The Bride Price
The Bride Price (1976) by Buchi Emecheta The Bride Price is a 1976 novel (first published in the UK by Allison & Busby and in the USA by George Braziller) by Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta. It concerns, in part, the problems of women in post-colonial Nigeria. The author dedicated this novel to her mother, Alice Ogbanje Emecheta. (The Bride Price is also the name of an unrelated novel by German novelist Grete Weil originally published in German as Der Brautpreis in 1988 and in English, translated by John Barrett, in 1991.)
Quotes
[edit]- 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
- 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.
- anything imported was considered to be much better than their own old ways.
- 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.
