Ciudadana de segunda

Adah, from the Igbo people, "was a girl who was born when everyone expected and predicted a boy. Therefore, as it was a great disappointment for her parents, for the closest family and for the tribe, no one remembered to register your birth". Already married before the age of eighteen, she convinces her husband to study accounting in London. Pregnant with her fifth child, she decides to leave him, fed up with the mistreatment and after he has burned the manuscript of a novel she has written. Virtually every detail in Second Class Citizen (1974) coincides with that of the life of its author, Buchi Emecheta, who would come to be considered the first great black novelist in post-war Britain. Adah is a "second class citizen" twice: female and black. Emigration and racism are fundamental themes of the novel, but always related to machismo within African immigrant families.