In many cultures, women are often objectified and reduced in value, and we need to avoid this. The Bride Price is a fantastic book about a woman named Aku-nna who lives in a Nigerian culture. In Nigerian culture, the father must be paid a large sum of money whenever their daughter is being married, called a bride price, and this is the primary usage of daughters. Aku-nna’s very name means “father’s wealth”. Things like education increase the value of the daughter, but it stops almost immediately after being married or after fourteen years of age. However, sons are valued immensely and get all of the father’s wealth after they die, and shows how unfair their society is. Aku-nna was a young girl whose father died, and she was taken in by her uncle. She had a lover who was a teacher but part of a wealthy slave family, and she had to be rescued by him after being kidnapped by a competing suitor. After escaping, she dies in childbirth, supposedly because she was not blessed by Okoboshi, her uncle and new stepfather. The Bride Price shows how important it is that we try to avoid stereotypes and follow a modern way of thinking as opposed to such a harmful thought process.
Forcing women into marriage is a horrible idea because it eliminates the actual value and love that comes with a marriage in modern society, which makes everyone less happy. We need to remember that marriage is a symbol of unity and is just supposed to seal the bond of love that two individuals already have. Inside of the Bride Price, men need to pay large sums of money to get a girl to marry them, and this involves no choice on the women’s part, and the men can determine almost everything. This causes Aku-nna to think, “She cried a little, because she knew that until the bride price was paid, her family would not recognize the marriage, and she was worried.” She had to become an outcast to her family in order to follow the man she loved, and the bride price that her husband wanted to pay wasn’t being accepted. This caused a rift and forced an otherwise incredibly happy marriage to become torn, as the text shows saying, “Aku-nna was not always happy, however. Sometimes there was a shadow of sadness on her face, and Chike knew she was thinking about her bride price.” Having to pay money for a wife results in incredible differences in happiness and creates a gap that can be ridiculously difficult to fill and harmful to overall cheerfulness. We need to stop arranged marriages as they are terrible for both women and men as it creates a lack of love.
Restricting access to education for a specific gender results in less educated children and adults which is detrimental to everyone. When we don’t allow others to receive education, they are less fortunate than we are and have to face lots of detrimental challenges and this can prolong stereotypes and unfair prejudice. Inside of The Bride Price, women weren’t allowed to get education most of the time unless it was to increase their bride price, something that only benefited men as opposed to women. The Obidis said, “there’s nothing special about her except her education, and all this modern education doesn’t do women any good… it makes them too proud.” This shows how people didn’t care about what education could do for them and they simply regarded it as something that might increase a bride price by just a little, instead of an education being something incredibly valuable that they should have all treasured. Education is incredibly beneficial as it allows us to achieve things that are immensely beneficial and gives us the ability to succeed later in life in the long term as opposed to the short term. We have to try and make education accessible for all so that these people can achieve the many benefits that education can bring for most people.
Traditions are often fun events that most people enjoy, but some of them can be damaging and downright harmful to lots of different people. When we follow tradition, it may seem like we are becoming part of a group of people, but sometimes this isn’t always positive and can actually be seriously detrimental. Inside of the Bride Price, Chike and Aku-nna couldn’t be happy together simply because of tradition, with Aku-nna thinking, “Then they came home to the countless, unchanging traditions of their own people. They were trapped, like two helpless little fish, between the two sets of traditions.” They could have been a happy couple, but the fact that Aku-nna’s father had to accept the bride price was a tradition that Aku-nna’s father would not do, forcing them to elope and hide their love. This could have been easily avoided if only they hadn’t had to follow the traditions of old. Rituals and customs can have negative effects, especially if they have no real logic or reasoning behind them, or even worse, inaccurate information that ends up harming others incredibly. We need to try and find out what traditions are beneficial to join upon which we can do by seeing if it is positive or negative.
The Bride Price is an amazing book that shows the harms of forcing arranged marriages, the damage that restricting education can cause, and the problem with traditions, customs, and rituals. Arranged marriages reduce the happiness that both sides get to enjoy in normal marriages. Partitioning education off from others can result in people becoming misinformed and undereducated, which is negative since it makes them less successful in life. Traditions can cause certain people to receive negative effects due to how they are structured. A marriage is supposed to be for sealing a bond, instead of simply a way to make money. Education is a tool that we should all have access to in order to create equality. Customs are something we should only follow if they don’t hurt others and make sure that they are more fair. The Bride Price is a terrific book, and I recommend it for everyone.
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