Hi, need to submit a 1750 words essay on the topic On The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta.Download file to see previous pages... This story is of a Nigerian girl called Akun-na and her family. After her

Hi, need to submit a 1750 words essay on the topic On The Bride Price by Buchi Emecheta.

This story is of a Nigerian girl called Akun-na and her family. After her father dies, she is left without anyone who can protect her and is forced to marry someone. She goes against the society to be with her lover, a young school teacher called Chike. She escapes from one terrible situation to another and suffers through quite a lot to get the ending she wishes for, which is still not exactly a happy one. After marrying Chike and conceiving a child, she goes into premature labor and dies after giving birth to her daughter. Emecheta’s book was published in the year 1976 and is based on the post-colonial times in Nigeria. The women in those days, particularly in Nigeria, were fully dependent on the men. They were not treated like normal human beings but like objects. They could be bought and sold if a man wanted to have a woman and their opinion was not even asked. Their wishes were disregarded, they were to act like automatons and just follow whatever the men ordered them to do. Generally, the girls did not get any education. it was only in a few villages where there were schools for girls. Even then the girls were barely educated as they had to stop their studies once they got married which was when they were around fourteen years of age. There were certain rules and regulations which had to be followed by them no matter what the circumstances. Barely anyone had the courage to rebel and those who did had to suffer a lot at the hands of the society. Akun-na did not approve of the society’s laws and wanted to follow her own wishes which led to her having to face quite a number of problems and eventually her death. “Emecheta uses Akunna's story to expose and combat those socio-cultural traditions, taboos, myths, emotional and class deprivations employed by a patriarchal system that is inherently structured to perpetually produce “women in chains”” (Mezu 133). In those times, it was a sexist society and the men were the ruling lot. It was automatically assumed that if the family could afford to send their son to school, then the boy would get a good education. Every command of the men was to be carried out without arguments. Most of them were an insensitive lot with no care of the women around them be it their wives or their daughters. They were greedy creatures only caring for money and the respect they had in society. They used the females for their benefits, no matter how they got them. it was the same to them as long as they got the results they wanted. Since the beginning of times, the men were thought to be powerful and important, more so than the women, and the Nigerians had the same traditional concepts regarding male superiority. They were not down trodden upon and could do whatever they wished to. This was not for all though. Chike, the man Akun-na is shown to be in love with in the book, was a descendant of the slaves. Despite his wealthy father’s offering to pay Akun-na’s uncle the bride price several times, Okonkwo refuses him. This was because of his background which Okonkwo considered to be far too inferior. Despite the freedom of the slaves done by the Colonists, the natives refused to accept them as their equals. In the olden times, if the husband died, then the widow was left to be ‘inherited’ by the next male relative of the deceased.