Buchi Emecheta
Biography
Many say that Buchi Emecheta is to
date the most important female African writer. She is certainly Nigeria's best
known woman writer, and is respected for her imaginative and documentary
writing about African women's experiences in Africa and in Great Britain.
Emecheta was born with the full name
Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta, in Yaba near Lagos, Nigeria on July 21, 1944. Her
mother was Alice Ogbanje Okwuekwu Emecheta, and her father was Jeremy Nwabudike
Emecheta, who worked as a molder on the railways. Buchi dreamed of being a
writer from an early age, influenced by an older aunt who told stories to the
children after dinner. After her father was killed as a soldier in the British
army in Burma, Buchi was sent to a Methodist Girls' High School in Lagos.
In 1960, Emecheta married Sylvester
Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since the age of eleven. After
bearing two children in Nigeria, Buchi followed her husband to London where he
was a student. The young family struggled with poor living conditions to help
finance Onwordi's education. Emecheta worked as a library officer at the
British Museum and bore three more children, and at the same time began
writing. Sylvester was not supportive of Buchi's efforts, and was sometimes
abusive. She separated from her husband in 1966 when he burned the manuscript
to her first book, The Bride Price. According to Emecheta, “I was the
typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it,
approve it and he said he wouldn't read it. And later he burnt the book ... and
that was the day I said I'm going to leave this marriage and he said 'what for,
that stupid book' and I said 'I just feel you just burn my child'” (BBC
website).
So at the age of 22, Buchi set out
on her own. She struggled to support her children and continue writing. From
1970 to 1974, Emecheta studied and received an honors degree in sociology at
the University of London. At the same time, the British left wing magazine The
New Statesman published passages subsquently gathered into her later novel In
the Ditch (1972). Thus Emecheta began her dual career, working as a social
worker with youth and other communities, while writing in the early mornings at
the kitchen table with her children playing around her.
Struggling against reluctant
publishers and male-dominated audiences, Emecheta has published nine novels to
date. Her first two published novels, In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class
Citizen (1974) are largely autobiographical, describing a woman's struggles
against sexual discrimination in Nigeria and racism, classism, and sexism as an
immigrant to Britain. Other novels including The Slave Girl (1977) and The
Joys of Motherhood (1979) address the harmful potential of rigid gender
structures amidst otherwise changing Nigerian culture. The allegorical novel The
Rape of Shavi (1983) details the clash of Western and traditional African
cultures. She has also written four works of teenage fiction, two works of
children’s fiction, and an autobiography entitled Head Above Water (1986).
She has written numerous plays for the BBC and won several awards, including
being selected as one of the Best British Young Writers in 1983.
From 1972 to 1982, Emecheta served
as a visiting lecturer and professor at universities in the United States,
England and Nigeria. Shortly thereafter, she and her journalist son founded a
publishing company in London and Nigeria, named Ogwugwu Afor. Since 1979
Emecheta has also served on numerous British committees as a respected voice
for arts, integrationist, and women’s issues, although she rejects the feminist
label. She achieved a PhD in social education in 1991. (Text from 2003)
Author: Sarah
K. Horsley
Quotes
What I am trying to do is get our
profession back. Women are born storytellers. We keep the history. We are the
true conservatives – we conserve things and we never forget. What I do is not
clever or unusual. It is what my aunt and my grandmother did, and their mothers
before them. (Malinkowski 188, from interview with Rosemary Bray, Voice
Literary Supplement)
Malinowski, Sharon. “Emecheta,
Buchi,” in Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors.
Linda Metzger, senior editor, Hal May, Deborah A. Straub, and Susan M. Trosky,
editors. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1989, pp. 185-188.
Smith, Christopher. “Buchi
Emecheta,” in African Writers, volume 1. C. Brian Cox, editor. New York:
Charles Scribner’s Sons/Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1997, pp. 235-239,
246-247.
Petersen, Kirsten Holst. “Buchi
Emecheta,” in Twentieth-Century Caribbean and Black African Writers, from
Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 117. Bernth Lindfors and Reinhard
Sander, editors. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1992, pp.159-166.
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