Buchi Emecheta

Nigerian · 1944 to 2017

Born Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta on 21 July 1944 in Lagos, Nigeria, to Jeremy Nwabudinke Emecheta, a railway worker and moulder, and Alice Ogbanje, who had herself been sold into slavery as a girl and freed only after her owner died, Emecheta lost her father at nine to a war wound from Burma and was orphaned within a few years, finding refuge in books at the Methodist Girls' School in Yaba on a scholarship. At sixteen she married Sylvester Onwordi, the schoolboy to whom she had been engaged since eleven, and in 1962 followed him to London, where she bore five children in six years while her husband, unsupportive and at times violent, dismissed her writing. In 1966 he burned the manuscript of her first novel, and she left him that year, twenty-two and pregnant with their fifth child, to raise the family alone on a housing estate while working as a library officer at the British Museum. She sent weekly sketches of immigrant life to the New Statesman, whose editor Richard Crossman ran them as a column from 1971, gathered the next year into her first book, In the Ditch. A sociology degree from the University of London followed in 1972. Second-Class Citizen (1974), her autobiographical breakthrough, made her name; The Bride Price (1976), rewritten from memory after the burning, The Slave Girl (1977), drawn from her mother's history, and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), her most acclaimed novel, followed in quick succession, along with Destination Biafra, Double Yoke, and Gwendolen through the 1980s. She held visiting professorships at universities in Nigeria, Britain, and the United States, earned a PhD in 1991, and was appointed OBE in 2005 for services to literature. A stroke in 2010 left her increasingly frail. She died in London on 25 January 2017, aged seventy-two, and her son Sylvester later founded a foundation in her name to support literacy and education in Britain and Nigeria.