Publisher's Synopsis
Adams had explained to me that the replacement of one's son in the position of honor was breeding this mediocrity among the members, thereby weakening the traditional institution and its relevance. The option left for him was to fight for his right but I didn't feel so. I was afraid that my husband could be killed by his rival brother and the red cap chiefs who were aiding. This had always been the tragedy that a girl child had no place in the clan suggesting that their serious platitude that the girl child was to be subjected, and regarded as nobody but a mere slave to her opposite sex, for they had found that Adams had no son too. His words were running in circle of his lacks, they had thought and laughed at him. They said this and made their positions glaring. "We are proud people. The male child is the pride of the house because he is the custodian of our sanctity but you haven't looked at this point with an open eye that our custom is sacrosanct," the council had told him as a reminder. He was told to keep quiet because he had no son in the clan. This egocentric status of the male child was overtaxed more than it was necessary, because of no regard for the girl child who was only remembered for early marriage without a voice and status, even denied education so that she could be voiceless and intimidated by men folks.
I wasn't strange to men's chauvinism even in my own conscientious country, but I held that considering a man obsolete because he had no son in his society could be viewed as a colossal damage to the women sanctimoniously. This wasn't so in my own tribe compared. "This village is strange," I had cried. Oboe was so particular and jingoistic about this unfair consideration to blame. Their women could watch their husbands pick as many wives as possible for a male child if none was available in the family. No matter the number of girls one had, they were mere figures to be counted in the homes, without a boy child nothing was said to be. Their civil war was also responsible for this disparity. The men were massacred during the war and many girls were left. After the war they were left unmarried in their father's homes. Soon they were forced into prostitution and other forms of ill-fated attitudes. At a point the council had to drive some single moms with more girls out of Oboe, sparing those with male children and still claiming they drove others out because the custom forbade breeding of children out of wedlock. "We shouldn't fold our hands and watch these girls destruct the fabric of Oboe. If its Otsu clan let them go, we must send them out to get married with those kids they got out of wedlock". That was the decision of the council, and these women and their female children were forced to be taken over by old men without pride prices. Some of them were given out to outside suitors with their children paying nothing, but just take and go. There was a great exodus of this group of single parents.
