The Bride Price was published by Allison & Busby in 1976. Aku-nna is a young Igbo girl who, after her father’s death, is taken with her mother to the village of Ibuza, where they come under the control of her uncle Okonkwo. Aku-nna falls in love with Chike, the schoolteacher — a man of intelligence, kindness, and education. But Chike’s family are descended from slaves, and in Ibuza’s rigid caste system, a freeborn woman who marries into a slave family brings disgrace on her entire lineage. Furthermore, Okonkwo has his own plans for Aku-nna’s marriage — he intends to sell her to the highest bidder, and the bride price she commands will be a source of wealth and prestige.
Aku-nna and Chike elope. The community’s response is not merely disapproval but a kind of collective curse: tradition holds that a woman whose bride price is not properly paid will die in childbirth. Emecheta’s handling of this curse is the novel’s most complex element. She does not present the tradition as mere superstition — it is embedded in a social system that gives it real power, because the community’s ostracism and hostility create the conditions for the tragedy to occur. The curse works not because it is supernatural but because it is social: a woman cut off from her community, denied the support network that sustains women through pregnancy and birth, is genuinely at greater risk.
The novel is shorter and more tightly focused than Emecheta’s other major works, and its narrative drive — the love story, the elopement, the gathering consequences — gives it an almost classical tragic structure.
Collecting The Bride Price
First edition (Allison & Busby, London, 1976): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $150–$400
- Very good/very good: $60–$150