Here’s the very interesting story of how she rose from domestic violence
to becoming an icon.
Emecheta was born on 21 July 1944, in Lagos, Nigeria, to Igbo parents,
Alice (Okwuekwuhe) Emecheta and Jeremy Nwabudinke, both parents from
Ibusa, Delta State, Nigeria.
Her father was a railway worker in the 1940s.
Due to the gender bias of the time, young Buchi Emecheta 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, she spent her early childhood at an all-girl’s missionary school.
Her father died when she was nine years old. A year later, Emecheta
received a full scholarship to the Methodist Girls School, where she
remained until the age of 16 when, in 1960, she married Sylvester
Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since she was 11 years
old.
Onwordi immediately moved to London, UK, to attend university and
Emecheta joined him. She gave birth to five children in six years.
It was an unhappy and sometimes violent marriage (as chronicled in her
autobiographical writings such as Second-Class Citizen). But 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, The Bride Price, which was
eventually published in 1976. Buchi had to rewrite it after it was
destroyed.
Her husband also reportedly denied her and the kids to avoid paying
bills. One time, she came back after a painful labour the same day alone
with her new born child to find her husband on top of another woman.
At the age of 22, Emecheta left her husband.
While working to support her five children alone, she earned a BSc degree in Sociology at the University of London.
She began writing about her experiences of Black British life in a
regular column in the New Statesman, and a collection of these pieces
became her first published book in 1972, 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. Her second novel
published two years later, Second-Class Citizen (Allison and Busby,
1974), also drew on Emecheta’s own experiences, and both books were
eventually published in one volume under the title Adah’s Story (Allison
and Busby, 1983).
Among honours received during her literary career, Emecheta won the Jock
Campbell Award from the New Statesman in 1979, and was on Granta
magazine’s 1983 list of “Best of the Young British Novelists”.
In September 2004, she appeared in the historic “A Great Day in London”
photograph taken at the British Library, featuring 50 Black and Asian
writers who have made major contributions to contemporary British
literature. In 2005, she was made an OBE.
Buchi Emecheta died in London on 25 January 2017, aged 72.