Casteism and Marriage in Igbo Society: A Study of Buchi Emecheta’s The Bride Price

Abstract

The most prominent and pronounced form of casteism that prevails in the Nigerian society is the discrimination against Osus. Osu is a caste determined by heredity irrespective of the individual’s religious faith and practices. Though coming from a society where individual merit and achievement entitles one to the highest indigenous title and social prestige, Osus cannot aspire to one for their stigmatized caste status. Under the colonial influence, Osus became the first people to be educated, which made them the earliest Nigerian-Igbo elites, but this privileged class status too could not provide them an inroad into the mainstream of the Igbo society, which makes the Osu identity paradoxical. In this article, we attempt a reading of how the exclusionary practices of Igbo marriage ritual contribute in constructing the Osu identity as perpetually marginalized and, in doing so, how the Igbo society throws its preoccupation with individual merit and achievements as the keys to social respectability to the wind through Buchi Emecheta’s third novel The Bride Price. The novel is a study in different forms of marginalizations and liminalities, which raises questions about agency as it exposes the paradoxes on which the social life of a tribe is riveted.