Angela M.

Fubara Figures of pedagogy in Ama Ata

Angela M. Fubara is a lecturer in
English Studies at Rivers State
Aidoo’s Changes and Buchi
University of Science & Technology, Emecheta’s Double Yoke
Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Nigeria.
Email: [email protected]

Figures of pedagogy in Ama Ata Aidoo’s

Changes and Buchi Emecheta’s Double Yoke
Writers and critics of women emancipation have lifted and advanced the struggle to another phase. The last decade has
witnessed feminist writing from female disparagement, subjugation, women as victims craving to be fulfilled wives and mothers
endowed with “pretty faces and fertile ova” (Chukwuma), to women striving for empowerment and assertion. A revisit of Buchi
Emecheta’s Double Yoke and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes reveals that these inimitable feminist writers, while depicting the women
in the abyss of debasement in patriarchal society portray assertive heroines teaching by precepts immanent in pedagogical assets.
Economic independence and education are added advantages to factors that make for self-assertion. Self-assertion, seen as a
woman’s greatest weapon, serves as a pedagogical instrument for equipping both sexes. This article focuses on narrative
strategies that evoke images that go beyond women disparagement and marginalisation to female empowerment and self-
assertion through close rereadings of Emecheta’s and Aidoo’s novels. Keywords: Ama Ata Aidoo, Buchi Emecheta, education,
gynandrists, self-assertion, woman empowerment.

Introduction
Different pictures of women have been painted by feminist writers, for example Ama
Ata Aidoo, Rebeka Njau, Flora Nwapa, Mariama Bâ, Buchi Emecheta, Yvonne Vera,
Nawal El Saadawi and several gynandarists. Gynadarist are literary male writers,
who in their works exhibit empathy with women. Examples of these writers are
Ousmane Sembene (Gods Bit of Woods) Ngugi ã ˜ wa Thiongo (Petals of Blood, Devil on the
Cross) Ayi Kwei Armah (The Healers). These feminist writers and gynandarists
forcefully articulate female marginalisation, debasement, inferiority and poverty. These
are themes which have persisted in feminist discourse expressing distinctly the plight
of the downtrodden, the woman. The precursor of the concept of gynandarism which
Chioma Opara coined in her article entitled “Okpewho’s women” posits that
gynandarism “is diametrically opposed to sexism and leans towards Socialist tenets
of social equality” (“Introduction” 2). Despite the constraints of patriarchy and viewing
from the progression of feminist question ignited by Mary Wollstonecraft’s A
Vindication on the Rights of Women: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
(1792),Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own” (1929), there has been sustained gains
in the strive for change in the affairs of women in personal and socioeconomic spheres.

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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4314/tvl.v51i1.2
With committed struggle, writers of women emancipation have at the moment lifted
and advanced the battle to another phase. The last decade has witnessed feminist
writing from disparagement, subjugation, women as victims craving to be fulfilled
wives and mothers endowed “with pretty faces and fertile ova” (Chukwuma xiv), to
women striving for empowerment and assertion. Assertiveness has featured in feminist
writing prior to the immediate present but has not been a topical interest for African
feminist critics. A move beyond certain levels of close reading exhumes more of female
experiences and characteristics in a text.
The publication of Double Yoke (1982) and Changes in (1991) has attracted an
impressive number of opinions. Opara (Mother’s Daughter 56) calls Emecheta a radical
woman writer who uses various “modes to break the yoke of a hidebound cohesive
culture in Double Yoke,” thus exhibiting a woman’s defiance of patriarchy. Micere
Mugo in like manner asserts that Emecheta, a black female writer, has risen above
menacing fears of “punishment for too much talk” to arm “herself with a mighty pen
in the affirmation of female self”. Opara points out that women, especially women of
an older generation “cushioned their heartaches in marriage attendant on their
husbands’s infidelity and even abandonment” (Mother’s Daughter 90 ). Tuzyline Jita
Allan (171) amongst Ama’s many critics of Changes has the view that “Aidoo and other
African women artists bear the prodigious responsibility of holding in check the
structures of gender and cultural domination.” The list of critical opinions on these
pedagogical works by Aidoo and Emecheta appear to be endless. It is indeed elating
and encouraging that their potent pens have triggered women from a level of docility
to assertiveness.
A revisit of Aidoo’s Changes and Emecheta’s Double Yoke reveals that these inimitable
feminist writers while depicting the women in what appears to be an abyss of
debasement in patriarchal society portray assertive heroines teaching by precepts
immanent in pedagogical assets. This study hinges on narrative strategies that evoke
images which go beyond women disparagement, the marginalisation to female
empowerment and self-assertion through the close rereading of Aidoo and Emecheta’s
selected novels. In doing this, the article will portray the strategies these authors have
employed to subvert the status quo despite the constraints of patriarchy and thus
symbolically lifting the woman from the scourge of what may be called the acronymic
D’S—debasement, degradation and dehumanization—to fulfilling existence. The
conclusion provides insight into forces injurious to female assertion.

