecheta’s commitment to feminism, a commitment that had seemed so central to her earlier work. At the same time, at least one male critic took issue with the novel’s portrayal of men, claiming that they were essentially exaggerated, one-dimensional strawmen.

Scholarly assessments continue to focus mostly on the feminist implications of the experiences that the women in the novel have. Lately, their range of analysis has expanded to include the novel’s incorporation of Igbo storytelling practices. Highlighting Emecheta’s frequent use of dialogue, proverbs, and songs, Susan Arndt compares Emecheta’s narrative techniques to those employed by female storytellers in Igbo villages.

—Laura Franey

For More Information

Anene, J. C. Southern Nigeria in Transition, 1885-1906. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

Arndt, Susan. “Buchi Emecheta and the Tradition of Ifo: Continuation and Writing Back.” In Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta .Ed. Marie Umeh. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996.

Crowder, Michael. A Short History of Nigeria. New York: Praeger, 1966.

Emecheta, Buchi. Head Above Water. Oxford: Heinemann, 1994.

_____. The Joys of Motherhood. New York: George Braziller, 1979.

Fishburn, Katherine. Reading Buchi Emecheta: Cross-Cultural Conversations. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1995.

Isichei, Elizabeth. A History of the Igbo People. London: Macmillan, 1976.

_____. A History of Nigeria. London: Longman, 1983.

Mba, Nina Emma. Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women’s Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900-1965. Berkeley, Calif.: Institute of International Studies, 1982.

Njoku, John E. Eberegbulam. The Igbos of Nigeria: Ancient Rites, Changes and Survival. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1990.

Olusanya, G. O. The Second World War and Politics in Nigeria, 1939-1953. London: Evans Brothers, 1973.

Stratton, Florence. Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. London: Routledge, 1994.

Women In Nigeria Today. London: Zed, 1985.