The Joys of Motherhood was published by Allison & Busby in 1979 and is widely regarded as Buchi Emecheta’s finest novel. Nnu Ego is the daughter of a chief in the Igbo village of Ibuza. Her first marriage is dissolved because she fails to produce children — the ultimate failure for a woman in a society where motherhood is not merely desirable but existentially necessary. She is remarried to Nnaife, a washerman working for a British family in Lagos, and with him she bears many children. The title’s “joys” should be the vindication of her existence.
They are not. Nnu Ego’s life in Lagos is a grinding cycle of poverty, exhaustion, and self-sacrifice. She feeds her children before herself, takes in laundry, sells cigarettes on the street, and endures Nnaife’s increasing uselessness with a stoicism that is heroic and, Emecheta makes clear, deeply unfair. The children grow up and leave — the sons go to America and Canada for education, the daughters marry — and none of them send money home. Nnu Ego, who defined her entire existence through motherhood, discovers in old age that the bargain was one-sided: she gave everything, and the return is nothing.
Colonial Lagos
Emecheta’s Lagos is a city of radical dislocation. The Igbo community in Lagos has been uprooted from the village structures that gave meaning to their lives — extended family, communal labor, traditional authority — and deposited in a colonial economy where their labor is worth almost nothing and their culture is treated as primitive. Nnaife works as a laundryman for a British family, washing their underwear, and the humiliation of this position — for a man who is a titled chief in his own village — corrodes his dignity and, eventually, his sanity.
The novel’s sharpest analysis concerns the intersection of patriarchy and colonialism. Traditional Igbo society gave women enormous burdens but also certain protections and a clear social identity. Colonial Lagos strips away the protections while intensifying the burdens. Nnu Ego is expected to be a traditional wife — obedient, fertile, self-sacrificing — in a modern economy that makes traditional family structures unsustainable.
Critical Standing
The Joys of Motherhood is now recognized as one of the major African novels of the twentieth century. It is taught in university courses worldwide and has been translated into numerous languages. Emecheta’s ironic, clear-eyed prose — which refuses to sentimentalize either traditional or modern African life — has been compared to Chinua Achebe’s, though her focus on women’s experience gives her work a dimension that Things Fall Apart lacks.
Collecting The Joys of Motherhood
First edition (Allison & Busby, London, 1979): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good/very good: $80–$200