Is Esi too an African woman?

In Changes the narrative begins with the protagonist, Esi shown as educated, financially
autonomous, forceful and married to Oko Sekyi. Esi is a statistician who holds a
Masters degree in Urban Statistics. She has a well-paid dignifying job in the

TYDSKRIF VIR LETTERKUNDE • 51 (1) • 2014 19

Department of Urban Statistics where she is an analyst. By the virtue of her job she
travels to many parts of the world frequently: “Geneva, Addis, Dakar one half of the
year; Rome, Lusaka, Lagos the other half for conferences, seminars and workshops”
which she enjoys so much and which has become her “life style” (8). Esi loves her job
and she enjoys working with figures. Through her job position she also has the
benefit of a whole bungalow assigned to her as official quarters where she resides
with her husband. The narrator depicts Esi as intimidatingly assertive and in control.
Where she towers in height with her slim straight body, her husband Oko, appears
diminutively short beside her. Where she is financially independent her husband
earns a lesser income as a school teacher. Esi’s achieved, successful and fulfilled status
answers Nnu Ego’s quest in The Joys of Motherhood:
God, when will you create a woman
who will be fulfilled in herself,
a full human being not anybody’s
appendage. (186)

In Esi, the dawn of Nnu Egos’ yearnings breaks. Esi is that woman whose achievements
evoke the communal voice echoing through the intrusive narrator: “Is Esi too an
African woman?” (8). Unlike her friend Opokuya Dakwa who is temperate, educated
with the credential of a fifteen years career as a registered nurse and midwife, Esi
appears distant, uncompromising and ungovernable. In spite of all these, Oko loves
and “savours Esi as a liquor’’ (7). This figuratively connotes Esi’s intoxication with
power, force and control over her husband. Oko’s extravagant love for Esi overwhelms
him such that the aroma of her powder, body, and perfume even her briefcase and
scribbling board tunes him on erotically. Esi however never loved Oko before they
married. Here is the omniscient narrator’s commentary: “now looking back she (Esi)
dare not admit even to herself that perhaps what she felt for Oko in the first years of
their married life was gratitude … gratitude. In spite of everything he had persisted
in courting her” (41).
Esi’s acceptance to marry Oko was simply gratitude because her mothers (mother
and grand mother) were getting uncomfortable that she had remained single when
she ought to had been married. Esi’s grand mother, Nana endorses Esi’s posture of not
being able to love because according to Nana:
Love is not safe, my lady Silk, love is dangerous …
Love is fine for singing … even to dance to. But when
we need to count on human strength … love is nothing.
Ah … the last man any women should think of marrying is
the man she loves (42).

Nana’s words of caution are proven right in the life of Esi as we progress.

