Buchi Emecheta was one of the few Nigerian novelists I had the misfortune of not being exposed to early in life. While I had been privileged to read Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, James Ene Henshaw, Onuora Nzekwu, Eddie Iroh, Flora Nwapa, Anezi Okoro, and a host of others, especially those from the stables of Pacesetters, as early as primary school and junior secondary, I didn’t get to read Emecheta until my first year in the university, although I had heard of her much earlier.
My first encounter with Emecheta’s writings was The Joys of Motherhood. It was a recommended text for Introduction to Fiction. I fell in love instantly.
Ironically, there is absolutely nothing joyful about the travails that Nnu Ego, the central character, has to face in The Joys of Motherhood. Rather, the novel tells the tragic story of a woman who has a bad fate with childbearing. Even though she has many children, she dies wretched as her older children who would have taken care of her at old age stay put overseas. It is only after her death that her children finally come home – Oshia from America and Adim from Canada – throw her an expensive funeral and build a shrine so that her descendants can pray to her and ask for children.
Much later, I read Second Class Citizen, The Slave Girl, and The Bride Price. But it was The Joys of Motherhood that has stuck in my memory. Part of the reason is that as a youth corps member teaching Literature in English to a Senior Secondary School Certificate class in Makurdi, Benue State, I taught The Joys of Motherhood as well.
It was sad to hear of Emecheta’s death recently. And tributes have continued to pour in, from across the world, since the news of her death became public, all of them well-deserved.
Author Aminatta Forna described her as “one of [Wole] Soyinka’s so-called ‘Renaissance generation,’ those Africans who came of age at the same time as their countries. She and other writers all over the continent had both the challenge and the joy that comes with being first, of writing Africa and Africans into literary existence. They embraced the task.”
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British-Nigerian novelist Bernardine Evaristo called her “an incredibly important” figure in the history of British literature, adding that The Joys of Motherhood “should be up there as the female, feminist counterpart to Chinua Achebe’s celebrated and widely taught novel Things Fall Apart”.
Kadija Sesay, friend and publisher of Sable LitMag, described her as “a rock for women writers and single mothers in an unassuming way”.
“Her fictionalised life story showed women that they could survive and succeed through adversity and abuse and stand up for feminism – all without using those actual words,” Sessay said.
Across online platforms, Nigerians have also paid glowing tributes.
Chineze Eziamaka said, “I just finished reading The Joys of Motherhood on Sunday. I‘ve read it several times and it never gets old. You questioned a lot of things in the times that people didn’t question many things.”
And an anonymous commenter wrote, “I am saddened by this news! Buchi Emecheta, you were my role model. I always looked up to you. You raised 6 young children on your own in London. When I became separated from my husband whom I married at a very young age just like you married young too, I became a single mother overnight with 3 young children in a foreign land. I remembered in your interview how you said you were working and schooling. How you did it, I don’t know. Just like you, I went to school, achieving 2 Masters degrees and won a scholarship for my PhD. Adieu, great woman! You pay school fees for over 60 children and I hope this legacy lives on.”
Despite her relentless fight, through her writings, for the liberation of women, Emecheta never accepted the feminist appellation.
“I work toward the liberation of women, but I’m not feminist. I’m just a woman,” she said on one occasion.
On another occasion, she said, “Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There’s nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world – like we are called the Third World.”
Born in Lagos on July 21, 1944, to Igbo parents, Buchi at the age of 16 married Sylvester Onwordi, to whom she had been betrothed at the age of 11, and both of them relocated to England in 1960. Her marriage was an unhappy one. She had five children in a space of six years and separated with her husband at 22. Her 1974 novel, Second Class Citizen, relays their unhappy and sometimes violent marriage and her struggles to bring up her children in London.
A prolific writer, her first novel, In the Ditch, was published in 1972; Second Class Citizen (1974); The Bride Price (1976); The Slave Girl (1977); The Joys of Motherhood (1979); Destination Biafra (1982); The Rape of Shavi (1983); Gwendolen (1989); Kehinde (1994); and The New Tribe (2000).
Emecheta also wrote children novels, Nowhere to Play (1980) and The Moonlight Bride (1980), and published a volume of autobiography, Head Above Water, in 1986.
She won several honours for her writings. In 1983, she was selected as one of 20 ‘Best of Young British Writers’ by the Book Marketing Council.
The essence of her writings can best be summed up in these words from a review on literature.britishcouncil.org: “Emecheta’s writings document the author’s multi-layered yet intersecting identities: the diasporic single woman, the sociologist observing grim urban realities, the best-selling novelist, the narrator of African myths and traditions that clash against modernization, the re-creator of her continent’s enslaved traumatic historical past.”
Emecheta has gone the way of all mortals, but she would continue to be remembered through her path-finding works.
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