Buchi Emecheta

Buchi Emecheta Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta, writer, born 21 July 1944; died 25 January 2017

Born Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta Obe  ‘Buchi Emecheta’ was born in the Nigerian city of Lagos on 21 July in 1944 to Jeremy Nwabudinke, a railway worker and Alice (nee Okwuekwuhe).  Her Igbo parents were from the town of Ibusa, and that is where she spent most of her childhood. The family was very poor and the mother did not have an education. The family only had enough money to send her brother to school. Her father passed away when she was eight years old. Emecheta was discovered by a benefactor who saw her potential and she was given the opportunity to study rather than sell fruit in the market.

In 1954 she won a scholarship to the well known Methodist girls high school, in Yaba, Lagos. A year later, her mother died and she then moved between relatives and the Ibusa community in Lagos.

She met Sylvester Onwordi, at the age of eleven and five years later the two married. In 1960 Onwordi moved to Britain to study at University. She came in 1962. She had five children but was unhappy in sometimes volatile marriage and left her husband to raise them on her own. He had burnt the manuscript of her second book, which had a fictional narrative similar to her own, Second Class Citizen. It was rewritten and then published later (1974). She worked as a librarian to support her family. In 1970, she enrolled at the University of London and worked towards a degree in Sociology. During this time Emecheta worked as a community worker in North London.  Much like the feminist writers who preceded her, her work focused on the politics of race, gender and sex based largely on her personal experiences. Her debut novel, In the Ditch, was published in 1972 as a series of articles in the magazine The New Statesman. This novel, alongside her second novel, Second Class Citizen, offers a view into the life of a poor Nigerian woman struggling to fit into the community in one of Europe’s biggest cities.

Her subsequent works depicted accounts of women’s experiences in female child-rearing, while facing numerous obstacles which included the changing values of traditional societies. Buchi Emecheta is also the author of several novels for children, including Nowhere to Play (1980) and The Moonlight Bride (1980). She published a volume of autobiographical tales, Head Above Water, (1986.) Her television play, A Kind of Marriage, was first screened by the BBC in 1976.

In the late 1970’s she was a visiting professor at several universities in the United States. In 1979 she received the prestigious New Statesman Jock Campbell Award for Commonwealth Writers. She returned to Nigeria in 1980 to work as a visiting Professor of English at the University of Calabar. Following this she ran Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company alongside her son with branches in London and Ibuza. She remained a literary contributor to many leading magazines including New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. In 2010 a stroke hindered her mobility and her writing, and she became progressively ill. She died on 25 January 2017 in London.