African Love Stories

While reading African Love Stories I could not help but notice the constant reference to educated women being unmarried and married women being uneducated and dependent upon their husbands. "In Anthonia C Kalu" the main character Adaaku is a well educated young women who has attended the university and now owns her own business. In the beginning of the text we learn that "Well educated young women with tendencies for any type of personal independence were not for marrying." Therefore those women who chose to better themselves by getting an education were not the type of women that a man would marry. Yet in "Monica Arac de Nyeko" the narrator Anyango talks about the women in her neighborhood who don't work, i.e. the housewives. "Like Mama Atim they sit and talk, talk, talk, and wait for their husbands to bring home a kilo of offal. Those are the kind of women we did not want to become."

So not only is an educated woman not desirable when it comes to marriage but an uneducated housewife is also not desirable when it comes to choosing a career path. So exactly how is a young african woman meant to find, and keep, a husband while pursuing her own happiness at the same time?

In Adaaku's fight for independence she threatens to lose the man she has always loved, yet the women who live in the Nakawa Housing Estates have to chant love charms in order to invoke their husbands love and sexual interest. Is being a housewife in their society undesirable to that particular generation of women and also undesirable to the men they marry?

My second question pertains to the characters in these stories who obviously have this stereotypical view of housewives. Since none of them have yet to experience it for themselves, where exactly did they develop the notion that being a housewife was something they would not do? What aspects of their heritage caused them to look down upon it? And what sort of message does this teach the younger women of their society that for so long has been built around the traditional household?