Buchi Emecheta

Florence Onyebuchi "Buchi" Emecheta was born on the twenty-first of July 1944 at Yaba, Lagos, the daughter of Jeremy Nwabudinke Emecheta, a railway worker and moulder of Igbo origin from Ibusa in the Mid-Western Region, and Alice Ogbanje Ojebeta Emecheta. Orphaned of her father while still a girl, she seized her education against the odds, winning a scholarship to the Methodist Girls' High School in Lagos before marrying young and emigrating to London in 1962.

In the cold and poverty of immigrant London she began to write, carrying five children and enrolling at the University of London, where she earned a degree in sociology. Her early observations of hardship, first serialised in the New Statesman, became her debut novel In the Ditch (1972), followed by the searching Second-Class Citizen (1974). From that struggle she rose to become the first Black African woman novelist to support herself wholly by writing in English.

Her mature work returned to Nigeria and to the interior lives of women. The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and above all The Joys of Motherhood (1979) examined tradition, sacrifice and the unequal burdens borne by women, while Destination Biafra (1982) confronted the wound of civil war. She wrote for children, published the autobiography Head Above Water (1986), and taught at universities across Britain and the United States.

Honoured as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2005, Buchi Emecheta died in London on the twenty-fifth of January 2017. She gave voice to the unheard daughters and mothers of two continents, and that voice endures. May her name be spoken with honour.