Buchi Emecheta's novel is dedicated to her 1981 students at the University of Calabar. Double Yoke is a tale of student life at that university and evidently the teacher has learned a great deal from her pupils, pulling out passages from their essays and exercises to make her own point about their lives and ideas. This is not an English-style comedy of university life, like Chukwuemeka Ike's Toads for Supper: it belongs to another genre of Nigerian fiction - the self-confidently didactic style of S. L. Aluko, the engineer who wrote One Man, One Wife and One Man, One Matchet, informing the outside world about Nigeria and telling Nigerians how to behave: two burdens, perhaps, a double yoke.

LRB 16 September 1982 | PDF Download