One of Africa’s most celebrated writers, Buchi Emecheta died yesterday in her sleep at her home in London at the age of 72.
Here’s the very interesting story of how she rose from domestic violence to becoming an icon tat you may not have known before now.
Emecheta was born on 21 July 1944, in Lagos, Nigeria, to Igbo parents, Alice (Okwuekwuhe) Emecheta and Jeremy Nwabudinke, both parents from Ibusa, Delta State, Nigeria.
Her father was a railway worker in the 1940s.
Due to the gender bias of the time, young Buchi Emecheta was initially kept at home while her younger brother was sent to school; but after persuading her parents to consider the benefits of her
education, she spent her early childhood at an all-girl’s missionary school.
Her father died when she was nine years old. A year later, Emecheta received a full scholarship to the Methodist Girls School, where she remained until the age of 16 when, in 1960, she married Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since she was 11 years old.
It was an unhappy and sometimes violent marriage (as chronicled in her autobiographical writings such as Second-Class Citizen). But to keep her sanity, Emecheta wrote in her spare time.
However, her husband was deeply suspicious of her writing, and he ultimately burned her first manuscript, The Bride Price, which was eventually published in 1976. Buchi had to rewrite it after it was destroyed.
Her husband also reportedly denied her and the kids to avoid paying bills. One time, she came back after a painful labour the same day alone with her new born child to find her husband on top of another woman.
At the age of 22, Emecheta left her husband.
She began writing about her experiences of Black British life in a regular column in the New Statesman, and a collection of these pieces became her first published book in 1972, In the Ditch.
The semi-autobiographical book chronicled the struggles of a main character named Adah, who is forced to live in a housing estate while working as a librarian to support her five children. Her second novel published two years later, Second-Class Citizen (Allison and Busby, 1974), also drew on Emecheta’s own experiences, and both books were eventually published in one volume under the title Adah’s Story (Allison and Busby, 1983).
In September 2004, she appeared in the historic “A Great Day in London” photograph taken at the British Library, featuring 50 Black and Asian writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British literature. In 2005, she was made an OBE.
Buchi Emecheta died in London on 25 January 2017, aged 72.
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