African novelist Buchi emecheta dies

Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta, writer, was born in July 21, 1944; she died January 25, 2017

Buchi Emecheta, who has died aged 72, was a pioneer among female African writers, championing the rights of girls and women in novels that often drew on her own extraordinary life, its trajectory spanning her struggle for an education to having her books set on school curriculums.

Emecheta’s writings epitomised female independence, the necessity to grow stronger in the face of any setback.

She was born in Lagos, Nigeria – her father was Jeremy Nwabudinke, a railway worker; her mother was Alice (nee Okwuekwuhe) – but it was with the town of Ibusa, where her Igbo parents originated, that she identified, having spent formative childhood years there.

“Buchi’s life was always overshadowed by the poverty and the deprivations of her early years,” her son Sylvester said. “She was a sick, poorly and undernourished child but with a ravenous desire to survive, against all odds. She lost her father, who doted on her, when she was eight years old. With his passing, she and her younger brother were left at the mercy of a mother who, due to lack of education, was unable to appreciate the talent in the young girl.”

In 1954 she won a scholarship to the prestigious Methodist girls high school, in Yaba, Lagos, mixing with children of the elite. “In her first year there her mother also died and she was passed back and forth between distant relatives within the Ibusa community in Lagos,” said Sylvester. “During holidays, while her classmates returned to their family mansions, she remained in the dormitory taking refuge in books and in her imagination, regaling her friends on their return with the wondrous things she had done during the summer.”

By the age of 11 she had met Sylvester Onwordi, a student who five years later became her husband. In 1960, her first child, a daughter, was born and in 1961 a son. Her husband travelled to London to attend university, and in the chill of February 1962 Emecheta joined him with their two young children. A second son was born that year, and by 1966 the family had expanded with the birth of two more daughters.

Her autobiographical writings chronicle the unhappiness of her marriage. Emecheta’s alter ego – challenged by atrocious living conditions and a violent husband, finds refuge in her dream of becoming a writer.

according to online obituary, After Emecheta’s husband burned the manuscript of what would have been her first novel, she left him and set about raising her five small children alone, finding employment as a library assistant at the British Museum while studying at night, earning a sociology degree at London University in 1974.

She began writing about her experiences for the New Statesman, and a book based on her columns appeared as In the Ditch, in which her feisty protagonist, Adah, remains fiercely resistant to the attempts of a welfare system to relegate her and her children to the ranks of a “problem family”.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie a celebrated African woman writer – acknowledged her debt to Emecheta: “I read and admired all her books. Destination Biafra was very important for my research when I was writing Half of a Yellow Sun. The book I adored was The Joys of Motherhood, for its sparkling intelligence and a certain kind of honest, lived, intimate insight into working-class colonial Nigeria.”

Ama Ata Aidoo, one of the few African women to have been writing internationally since the 1960s, and who taught The Joys of Motherhood in a course on African women’s literature, said: “Buchi Emecheta was expert at cutting through mush. So at writers’ conferences and other public meetings, while we fumbled for responses to the perennially frustrating question, ‘Which of your books is your favourite?’, Buchi would be swift with: ‘My books are like my children. I don’t have favourites.’”

While committed to the liberation of women, she did not label herself a feminist, claiming: “Apart from telling stories, I don’t have a particular mission. I like to tell the world our part of the story while using the voices of women.” Alastair Niven, former director of the Africa Centre, London, recalled the influential storytelling sessions she held there: “Without seeking to be so, she became an outstanding role model for how black women from another country could achieve a respected place in British society through sheer determination and ability.”

Emecheta also occasionally wrote plays and children’s books, as well as building a career as a visiting academic at US universities including Pennsylvania State, Rutgers, UCLA, and Yale, and becoming a resident fellow of English at the University of Calabar in Nigeria. With her son Sylvester, for a time she published under her own imprint, Ogwugwu Afor. In 2005 she was appointed OBE.

in 2010 a stroke curtailed her mobility and her writing, and she became progressively ill. Two of her children, Florence and Christy, predeceased her. She is survived by Sylvester, Jake and Alice.