4 ideas
In 1960s London, Adah supports her husband Francis, who repeatedly fails his accountancy exams, and their children on her library job. She secretly writes her first novel, 'The Bride Price', and Francis burns the manuscript, saying a woman cannot write. She then leaves him with her children, and in court he denies they were ever married and says he burned their marriage and birth certificates.
In London, 'second-class citizen' status is imposed by white landlords and signs reading 'No Coloureds'. Other Nigerian immigrants also enforce it, by policing who may rent good rooms and expecting newcomers to accept slum housing and private foster care. Adah sees that the status works best once the excluded group accepts it as normal and treats anyone who resists as putting on airs.
Adah's well-paid job at the American Consulate library in Lagos, and later at a London library, makes her valuable to her husband and his family. Where a wife's labour is assumed to belong to her husband's household, more earning power means more extraction rather than more independence.
When Adah secretly gets fitted for contraception, Francis reacts to it as a betrayal of his authority, not as a family-planning question, and the violence gets worse. Seeing a marriage through who controls pregnancy shows where power actually lies. Repeated pregnancies keep a woman tied to the home and dependent, even when she is the one earning the money.