Second Class Citizen

Second Class Citizen (1974) by Nigerian-born writer Buchi Emecheta is a semi-autobiographical novel tracing the journey of Adah Ofili from childhood in Lagos to her difficult life as an immigrant wife in 1960s London. Driven from early childhood by a fierce dream of education and eventual migration to the United Kingdom, Adah overcomes the death of her father, servitude in a relative's household, and the rigid gender expectations of Ibo society to win a scholarship, marry the student Francis Obi, and eventually sail to England with her two young children.

In London, Adah's dreams collide with harsh reality. She and Francis occupy a cramped, squalid room in Kentish Town, where Nigerian immigrants are concentrated in condemned housing. Francis, studying accountancy but persistently failing his examinations, resents Adah's intelligence, her professional ambitions, and her refusal to foster out their children as other Nigerian families do. Adah secures a professional post at North Finchley Library, becoming the family's sole breadwinner, but Francis treats her earnings as his entitlement while contributing nothing to childcare or domestic life. He becomes increasingly controlling and violent.

The novel exposes the intersection of racial discrimination in Britain (the repeated refusal of decent housing to 'coloureds'), gender oppression within the Ibo patriarchal system, and class snobbery both Nigerian and British. Through Adah's eyes, Emecheta chronicles the daily humiliations of second-class status: negligent childminders, racist landlords, a husband who burns her first manuscript, and institutions that offer sympathy but no remedy. The title captures Adah's bitter discovery that her colour consigns her to permanent inferiority in England, while her sex already consigned her to inferiority at home.