Second-Class Citizen was published by Allison & Busby in 1974. Adah Obi grows up in Lagos with a fierce ambition to go to the United Kingdom — the “land of her dreams,” as she imagines it from the books she reads. She marries Francis, a student, partly because marriage will give her the means to travel. In London, she discovers that the dream is a lie. The family lives in a single room in a crumbling house; Francis refuses to work, expecting Adah to support them while he studies; the landlords will not rent to “coloureds”; and the English, whom Adah had imagined as cultured and fair-minded, treat her with casual, institutionalized contempt.
The novel’s most devastating scene comes when Francis discovers that Adah has been writing a novel — The Bride Price, which Emecheta would later publish separately — and burns the manuscript. The act is not merely destructive but symbolic: Francis cannot tolerate his wife’s ambition, her talent, or her independent intellectual life. The burning of the manuscript is an attempt to destroy not just a book but a selfhood.
Emecheta’s prose is deceptively simple — short sentences, plain vocabulary, an almost documentary precision — but the cumulative effect is devastating. The novel’s power comes from the specificity of its humiliations: the job interviews where Adah is rejected for being Black, the National Health Service clinic where she is treated as an object, the neighbors who complain about the smell of her cooking. Each incident is small; together, they constitute a systematic demolition of human dignity.
Collecting Second-Class Citizen
First edition (Allison & Busby, London, 1974): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good/very good: $80–$200