Double Yoke was published in 1982 by Ogwugwu Afor, Emecheta’s own publishing imprint. Nko is a student at the University of Calabar, intelligent and ambitious, who wants both a modern education and a traditional marriage. The “double yoke” of the title is the impossibility of having both: her boyfriend Ete Kamba wants a wife who is educated but submissive, accomplished but obedient — a combination that Emecheta recognizes as logically incoherent but socially demanded.
The novel’s campus setting allows Emecheta to examine a new generation of Nigerian women — women who have access to education, who can envision professional careers, but who remain trapped by sexual politics. When a male professor makes sexual advances, Nko faces a choice with no good options: submit and risk her self-respect, or refuse and risk her academic career. Emecheta’s treatment of this dilemma is characteristically unflinching — she does not provide easy answers, and the novel’s resolution is deliberately unsatisfying because the situation itself is unsatisfying.
Double Yoke is a minor work in Emecheta’s canon, but it extends her analysis of women’s oppression into a domain — higher education — that is supposedly the engine of liberation. Her argument is that patriarchy is not a feature of traditional society that education erodes; it is a structure that adapts to new contexts, clothing itself in new vocabularies while maintaining the same hierarchies.
Collecting Double Yoke
First edition (Ogwugwu Afor, London, 1982): Paperback.
Market values:
- First edition: $40–$100
- Very good: $20–$50