Reading Order
Efuru Reading Order
Efuru (1966) by Flora Nwapa is a landmark in African literature: the first novel published in English by a Nigerian woman and the first major work of African literature to center a woman's inner life, desire, and consciousness as the primary subject of fiction. Set in an Igbo fishing community on the Niger Delta in the early colonial period, the novel follows Efuru, a beautiful, industrious, and remarkable woman who marries twice (both marriages dissolve — the first husband abandons her for another woman, the second becomes obsessive and falsely accuses her of adultery), loses her only child, and at the novel's end devotes herself to the worship of Uhamiri, the Woman of the Lake, a deity associated with beauty, wealth, and childlessness. Nwapa writes from inside the Igbo community without the distancing anthropological perspective that male writers of the period sometimes adopt. The community's life — the trading, the gossip, the ceremonies, the domestic negotiations of marriage — is rendered with an intimacy that comes from being of it rather than observing it. The novel's most striking formal feature is its use of dialogue and communal speech: long passages of women's conversation, gossip, and collective deliberation replace the individualist psychological narration that the European novel relies on. This is both a cultural authenticity (Igbo social life is structured around communal speech) and a feminist aesthetic choice: women's talk, dismissed in European literary tradition as mere 'gossip,' is here the medium through which the community's wisdom is expressed and transmitted. Nwapa's Efuru was the predecessor for all subsequent African women's fiction — Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — and its influence, though less studied than its male contemporaries, is foundational.
Where to start
Efuru — the Heinemann African Writers Series edition. The novel's slow pace and communal style require a different reading mode than the European novel; surrender to the rhythm of communal life rather than tracking individual psychological development.
Complete Efuru Book List
- 1Buy
Efuru
Flora Nwapa·1966·The novel — Efuru's two marriages, the loss of her daughter, her devotion to Uhamiri the Woman of the Lake, and the community's life around her. - 2Buy
Idu
Flora Nwapa·1970·Nwapa's second novel — another Igbo woman's story; the companion to Efuru in its centering of women's consciousness in the same Niger Delta community. - 3Buy
Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga·1988·Dangarembga's Zimbabwean feminist novel — the African women's literary tradition that Efuru inaugurated; the 'nervous condition' of colonial education that Efuru's pre-colonial world does not yet know. - 4Buy
So Long a Letter
Mariama Bâ·1979·Bâ's Senegalese novel of women's suffering in post-independence Africa — the West African feminist companion; a woman's interiority and the patriarchal structures that constrain it. - 5Buy
The Joys of Motherhood
Buchi Emecheta·1979·Emecheta's Nigerian novel of a woman's suffering under patriarchal culture — Efuru's literary descendant; a darker account of Igbo women's experience in colonial and transitional Nigeria. - 6Buy
Arrow of God
Chinua Achebe·1964·Achebe's Igbo novel — the male perspective on the same traditional Igbo world that Efuru inhabits; essential context for understanding Nwapa's revisionary feminist contribution. - 7Buy
Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe·1958·Achebe's foundational novel — the Igbo world in its fullness; Nwapa is writing in relation to Achebe's founding of Igbo literary consciousness, revising it from a woman's perspective. - 8Buy
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston·1937·Hurston's American novel of a Black woman's self-discovery — the cross-cultural companion; the same centering of a woman's desire and inner life against a community that would define her by her relationships.
Efuru — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Efuru about?
Efuru follows the life of Efuru Ogene, a beautiful, remarkable, and independent Igbo woman in a fishing community on the Niger Delta in the early colonial period. The novel begins with her first marriage — she and Adizua marry without the traditional bride price, which causes family tension, and they have a daughter, Ogenim, who dies in childhood. Adizua eventually abandons her for another woman. Efuru remarries Gilbert (Eneberi), a trader, but this marriage also fails when he becomes obsessive and falsely accuses her of adultery with the town's medicine man. The novel is structured around the question that the community asks throughout: Efuru is favored by Uhamiri, the Woman of the Lake, with beauty, wealth, and success in trading — why does she also have Uhamiri's fate (childlessness, broken marriages)? At the novel's end, Efuru devotes herself to Uhamiri's worship.
Why is Efuru significant as the first novel by a Nigerian woman in English?
Efuru was published in 1966, eight years after Things Fall Apart and six years after Chinua Achebe's No Longer at Ease — in the same Heinemann African Writers Series that published the canonical male African writers of the period. Its significance is both historical and formal: historically, it demonstrated that African women could write in the emerging African literary tradition and could demand the same attention for women's stories as the male writers had claimed for men's stories; formally, it contributed a distinctly different aesthetic — the communal, dialogue-heavy narration rooted in Igbo women's social life — that was not available in the male writers' more individualist prose styles. Flora Nwapa is the missing link between the Achebe generation and the later generation of Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Bâ, and Tsitsi Dangarembga who built on her foundation.
What is Uhamiri and what is her significance in the novel?
Uhamiri is a deity in Igbo religion — the Woman (or Goddess) of the Lake, associated with Lake Oguta in Igboland. She is a beautiful woman who appears to her devotees and grants them beauty, wealth, and success in trading, but also childlessness and failed marriages. She is a spirit of female independence and power who cannot be fully possessed by any man and who chooses her own path. Efuru's fate — beautiful, successful in trading, twice married and twice abandoned, childless — mirrors Uhamiri's, and the novel ends with Efuru being called to the goddess's worship. Nwapa uses Uhamiri to propose an alternative to the patriarchal narrative of a woman's value as wife and mother: the goddess represents a mode of female existence that is complete without those roles, and Efuru's devotion to her is a form of self-realization rather than defeat.
How does Nwapa's communal style differ from other African novels of the period?
Most African novels of the 1950s and 1960s — Things Fall Apart, A Grain of Wheat, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born — are written in a relatively individualist prose mode derived from European literary tradition, focusing on a central consciousness or protagonist. Nwapa's Efuru is different: long passages of the novel consist of women's conversations — gossip, advice, deliberation, narrative — in which the community's collective wisdom is expressed. This is not a failure of technique but a deliberate aesthetic choice rooted in Igbo social life, where women's communal speech is the medium of social regulation and knowledge transmission. The gossip is the society; the women's conversation is the novel's way of presenting communal life as a whole rather than through an individual lens.
What should I read after Efuru?
After Efuru, Flora Nwapa's Idu (1970) and her later novels One Is Enough (1981) and Women Are Different (1986) continue her project. Buchi Emecheta's The Joys of Motherhood (1979) and Second Class Citizen (1974) are the most important literary descendants of Efuru in Nigerian women's fiction. Mariama Bâ's So Long a Letter (1979) and Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (1988) are the wider African feminist tradition. For critical work on Nwapa and African women's fiction, Susan Andrade's The Nation Writ Small (2011) and Florence Stratton's Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender (1994) are the foundational studies.
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