Novelists From Nigeria

"(Chapter 7, Page 76)"

"(Chapter 13, Page 138)"

"I write about the little happenings of everyday life . Being a woman and African born, I see things through an African woman’s eyes. I chronicle the little happenings in the lives of the African women I know. I did not know that by doing so I was going to be called feminist."

"I did not discover till years afterward that Mr. Thorne’s intemperance was not the only annoyance she suffered from…he had poured vile language into the ears of [Grandmother’s] innocent great-grandchild."

"I thought that if he was my own father, he ought to love me. I was a little girl then, and didn’t know any better. But now I never think any thing about my father. All my love is for you."

"I replied, “God alone knows how much I have suffered; and He, I trust, will forgive me. If I am permitted to have my children, I intend to be a good mother, and to live in such a manner that people cannot treat me with contempt."

"We knelt down together, with my child pressed to my heart, and my other arm round the faithful, loving old friend I was about to leave forever. On no other occasion has it ever been my lot to listen to so fervent a supplication for mercy and protection. It thrilled through my heart, and inspired me with trust in God."

"Yet that intelligent, enterprising, noble-hearted man was a chattel! Liable, by the laws of a country that calls itself civilized, to be sold with horses and pigs!"

"Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage….The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own."

"Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own."

"I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched."

"But O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely! If slavery had been abolished I too could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws…"

"Some poor creatures have been so brutalized by the lash that they will sneak out of the way to give their masters free access to their wives and daughters. Do you think this proves the black man to belong to an inferior order of beings? What would you be, if you had been born and brought up a slave…"

"And later he burnt the book and I think by that time this urge to write had become more important to me than he realized, and that was the day I said, ‘I’m going to leave this marriage’ and he said “What for, that stupid book?’ and I said, “I just feel you just burned my child."

"She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. She pitied herself as a martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed."

"The young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household. Jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness."

"You must forsake your sinful ways, and be faithful servants. Obey your old master and your young master…if you disobey your earthly master, you offend your heavenly Master. You must obey God’s commandments."

"If God has bestowed beauty upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave. I know that some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it."

"My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s Word: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” “Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.” But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor."

"I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? He was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach…"

"On each cheek was drawn the outline of a large spinach leaf looking ready to be picked. It was not that many Ibos would have put so many on the face of a little girl. But Ojebeta's mother Umeadi, when she realised that her daughter was going to live, had had reason for going to the expense of engaging the services of the most costly face-maker in Ibuza. For, with such a riot of tribal spinach marks on her only daughter's face, no kidnapper would dream of selling her into slavery. What was more, if she got lost her people would always know her."

"It is so even today in Nigeria: when you have lost your father, you have lost your parents. Your mother is only a woman, and women are supposed to be boneless. A fatherless family is a family without a head, a family without shelter, a family without parents, in fact a non-existing family. Such traditions do not change very much."

"Every woman, whether slave or free, must marry. All her life a woman always belonged to some male. At birth you were owned by your people, and when you were sold you belonged to a new master, when you grew up your new master who had paid something for you would control you."

"When my grandmother applied for him for payment he said the estate was insolvent, and the law prohibited payment. It did not, however, prohibit him from retaining the silver candelabra, which had been purchased with that money. I presume they will be handed down in the family, from generation to generation."

"Anything imported was considered to be much better than their own old ways."

"(Narrator, p. 42)"

"In Ibuza, every young man was entitled to his fun. The blame usually went to the girls. A girl who had had adventures before marriage was never respected in her new home; everyone in the village would know about her past, especially if she was unfortunate enough to be married to an egocentric man."

"So, sorry as she was for making a fool out of an old doctor, this was just one of the cases where honesty would not have been the best policy."

"But to the slave mother New Year’s day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from her childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of a mother’s agonies."

"Then the thought suddenly struck her. Yes, she would go to school."

"(Narrator, p. 9)"

"There were men who would go about raping young virgins of thirteen and fourteen, and still expect the women they married to be as chaste as flower buds."

"(Narrator, p. 175)"

"(Narrator, p. 93)"

"Hunger drove Francis to work as a clerical officer in the post office. Adah's hopes rose. This might save the marriage after all."

"They were going to get the room they were asking for. Pa Noble was too old for Sue."

"London, having killed Adah's congregational God, created instead a personal God who loomed large and really alive."

"(Narrator, p. 151)"

"(Narrator, p. 162)"

"(Narrator, p. 141)"

"Did she not feel totally fulfilled when she had completed the manuscript, just as if it were another baby she had had?"

"(Narrator, p. 166)"

"(Narrator, p. 53)"

"This old friend of Adah's paid for the taxi that took her home from Camden Town because he thought she was still with her husband."

"For my master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour, had just left me, with stinging, scorching words; words that scathed ear and brain like fire. O, how I despised him! I thought how glad I should be if some day when he walked the earth, it would open and swallow him up…"

"You must know, my dear young lady, that in Lagos you may be a million publicity officers for the Americans; you may be earning a million pounds a day; you may have hundreds of servants: you may be living like an elite, but the day you land in England, you are a second-class citizen.”"

"(Francis, p. 39)"

"Her children were going to be different. They were all going to be black, they were going to enjoy being black, be proud of being black, a black of a different breed."

"She, who only a few months previously would have accepted nothing but the best, had by now been conditioned to expect inferior things. She was now learning to suspect anything beautiful and pure. Those things were for the whites, not the blacks."

"One thing she did know was the greatest book on human psychology is the Bible. If you were lazy and did not wish to work, or if you had failed to make your way in society, you could always say, 'My kingdom is not of this world.' If you were a jet-set woman who believed in sleeping around, VD or no VD, you could always say Mary Magdalene had no husband, but didn't she wash the feet of Our Lord? Wasn't she the first person to see our risen saviour? If, in the other hand, you believed in the inferiority of the blacks, you could always say, 'Slaves, obey your masters.' It is a mysterious book, one of the greatest of all books, if not the greatest. Hasn't it got all the answers?"