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 Watching Esi as she dresses for work on this particular morning the author throws
Oko’s mind open through authorial commentary while the reader gleans this
information. They have only one daughter, Agyaanowa. Esi refuses to have another
child although Oko yearns to have more children. “Esi definitely put her career well
above any duties she owed as wife” (8). Oko laments in his rumination. At this point
he takes his wife forcefully, and makes astonishing love to her. Esi becomes quite
infuriated. The narrator tells us that Esi’s “anger rose to an exploding pitch” such that
she accuses her husband of marital rape, a phrase which the intrusive narrator informs
us has no interpretative equivalence in any African language. The African man has
the right to take his wife any time. By Esi’s powerful analysis of the matter she becomes
convinced that the marital rape is not only subjugation but also dehumanization. The
post rape drama, the narrator observes “finished” Esi. Not only Oko taking the bed
cover “left her completely naked’’ but also the sight of the cloth trailing behind him,
“Who looked like some arrogant king” as he walks to the bathroom (10).

Metaphor of the marital rape

Esi, the analyst, sees through the lens of gender and interprets the onslaught as firstly,
authority pitted against subjugation; secondly, gallantry pitted against debase-
ment(abuse); and thirdly, as subject pitted against object.
Esi’s analytical power as she sat in the office unfolds this metaphor that the rape is
an instrument of limitation designed to deny her right as a being, indeed to
dehumanize her. From this knowledge springs a decision equipped with forceful
self-assertion that consequently splits the marriage by divorce and sends Oko packing
from his hitherto matrimonial home, in spite of his pleading and observable remorse.
He vacates the home with their daughter Agyaanowa thus making history in the
patriarchal norm. The seat of patriarchy is literally dissolved. Lovenduski and Randall
have noted that “The women question saw men as the norm and the woman as the
other” (8). It was the norm to see the man as the subject, the powerful and authority,
the gallant and the exultant. In Changes there is reversal of these roles with the use of
the symbolic Esi equipped with factors that make for self-assertion. To add Allan’s
words who observes that
Changes pulses with an irrepressible pioneering spirit, clearing the ground of
changing circumstances of women’s lives in contemporary Africa, but more
importantly it transcends realistic significance and constructs a psychological blue
print for female portraiture […] African women diminishment in literature may
well be a thing of the past. (179)

Aidoo reverses the status quo where the battered, oppressed wife is kicked out of the
home by her husband.

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 The natural consequence for Esi’s action, the divorce, is a vacuum. This brings Ali
Kondy, the handsome well-travelled managing Director of Linga Hide Aways, travel
and tourist agency to the scene. Esi falls in love with the vibrant Ali Kondy. Their love
could be seen as reciprocal because we learn “there followed days when he (Ali)
would sit behind his desk at Linga Hide Aways after office hours, pretending he was
working, in fact he was thinking of Esi”; “When he learns of her divorce he had
silently thanked Allah and set about wooing her” (73, 74). The fact that he is married
to Fusena, the wife of his youth and who he affirms “is a good woman” (75) and that
they have three children could not deter him from wooing and marrying Esi.
The assertive powerful Esi falls prey to love under Ali’s clutches. Driven by
uncontrolled love and forgetting Nana’s caution that “love is not safe” Esi unwittingly
sacrifices her physical and emotional autonomy and gets into a Muslim polygamous
marriage with Ali Kondy. She who paid less attention to her conjugal roles when she
was married to Oko becomes an astonishing cook such that Ali affirms: “Esi cooked
like nobody he knew or had known” (76). Her house becomes a place of lovemaking
with Ali, from the doorsteps to the living room and to her bedroom.
Not long after the wedding Ali seldom visits Esi’s residence (the “love haven”). Esi
is now “occupied territory” (91). For Ali Kondy, home is where Fusena, the wife of his
youth and children reside; contact with Esi becomes stolen moments. Esi now burns
with love and yearns for Ali’s visits and attention without success. She succumbs to
the disparaging position of a second wife and falls prey to vulnerability which her
mother had well articulated where the position of a second wife is “a sort of come
down” (87).
Esi’s second marriage becomes an utter sham and she is a total wreck. “All Esi is
aware of is desolation” (162) and her personality drastically changes. She becomes
reduced to a hysterical paranoid such that she has to see a doctor who prescribes
diazepam which she takes and “slept a drugged sleep” on the last hours of the year
(141). It is at this point of agony that Ali with his inherent machismo comes and
presents her with a brand new maroon pleasure car as a New Year gift.

