The Joys of Motherhood Men and Masculinity Quotes

That was a quality many Ibuza men appreciated; they wanted women who could claim to be helpless without them. Nnu Ego was not surprised to see men conferring in secret with her father. This time he wanted a man who would be patient with her, who would value his daughter enough to understand her. A man who would take the trouble to make her happy. Feeling this way, he refused all very handsome-looking men, for he knew that thought they might be able to make love well, handsome men often felt it unnecessary to be loving. The art of loving, he knew, required deeper men. Men who did not have to spend every moment of their time working and worrying about food and the farm. Men who could spare the time to think. This quality was becoming rarer and rarer, Agbadi found, and sometimes he thought it was actually dying out with his own generation. He would rather give his daughter to an old chief with a sense of the tried, traditional values than to some modern young man who only wanted her because of her family name. (3.66)

This could not be the man she was to live with. How could two brothers be so unalike? They had similar foreheads, and the same kind of gestures, but there the similarities ended, for otherwise the two men were as different as water and oil. She felt like bursting into tears, like begging the senior Owulum to please take her home….

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Nnu Ego held herself tight, trying to bravely to accept the greetings and not to imagine what her father would say had this man come in person to ask for his daughter. She fought back tears of frustration. She was used to tall, wiry farmers, with rough, blackened hands from farming, long, lean legs and very dark skin. This one was short, the flesh of his upper arm danced as he moved about jubilantly among his friends, and that protruding belly! Why did he not cover it? She despised him on that first night, especially when much later people began to take their exaggerated leave. (4.16; 18)

Nnaife could tell that Nnu Ego did not approve of him. But he could not help the way he was made, and what anyway was she going to do about it? In his five years in Lagos he had seen worse situations. He had seen a wife brought for an Ibuza man in Lags running away at the sight of her future husband, so that friends had to help the poor bridegroom catch the runaway bride. At least Nnu Ego did not do that. Very few women approved of their husbands on the first day. It was a big joke to the men, women from home wanting to come to Lagos where they would not have to work too hard and expecting a handsome, strong figure of a husband into the bargain. Women were so stupid! (4.17)