Home » History » African History » Modern Nigeria Through the Eyes of a Wicked Woman - Page 2

Modern Nigeria Through the Eyes of a Wicked Woman - Page 2

© Jessica Powers

Jagua returns to her village when her father dies. At this point she is poor and lonely, having left behind everything when she fled her house for her life. She feels shame over her poverty but even more, she feels remorse that she has spent the last ten years of her life in Lagos, forgetting her family-the people who are really important and will stand by you when you've lost everything.

She stays in the village with her mother during the mourning period and that is when we see Jagua change. An unexpected pregnancy at age 47 or 48 softens her, and we begin to wonder if her unfruitful womb has been the source of Jagua's restlessness and desire for a glitzy life. The thought of being a mother calms her, serves as balm for some wound in her spirit. Though the child does not live, Jagua realizes that her home village-or nearby-is where she belongs, and she decides to make a life for herself, opening a business with the money Uncle Taiwo left with her.

So the moral of the story is that when everything goes to hell because you've kept company with corrupt politicians, you'll still be taken care of financially in the end because those same corrupt politicians will have saved some (dirty) money for just such a rainy day....OK, I'm kidding. Seriously, though, Ekwensi is easier on his heroine than other Nigerian writers are on their protagonists, for example, Buchi Emecheta. Emecheta's virtuous, righteous heroines usually die young in childbirth or suffer poverty and unhappiness for an entire lifetime before dying cold and alone. Equally, Chinua Achebe's heroes lose their honor, their glory, their wealth through foolishness or rigidity or, sometimes, lack of virtue.

But Ekwensi's heroine, who throws virtue to the winds, becomes a rich woman in the end, at the expense of others. Though we see, as we see in other African novels, the tension between modernity and tradition, Ekwensi refuses to dwell on the issue of colonialism or how it has disrupted African culture. Rather, he simply presents a picture of life the way it is in modern Lagos and leaves the reader to decipher how city life and British culture emerged in Nigeria. Further, Ekwensi doesn't judge the lifestyle of his character, or suggest that the "traditional" lifestyle is better than the glitzy, glamorous life Jagua leads in Lagos. Nevertheless, Jagua ultimately finds that a more traditional life in the village of her birth is preferable because it leads to less spiritual, emotional, and physical destruction.

The copyright of the article Modern Nigeria Through the Eyes of a Wicked Woman - Page 2 in African History is owned by Jessica Powers. Permission to republish Modern Nigeria Through the Eyes of a Wicked Woman - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.