Extended metaphor and other figures

Aidoo adopts an omniscient narrative strategy and throws open the characters’ minds
with intrusions, while she employs captivating images and figures to enrich her
narrative. As Esi receives this gift with utter amazement, her analytical mind tells
exactly what the gift is meant to be: “very special bribe […] meant to be substitutes for
his presence” and abandonment (147). In her monologue she sees her relationship
with Ali as “a complete dead end.” She is drained of all emotion of joy or anger. She
figuratively compares herself to a spirit freshly released from the body that watches
the affairs of men but “cannot rejoice […] cannot hurt” (149). In spite of all these, she

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stays in the marriage but its terms radically changed. Esi analyses her situation and
decides to remain “good friends” with Ali (164).
Oko’s replacement for irrepressible Esi is figuratively called “breathing parcel”
whom he receives from his mother with a shock and as a mouthpiece of the narrator
warns that it is no longer acceptable or possible in this days and age “to get a young
woman […] carried off as a wife to a man she has never met”(71).
Aidoo uses liquor as a metaphor to set the love story in motion. Love is depicted as
liquor which intoxicates Oko and leaves him powerless and abandoned. In the same
instance Esi’s love for Ali devastates and weakens her strength even her assertive
force when she becomes alienated by her lover. This wrecks her liberated self and to
quote the character, Nana “love is nothing, it is dangerous” (42). In her marathon
advice to Esi, she calls her (Esi’s) wedding ceremony “a funeral of the self that would
have been”. Esi’s assertiveness deflates like her house figuratively delineated as having
eerie feelings of a ghost in a cemetery. Fusena earlier called Esi’s marriage to her
husband a “monster ” she had secretly feared since their sojourn in London, and
because of childbearing, her difficulties to further her education (100).
Within the framework of the omniscient perspective, Aidoo juxtaposes the
conventional form of narration with poetic elements like the rhetoric of the oral bard
deploying a sudden change of “narrative gear” (Okpewho 27, 213). An instance is
when Esi meets Ali for the first time. At a certain point in their dialogue, Esi prefers to
keep silent because “silences sometimes have a way of screaming strange messages.”
From here the narrative gear suddenly changes to a poem:
They know that art well who trade in food-pad up
where resources are scares or just for profit:
grains for sausages some worms burgers
more leaves for kenkey (3).

Instances where Aidoo switches from prose to poetry abound, like the one cited
below, depicting how husbands virtually seize their wives’ cars “whisking” their
girlfriends around
for the whole world to see definitely for
the whole world to see and sometimes even
refusing the wife a ride if he should pass
her on the way (19).

Such poetic passages are numerous in the text. Apart from these the narrative is replete
with captivating dialogues. Examples are passages where Ali proposes to Esi (88–92);
the dialogue between Esi and her mothers, Nana and Ena (110–14); the skillfully
contrived dialogue captioned: “Said Aba to Ama” (101), and the imaginary telephone
dialogue between Ali and Esi to explain the reasons for his inability to be with her

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(137). The mono-dialogue between Esi and her inner soul is most captivating. Here
she is in pain over Ali’s affair with his secretary. Hear her as she dialogues with herself:
So what of it if Ali occasionally dropped his secretary home?
But it was not occasional; it sounded like everyday.
So what of that?
But I don’t want him to.
Why not?
It hurts
Does, it?
Terribly
Well, just remember that if a man can have two wives
Then, he can have three wives … four wives …
And on and on … plus remember … (155–56)

Esi’s poetic self-analysis serves as the author Aidoo’s serious warning to women who
go into polygamous marriages: to be preferred as the only well-loved is only ephemeral;
they should be prepared for eventual harrowing experiences. All these contrivance
and skill enrich the narrative and add interest with Aidoo’s mature artistic exposition.

Was Nko a virgin?

