Representation of the modern African woman in the widow's Might John

The condition of the modern African woman is one that has raised a lot of dust in recent times. The authors of our corpuses reject the traditional and archaic notion of the place and role of the woman in the society. That is why on one hand, they show the mistakes that can be fatal to the modern woman and, on the other, they portray young, beautiful, educated and strong women who are respected not just because they are women, but also because they face head-on and overcome challenges in their social, professional and private lives. These aspects of the modern African woman shall be examined below.

I – THE WOMAN AS A SOURCE OF HER OWN PROBLEMS

I – 1 – Her refusal to be educated

Education is of prime importance to the girl child in this modern world. Without education, the woman is closed up to opportunities of good jobs with good pay packages, exposure to the intellectual world, just to name a few. She cannot therefore be financially independent and contribute to the development of her society.

In The Widow’s Might, Akwenoh, refuses to heed the advice of her mother not to abandon school. She rather prefers to remain under the comfort of the man she loves, Ebbi:

She thought of abandoning school. Her mother warned her not to. Most of her class mates were already at the university, some doing the Master’s degree. Let them do it. They would have the MA degree but would never have an M to complement it. She was out to get married to a MAN not an MA [...] she had left secondary school without succeeding at the General Certificate of Education Examination at the Ordinary Level. She wrote several times thereafter but did not succeed. And when Ebbi came into her life she found it difficult to continue school .

This lack of education makes her financially dependent. She cannot think for herself but continues to remain a shadow of the men in her life.

Her decision of refusing to first acquire education continues to haunt her, especially after the death of her husband, the late Honourable Makata Mbutuku, who is heavily indebted at his death. When his house is confiscated by the bank to repay his loans and Akwenoh has no tangible help coming from anywhere to give her late husband a befitting burial, she becomes full of regrets for the wrong choice she makes in the earlier part of her life as a young girl:

She blamed herself for the present state of affairs. It was the result of the foolish pattern of choices she made as a young woman....She regretted that she did not take interest in her education. She would have obtained a degree or a good diploma and, of course, a good job...Her mother had always insisted when she was young that her education was her best husband. She ignored her and went after men. If only she knew the consequences! If only she knew that she would end up houseless and without a franc left by the husband .

This further helps in complicating her life because she cannot join the Global Ladies, a women’s association that fights for the rights of widows. She has no means of sustaining herself and her children, so she tries to think of what she would become after her husband’s burial:

She thought of the village as the immediate place for her to take temporary refuge from where she could plan to start a new life [...] She thought of becoming a Born-Again Christian; she thought of starting a small makara business; she thought of returning to town after the burial, borrowing money and starting a chicken parlour business. But she hated any thing that would bring her close to men. A hatred for men made her mind sour. She thought of becoming a buyam-sellam; of trading in okrika; of going back to school .

This shows the importance of education to a woman. Had Akwenoh been educated, she would not have gone through the pain and suffering the death of her husband brought her as a result of no money. She would have been able to give her husband a befitting burial even without her husband’s money. She also would have been able to ensure the upkeep of her children and

I – 2 – Infidelity (adultery)

In the African society, the integrity of a home is upheld by the faithfulness or fidelity of a wife to her husband. Therefore, any woman who has an affair outside her marital home is regarded as a bad woman and a shame to her household. Instances of adultery in The Widow’s Might are seen on the part of the wife, who cannot control her desire for material things.

Akwenoh is pushed by circumstances in her marriage to go against her vows of marriage to be faithful to her husband. With the coming of the economic crisis, civil servants experience salary cuts. Makata, Akwenoh’s husband, who is a civil servant, is affected and he is no longer able to take care of the family properly. Poverty settles in shortly after their marriage and Akwenoh, pushed by her greed, starts cheating on her husband:

The excitement that a young woman experienced when marriage, at last, was announced to her was drowned by poverty not long after she started living with Mbutuku. The promises of arrears of her husband’s salary amounting to some millions of francs CFA took so many years to be paid... A few years later the economic crises came, followed by a double cut in salaries, then the devaluation of the franc CFA... Mbutuku could no longer pay rents. There were several threats to eject them from the apartment. How she felt humiliated at the time and blamed her husband for not being able to sustain his household....She didn’t think it ethical to sympathise with her husband’s poverty. She needed modern dresses. She needed to appear like a respectable wife, a modern woman. She didn’t see any reason clinging to him when he couldn’t maintain a wife while the world of men was out there beckoning her .

As a result of her infidelity, Akwenoh starts losing respect for her husband. She not only talks back at him, she also despises him and makes him feel less a man by rubbing his poverty in his face and justifying her infidel acts:

He said she was too familiar with men; abandoning the children and paying more attention to men outside...Her husband could not stop her from doing what she wanted. She told him once to nurse his poverty rather than try to nose in her activities. She wasn’t going to starve or move in rags because she wanted to be faithful to her husband. If he had wanted a wife who would obey him and condone poverty he would have married a widow...He had become a bore. Always asking where she was going to or coming from as if marriage meant that she was forever tied to the dictates of her husband who could not provide for a wife, a husband who didn’t understand the yearnings of a wife .

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