His Only Wifeby Peace A. Medie Elikem married me in absentia; he did not come to our wedding. The ceremony was held on the third Saturday in January in the rectangular courtyard of my Uncle Pious's house...Our relatives, stirring with equal measures of happiness, but for different reasons...
What type of man doesn't attend his own wedding? Possibly a man who doesn't really want to be married? Yet Elikem Ganyo was very attentive, kind, and generous to Afi at times. He simply was just too busy with business duties to attend the ceremony. (Sounds like a bit of a scam??)
Afi Tekple is a young woman in the small town of Ho in Ghana. She rather reluctantly agrees to marry Eli to give her mother the financial security that was lost when her father died. Afi and her mother went from being stable in a "middle-class" type of way, to being poor and having to share housing. Mother Afino is very grateful to "Aunty" Fasustina Ganyo for a job as a saleswoman in her flour-distribution depot. Aunty was not to only businesswoman in town, but she was the most generous. However, this generosity sometimes came with a hidden cost. Afi has dreams of her own. She is a seamstress and would like to have her own boutique someday. She is willing to work hard, and tries to be a good daughter and a good wife to her very busy, successful husband. She moves to Accra, the capital of Ghana, a place of wealth and sophistication. In her new home she cleans (despite having a cleaning staff) and cooks traditional meals for her husband, just in case he decides to come by.
This is the first novel by Peace Adzo Medie, who is an academic lecturer in Gender and International Politics at the University of Bristol in England. She is also a research fellow at the University of Ghana. Peace has numerous published short stories in periodicals and is the author of Global Norms and Local Action: The Campaigns to End Violence against Women in Africa.
Recently I listened to a podcast that Peace did with "Sarah's Bookshelves Live." Peace said that she started writing at a young age when she ran out of books at the school library and the public library. She would also borrow books from friends of her parents and consequently read ones that were quite inappropriate for her age. However, the books that she read had characters set in America and Europe who skied, and she had never seen snow, growing up in Liberia and later living in Ghana. The characters ate plums and she did not even know what a plum was. Peace would write stories and then put them away to fool herself that someone else had written them.
Peace also said that arranged marriages are not really a common thing in Ghana, but it does happen occasionally - usually to keep money and property intact. In His Only Wife, Peace wanted to explore the issues of respect/ disrespect of women to men and the root causes of violence against women by men. She has done a wonderful job of this and created unforgettable characters set in a world that is quite unknown to me - despite being an Anthropology major in college. I thought that I knew something about Ghana, but it was the Ghana before the profound changes in society due to the implementation of cell phone technology in Africa. The continent skipped the Internet challenges completely, from dial-up to wireless. Warp speed: check out a unique book, one in which the characters dictated the outcome and the author was the conduit.
Katie Melville