Read the passage from "Marriage Is a Private Affair” by Chinua Achebe.

"Have you written to your dad yet?” asked Nene one afternoon as she sat with Nnaemeka in her room at 16 Kasanga Street, Lagos.

"No. I’ve been thinking about it. I think it’s better to tell him when I get home on leave!”

"But why? Your leave is such a long way off yet—six whole weeks. He should be let into our happiness now.”

Nnaemeka was silent for a while, and then began very slowly as if he groped for his words: "I wish I were sure it would be happiness to him.”

"Of course it must,” replied Nene, a little surprised. "Why shouldn’t it?”

"You have lived in Lagos all your life, and you know very little about people in remote parts of the country.”

"That’s what you always say. But I don’t believe anybody will be so unlike other people that they will be unhappy when their sons are engaged to marry.”

"Yes. They are most unhappy if the engagement is not arranged by them. In our case it’s worse—you are not even an Ibo.”

This was said so seriously and so bluntly that Nene could not find speech immediately. In the cosmopolitan atmosphere of t
he city it had always seemed to her something of a joke that a person’s tribe could determine whom he married.

Which statement about this passage best explains that the village culture is patriarchal?