Kehinde was published by Heinemann in 1994 as part of the African Writers Series. Kehinde Okolo has lived in London for eighteen years, raised two children, and built a career. When her husband Albert announces that they are returning to Nigeria — the homeland, the family, the culture — Kehinde is reluctant but goes. In Lagos, she discovers that the Nigeria she left has changed, and that Albert has changed with it. He takes a younger second wife, Rike, and expects Kehinde to accept her new position as senior wife in a polygamous household.
Kehinde cannot accept it. The years in London have changed her in ways she did not fully recognize until they were tested. She has grown accustomed to independence, to her own income, to making decisions about her own life. The traditional structures of Igbo family life — which give a husband unquestioned authority over his wives — feel not merely inconvenient but intolerable.
The novel’s resolution — Kehinde returns to London alone, rebuilds her life, and discovers that she is happier without Albert than she ever was with him — is radical in the context of Emecheta’s earlier work. Where The Joys of Motherhood ended in despair and The Bride Price in tragedy, Kehinde ends in liberation. The later Emecheta is more optimistic about women’s capacity to escape the structures that confine them, though the escape requires the willingness to lose everything — husband, status, community — and start again.
Collecting Kehinde
First edition (Heinemann, Oxford, 1994): Paperback (African Writers Series).
Market values:
- First edition: $30–$80
- Very good: $15–$40