A Woman among Women

 Flora Nwapa dedicated her life to writing in a period where women writing and publishing were not accorded the same respect as men. This resistance is reflected in her characters, especially Efuru.

Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Demas Nwoko’s Natural Synthesis and the Rise of African Architecture. Buy the issue here.

I read Flora Nwapa’s Efuru again a few months after I started my PhD in 2020. I had read it two decades ago, but it was as if I was discovering the novel for the first time and so was struck by the clean pragmatism of its themes, the compelling lives and the richly-drawn family dynamics and relationships, how the women of this world were constantly colliding with or complementing each other; so immersive was this carefully constructed story that time and distance shrunk between us and I was lost in that world. Afterwards, I returned to Isele Magazine submissions with new eyes. We were accepting works for our inaugural quarterly issue, themed ‘The Woman Issue’, and there were days when I hoped for a glimpse of a character like the headstrong Ajanupu or even the cantankerous Omirima, women who undermine that trope of ‘good women’. Women who are both aggressively supportive and aggressively obstinate, each armed with personal desires and motivations, such that their relationships are symbiotic and realistic. With Efuru, what Nwapa successfully did, as Marie Umeh noted in the introduction to ‘The Poetics of Economic Independence for Female Empowerment’, was to initiate a literary tradition that was, ‘rooted in resistance, a protest against the one-dimensional images of Nigerian women either as wives, mothers, femmes fatales, or rebel girls.’ And while Efuru, the eponymous hero of the novel, exemplifies this theme of resistance, so did Ajanupu, the fierce older sister to Ossai—Efuru’s mother-in-law, whose mere presence and unbending will saw Efuru through her most difficult times.

EFURU’S WOMEN

Often, we encounter women in stories who defend the homestead at the detriment of their fellow women, but Nwapa treats this subject with care: she introduces Ajanupu, who assumes the role of the mother Efuru desperately needs; she offers support, an emotional pillar, was Efuru’s debt collector, and often was going to war on Efuru’s behalf because her sister, Ossai, already subdued by her own failed marriage, was unable to offer Efuru all the social protection and the familial care that she needed. And evident in the way Ajanupu carried herself, in the forcefulness of her speech, even in her business and familial relationships, was a trait similar to the background information we were provided of Efuru’s late mother. She was a wealthier woman who before her death had impacted on Efuru the importance of economic independence and of taking the reins of one’s fate and stirring it to her favour. Ajanupu was the sort who, as the narrator tells us, ‘interfered with fate,’ unlike her sister, Ossai, who had succumbed to a sad, humdrum life. If faced with Ossai’s realities, the narrator lets us know that Ajanupu would have, ‘played her own tune and invited fate to dance to it.’ She spoke her mind without fear, wrestled even the most bullheaded of men, and was also imperfect, especially considering the harsh language she employed when berating children and the acidity of her tone when confronting her peers...

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