Buchi Emecheta’s Double Yoke is set on the campus of the University of Calabar. The
narrative is a creative writing assignment which is given to a class of students by the
female lecturer, Miss Bulewao. The male student Ete Kamba “put his biro onto a clean
sheet of paper […] to tell the world how it all began between him and his Nko until
Professor Ikot came into their lives” (13).This assignment becomes the instrument the
bright but bloated male student uses to expose the moral decadence of bigoted, self-
acclaimed man of God, Professor Ikot who steps on Eta Kamba’s toes by sexually
exploiting his girlfriend, Nko.
The story opens as we meet the protagonists in the village of Mankong at a special
thanksgiving service where Ete Kamba and Nko meet each other for the first time—it
is love at first sight. Eta Kamba even as a young man, a first year university student, is
imbued with patriarchal whims. He is bent on not only marrying a virgin but also
wants a woman to own and possess. The thought whether he is the one to deflower
Nko or not leaves him in a worrisome state that begins to destroy him. He seeks advice
from the Evangelical Campus Pastor, Professor Ikot who abuses his position and seduces
Nko. He continues this inappropriate relationship on the pretext of supervising her
research project: “Like a wooden doll, she let the man have what he wanted” (140).
Although Nko appears to be a victim she displays assertiveness when she breaks
into the male world. She declares: “women know what they want these days and

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how to get them” (24). Nko is capable of deep convictions about issues but manages to
keep her apparent innocence. This elusive quality mingled with seeming innocence
crushes Ete Kamba such that “he knew” her while they stood against a wall of an
incomplete building. He is anxious—”But wait a minute, was Nko a virgin?” (53)—
and he confronts her: “I wonder what they [his parents] will think of a girl who
allowed any man to sleep with her by the wall of half finished house.” Dignified Nko
responds: “you did not sleep with me, you stood with me” (58). Chioma Opara (59)
maintains that the portraiture of Nko in Double Yoke “is a statement against sexist
myth and the gamut of cultural mystique.” Nko rejects not only the bachelor’s bed
and the narrow student’s bed but also the marital bed. She confronts Ete Kamba not as
a subjugated bedmate but as an equal who stood abreast in lovemaking leaning against
the wall of an unfinished building. Emecheta uses Nko’s assertiveness and the question
of virginity to wound arrogant male confidence and his bloated ego.
The omniscient narrator makes the reader see Ete Kambas’s mind that “he was
uneasy because [Nko] was too sure of herself ”(124). Her assertiveness crushes him
and he begins to suffer “from fractured pride” (122). After their argument over her
virginity he learns that he would never “gain anything arguing” with Nko (added
emphasis, 121). Nko’s stance to the dominance of patriarchy is clear, as she reflects on
Professor Ikot’s demands:
She must either have her degree and be a bad, loose, feminist, shameless career
woman […] do without her degree and be a good loving wife… to Ete Kamba […]
O blast it all. She was going to have both. She was going to maneuver these men to
give her both. They thought they could always call the tune and women like her
must dance to it. With her they were going to be wrong. (135)

Nko, undaunted by any circumstance, is determined to achieve her goals. Her sexuality
is exploited but this does not deter her. Even when she is impregnated by Professer
Ikot Ete Kamba cannot loosen her grip on him such that he leaves lectures to attend
her father’s funeral. Nko is not spared the humiliation of a repressive custom; she is
‘virilized’ with a baby out of wedlock. As Oguyemi Okonjo (270) puts it: “Woman is
virilized and man is feminized.”
Miss Bulewoa is another assertive female in the narrative. She is self-confident and
knowledgeable, well-known and well-travelled internationally like Esi in Changes.
She has achieved and is liberated such that the masculine briefcase becomes part of
her working garb; she is a light, a store of knowledge to men; she towers to impart
knowledge while the men obey. She is an accomplish writer infused with the double
yoke of modernity and tradition with unwavering confidence. The significance of
Emecheta’s depiction of these female characters, Nko and Miss Bulewoa as well as
Aidoo’s creation of Esi in Changes, reveals that equipped with education, the scourge
of docility, passivity, poverty, inferiority, and marginalization becomes alien to women.

