Americanah: Chapter 24 Summary & Analysis

In Obinze’s first months in England, the first job he finds is as a janitor cleaning toilets. Another worker at the company is a woman from Ghana, but she ignores Obinze and only is friendly to the white cleaners. Obinze wonders if this is because she hopes to invent a new identity in England, which she won’t be able to do around another African. Obinze doesn’t mind the job for a while, but one day he discovers “a mound of shit on the toilet lid,” and he decides to quit. That same day he gets the first email from Ifemelu.

Obinze had been deeply hurt and unable to sleep when Ifemelu’s sudden silence began. He had been even more wounded when Ginika told him that Ifemelu had depression, and that was why she needed space. Obinze resented that Ifemelu talked to other people, but not to him. In the five years since then he has been sometimes angry at Ifemelu, sometimes confused, and sometimes sad. The email he gets seems to not acknowledge all the distance between them or how much he has suffered, and he impulsively deletes it.

Back when Obinze first went to England, he stays with his cousin Nicholas. In Nigeria Nicholas had been the most popular student at the university. Girls liked him, but he remained unattached until he met Ojiugo, Obinze’s mother’s student and research assistant. Nicholas and Ojiugo fell in love and became the wildest and most glamorous couple on campus. In England, however, Obinze finds that not a trace remains of Nicholas’s youthful personality. He and Ojiugo are married and have children, and he is very sober and responsible now.

Obinze stays with Nicholas and Ojiugo, and reminisces with Ojiugo about how she and Nicholas used to act in Nigeria. She says that marriage and all the difficulties of immigrant life changed Nicholas—he was illegally working under other people’s names for years, and constantly in fear of being deported. Obinze cooks dinner one night, and Ojiugo praises his cooking, and then asks about Ifemelu. Obinze says she went to American and forgot about him.

Obinze is constantly waiting to hear back from a job, and always nervous. Nicholas’s young son Nna comes home from school that day and says he wants to become a rapper. Ojiugo laughs and says she didn’t come to London for her son to become a rapper. Nicholas and Ojiugo have their children involved in lots of extracurricular activities, and all their time is scheduled.

Nna talks back to Ojiugo, and Obinze wonders if she would allow that if Nna didn’t have a British accent. Ojiugo denies this, and says that in England parents want their children to respect them instead of fear them, like they do in Nigeria. Obinze talks more to Ojiugo about their past, and is surprised that she has no regrets about how things might have turned out differently.

Ojiugo has gained a lot of weight, and sometimes she goes to different weight loss groups. She complains that white people want to turn everything into a “mental problem,” even her simple love of food. Sometimes Ojiugo’s friends visit while Obinze is around. Ojiugo complains to them about how people don’t expect “people like us” to be talking about private school and music lessons for their children. She especially complains about one rich black woman who seems threatened by her, as the woman always “wants to be the only black person in the room.”