Buchi Emecheta

Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta was born on the twenty-first of July 1944 at Yaba, Lagos, the daughter of Jeremy Nwabudike Emecheta — a railway moulder of Igbo origin from Ibusa in the Mid-Western Region — and Alice Ogbanje Emecheta, a homemaker of the Lagos Igbo expatriate community. Her father died of tropical disease when Emecheta was nine, and her mother was forced under Igbo levirate custom into a second marriage with her late husband’s brother.

She was placed at ten at the Methodist Girls’ High School at Lagos on a scholarship secured by the Methodist Missionary Society and completed the school certificate there in 1960.

She was married at sixteen to Sylvester Onwordi — a student of accountancy at the University of London — and followed him to London in 1962. The marriage was a five-year ordeal across which she gave birth to five children, suffered systematic abuse from her husband, and saw him burn the manuscript of her first novel in 1966. She left the marriage in 1966 and raised the five children alone at the North London council-housing estate of Pussy Cat Mansions, Chalk Farm, on social-security benefits while taking the bachelor’s in sociology at the University of London by evening study.

She published in 1972 her first novel In the Ditch — a thinly fictionalised account of the Pussy Cat Mansions years — at the small London house Barrie & Jenkins.

She published the novel The Joys of Motherhood at the Heinemann African Writers Series in 1979 — the chronicle of the village Igbo woman Nnu Ego across the colonial Lagos of the 1930s and 1940s and the post-war years — and the novel was at the time of publication and remains the principal feminist Black African novel of the post-war period.

She published across the following thirty-five years over twenty further novels and three works of non-fiction, among them Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), Destination Biafra (1982), and Head Above Water (1986).

She was the first Black African woman novelist to support herself and her family wholly by writing in English and was named in 2005 to the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for services to literature.

She died at Cricklewood, London on the twenty-fifth of January 2017 of complications of stroke, at seventy-two.

She is honored here as the author of The Joys of Motherhood.