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Without a woman’s “survival kit” love is nothing
Aidoo and Emecheta have ingeniously braced up to the challenge to redeem the
disparaging image of women. They are convinced that no society can advance pro-
gressively if a section of her population is subjugated. They have therefore created
Esi, Nko, Miss Bulawoa, Fusena and Opukuya as exemplars of contemporary libera-
ted African women.
After the first few chapters of the narrative in Double Yoke we do not see much of
Miss Bulawoa again but her creative writing assignment gives birth to the rest of the
narrative. The totality of her academic achievement tends to surpass that of any
achieving male in the academic world. Men as learners not only dread but also revere
her as a knowledgeable lecturer. Nko as a young student is determined to achieve her
goals. She is depicted as irrepressible, no impediment can deter her from her goals,
even more so when she is exposed to education, she begins to question. The acquired
knowledge adds to her assertiveness. At every point in the narrative she debunks any
show of masculine superiority. Nko’s “survival kit” becomes what she calls “little
secrets (that) make us women.” Her simplicity mingled with illusiveness unsettles
Ete Kamba, such that he begins to wonder if he “could cope with a woman like that”
(63). Nko is a survivor. Her undaunted spirit, complex and assertive quality subdue
her men, including the lustful Professor Ikot.
In Changes Esi’s inability to draw a line between home and career exposes her to
emotional devastation. At the beginning she is confident and assertive but becomes
brittle and broken at the end. Aidoo cautions that women should thread wearily with
love because according to her authorial mouthpiece, Nana, “love is nothing” (42). In
other words, love can hinder a woman’s self-emancipation. Opokuya, a mother of
four, compromises on a number of issues especially when she shares a car with her
conniving husband. Aidoo endorses this posture in marriage relationship. Opokuya
further expresses her financial autonomy forcefully when she purchases Esi’s car
outrightly without asking for her husband’s assistance.
Fusena on the other hand owns a supermarket. “What Fusena’s kiosk did not sell
was not available anywhere in the country.” The business is rumoured to make more
money than any other in Accra (67). Her business is a compensatory gift from her
husband Ali, who ruined her desire for higher education. Fusena, among the three
major Aidoo’s female characters, is not only financially autonomous but she and her
three children are well-provided for by her husband. However, her response as she
learns of her husband’s decision to marry a second wife appears unsatisfactory. The
reader expects her to mount forceful pressure to defend her marriage and to challenge
the status quo of a restrictive Muslim enclave with some measure of assertiveness to
boost her image as liberated woman. The appealing echo of Fusena’s voice for more
upliftment as a woman is quite audible. However, she is not fully actualized and this
affects the perception of her assertiveness in the novel.

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Conclusion
The feminist critic is soothed that Aidoo’s and Emecheta’s women have not plunged
into the rhythm of debasement, degradation and dehumanization. Esi’s pains are
emotional thirst for love. She is neither financially nor physically degraded but
emotionally devastated emanating from her inability to nurture a home, to draw a
line between home, career and from mismanaged assertiveness. Ali’s extravagant
material gifts from across the continents and show of love in his own genuine way
could not fill the hollow in her and her abode of emptiness. Can this be a retributive
justice? Aidoo’s luxuriant deployment of figures and skillful juxtaposition of oral
narrative with conventional written forms makes her work particularly accessible. It
is indisputable that both authors are inimitable storytellers. They have responded in
Changes and Double Yoke to the call that feminist writers should move beyond a
literature of abandonment and produce images of assertive independent women.
They have demonstrated that women can also oppress, seduce and marginalize.
Equipped with education and financial empowerment for women the world ceases
to be dominated as a male affair. The authors have produced independent, assertive
women who herald the literary phase of transcendence of female performers as
subjects rather than objects. The dawn is set for writers to create fulfilled women and
critics to recognise autonomous, assertive female figures to combat and expunge age-
long patriarchy.

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