The directory «Plots»

Emecheta Buchi (b. 1944)

Dr. Buchi Emecheta is a PEPA African novelist who has published over 20 books, plays and shorts, including the seminal works, Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her strong themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honorary awards, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. Dr. Emecheta’s timeless writing continues to resonate with readers across the globe.

(Florence Onye) Buchi Emecheta was born on July 21, 1944, in Lagos to Igbo parents, Alice (Okwuekwuhe) Emecheta and Jeremy Nwabudinke. While not much is known about her mother, it is documented that her father was a railway worker toiling under dangerous circumstances in the 1940s. Due to gender bias of the times, a young Buchi 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, Buchi spent her early childhood at an all-girl's missionary school. Tragedy came when her father died when she was nine years old. A year later, Buchi received full scholarship to the Methodist Girls School where she remained until she married to Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since she was eleven. Buchi was sixteen years old. Onwordi immediately moved to London to attend university and Buchi joined him in 1962. Emecheta Buchi bore five children in six years but it was an unhappy, oft-violent marriage. 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. At the age of twenty-two, while working as a librarian at the British Museum, Dr. Emecheta found the courage to leave her husband and supported all five children while earning a BSc degree in sociology at the University of London. She also wrote prolifically, publishing articles about Black British life in several journals and newspapers. In 1972 she published her first book of shorts, 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.

From 1965 to 1969, Dr. Emecheta worked as a library office for the British Museum in London. From 1969 to 1976 she was youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority. She then visited the United States and was a community worker in Camden, New Jersey, from 1976 to 1978.

As a successful author and visiting professor and lecturer, Dr. Emecheta has traveled throughout the world. From 1972 to 1979 she visited several American universities, including Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

From 1980 to 1981, she was the senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English, University of Calabar, Nigeria. 1982 saw her lecture at Yale University, and the University of London, respectively, as well as a fellowship at the University of London in 1986.

Dr. Emecheta once described her stories as "stories of the world…[where]… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical." From 1982 to 1983 Emecheta, together with her journalist son, Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company, with the intent was to promote and financially support Black artists.

Guinea Bissau, 2009, African writers