Naira Power by Buchi Emecheta: A Review

 

Buchi Emecheta was once described by her son as a “womanist”, a word that is perhaps closely related to the more popular word, “feminist”. Her ideas about the place of a woman in what is ostensibly 1970s and 1980s Nigeria are explored in this novella that packs a punch that is far greater than its small weight.

“Going to the United Kingdom must surely be like paying God a visit,” Buchi Emecheta declared in a BBC One programme The Light of Experience about her perceptions about that island as a little girl growing up in Ibusa, Nigeria. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7cAwemP-u8 She vowed to someday visit that country; she would go on to live there for decades. Bintu, the narrator of Naira Power by Buchi Emecheta, follows this path. “I am a woman who has stayed more than half of her life in the United Kingdom, pursuing one set of studies and then another,” Bintu introduces herself at the beginning of the novella.

The book opens with Bintu explaining that she has been visiting her family in Lagos, Nigeria and has spent some time with Nurudeen, her younger brother, and his third wife, Amina. “I am in my prime, thirty-five or so, but I still call Amina my wife,” Bintu remarks on the African culture of referring thus to a spouse of the member of the family. “So, she even felt it an honour for me to refer to her as ‘Amina my wife.’ I could hear and feel the vibrant happiness in her voice when she called back, ‘Yes, Auntie.’” The novel opens on the day that Bintu is expected to fly back to the United Kingdom. Nurudeen rules his house sternly. As he coordinates the house, Bintu remarks, “I could hear my brothers grave and sullen voice say something nasty to this person, or that person. I could hear Lamidi whimper in pain. I knew what had happened, my brother had given him a slap or two…But aggressiveness and rudeness are all part and parcel of being a male, I suppose.”  The preceding lines set the tempo for the novella: female solidarity in the face of patriarchy and outright male chauvinism. “My eyes caught hers and we nearly collapsed laughing…For that split second we forgot we were women. We forgot that we were meant to laugh only gently in a subdued, feminine way,” narrates Bintu about the hilarity she and Amina derived from Nurudeen’s strict conduct of the house’s affairs. For a book first published in 1982 under the Macmillan Pacesetters series, the sentiments expressed in the immediately preceding extract are perhaps not strange.

While she waits impatiently for her return flight to the UK, Bintu offers to follow Amina to the market. As Amina drives them to the market, they stumble on a mob that has apprehended Ramonu, a man from Amina’s past. A member of the mob tells Amina that Ramonu was caught allegedly pickpocketing “an Ibo man” at the National Stadium in the middle of a football match. The mob burns Ramonu alive. A rain suddenly starts thereafter, and the two women are trapped in Lagos’s notorious traffic. The novella is mostly Amina’s recollections of Ramonu’s life — mostly untoward adventures in the quest for wealth. It turns out that they grew up together at Isalegangan, a fictitious neighbourhood on Lagos Island. “Lemonu was the name of Ramonou’s father. He came to Lagos as a young man. A very long time ago, he travelled from the North to the South to sell his cattle…Lemonu spoke neither English nor Yoruba,” but he found success as a sanitary officer. Lemonu’s story is like many who join the rural to urban drift and make it big by using their wits and derring-do; his is slightly more different because he achieves it somewhat legitimately. As is expected of successful men, Lemonu delves into polygamy, and the deleterious effects on Ramonu is presented to the reader. Ramonu’s relationship with his father hits the rocks as a fall out of this domestic polygamous arrangement, leading Ramonu being disowned by his father. After some years, Ramonu suddenly shows up, wealthy and in a far better financial state than his father had ever been. His past transgressions are forgiven, and he finds favour with the neighbourhood. Everyone wants to be Ramonu’s friend, or wife. “If you don’t have naira power here, Auntie, you are lost. Money can buy you everything, even justice. Everything,” Amina tells Bintu as she narrates the story.‎

The theme of polygamy rings all through the novel.  Bintu wonders how her civil servant brother manages to maintain his three wives and their many children. “Men with many wives end up not having a single wife-friend among the women they work for all their lives,” Bintu observes. Bintu, much to her surprise, finds that Amina is not the docile, unexposed person/third wife she initially thought her to be. “Our mothers always told us that if you let your husband know all about you, you are asking for trouble,” Amina tells Bintu, after she discloses that the relationship between Ramonu and her was not platonic. It is common to find that many Nigerians in the diaspora look down on Nigerians who live at home, considering them anything buy exposed, smart or wise; both educated and uneducated alike. When Bintu wonders why Amina had never told her husband about Ramonu, Amina retorts, “My mother told me never to undress in front of my husband. He would never respect me. So. All these five years, my husband has never known how I look and he will never know. Do you think I should tell a man like that I had an adventure in my youth?” Bintu is very much surprised at the economic awareness possessed by Amina despite her limited formal education, as they lament Ramonu’s fate. “We both agreed that the tragedy that was Ramonu was the fault of nobody, but that of a society that respects any fool who has naira.” The Nigerian in the 2000s understands this sentiment very much.

Buchi Emecheta effectively takes the reader into Lagos of yore, when “One of the civil laws of Lagos states that only even-numbered cars should run on the roads on certain days, and on other days, only odd-numbered vehicles.” Her descriptions of Lagos are vivid.  She also accurately captures the attitudes of a lot of Nigerian men to the premiership of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. “My husband says that the United Kingdom is full of sick men. He says that is why they have a woman ruling them and a woman is their prime minister,” Amina tells Bintu, much to the dismay of the latter.

However, as with novellas, the major shortcoming I observed was the shortage of further material or information about the major characters in the novel.

I have little doubt about it; as Naira Power is reprinted and distributed once again, it will be an impactful book for another generation of Nigerians and Africans, especially to the younger readers for whom the Pacesetters series was initially designed.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars