Buchi Emecheta's The Bride Price

1297 Words6 Pages

The social institution of marriage and the culture of paying bride price are interlinked and form an important part in the lives of African men and women. Like other communities, the African society has its own series of events that takes place before and after marriage such as the hunting of bride by going to the prospective bride’s hut before marriage and the inheritance of a widow and her family by the brother-in-law after the death of the husband. The traditional society of Africa strictly follows the culture of paying “bride price” by the groom’s family failing to which consequently lead to the death of the bride in her first childbirth. The African men and women strongly hold this belief no matter how modern the society has become in order to avoid death. In the light of these social practices and taboos prevalent in the African society, the paper is an attempt to analyse the reflection of the African system of marriage and the very culture of paying bride price in Buchi Emecheta’s novel The Bride Price,The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood

Keywords: African women, bride price, marriage, traditional and patriarchal society. …show more content…

In this context, the novel The Bride Price can be best studied and analysed from the womanist perspective as expounded by Chikewenye Okonjo Ogunwemi and Alice Walker. Just as feminism is against the discrimination of women based on gender, womanism is against the discrimination of women based on both gender and race. The term “womanist” is generally considered to have first introduced by the famous Afro-American novelist Alice Walker in her 1983 book In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. As Walker skilfully contrasts the difference between the terms “feminism” and “womanism” in terms of

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