From: Okwukwe Ibiam o.ibiam@gmail.com [NIgerianWorldForum] <NIgerianWorldForum@yahoogroups.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 10, 2014 at 11:48 AM
Subject: [NIgerianWorldForum] BUCHI EMECHETA: WOMEN IN DEVELOPMENT
Women in Development: Buchi Emecheta
0Award winning author, who weaves stories through 'African woman's eyes'
Florence Onye-Buchi Emecheta is one of Nigeria's early prominent female writers. Buchi whose legacy has continued to inspire contemporary Nigerian female writers, uses her personal experiences as the stepping stone in expressing and confronting female subjugation. Buchi Emecheta, who was born to Jeremy Nwabudike and Alice Okwuekwu Emecheta on July 21, 1944 in Yaba, Lagos, hails from Ibusa, in Delta state. Her father was a railway worker in the 1940s.
Just like the characters she creates in her novels, young Buchi was initially kept at home while her younger brother was sent to school due to the gender bias at that time, but after persuading her parents to consider the benefits of her education, she spent her early childhood at an all-girls' missionary school. Unfortunately, her father died when she was only nine years old. A year later, fate smiled on her. What she thought she had lost with her father's death, she got back when she received a full scholarship to study at Methodist Girls' School, where she remained until 16 when she got married to Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged to since she was 11.
In 1962, as a young mother of two, Buchi moved to London where she joined her husband who was studying, too. However, her experience in the hands of her husband was a far cry from her idea of a happy marriage. According to her autobiographical writings such as Second-Class Citizen, it was an unhappy and sometimes violent marriage. So, to keep her sanity, the young mother needed to be engaged in her spare time, then, she turned to writing for solace. However, her husband became very suspicious of her writing, and he ultimately burned his wife's first manuscript. For the budding writer, who had given birth to five children in six years, her elasticity to endure had been stretched beyond repair. She eventually left her abusive husband in 1966 when she was just 22.
Buchi began to struggle alone to support her five children while working. Between 1965 and 1969, she worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London while pursuing a degree in Sociology at the University of London. Then, she began to chronicle her experiences in a manner of a Black British woman's life in a regular column in the New Statesman. Ultimately, a collection of those works became her first published book in 1972, In the Ditch. Buchi Emechete remains one of the foremost African female writers whose works are clearly exploring the afflictions faced by Nigerian women.
The Delta state indigene has authored over 20 books which include The Bride Price, Second-Class Citizen andThe Joys of Motherhood. Buchi whose works mainly exposes the oppressive system perpetuated by Nigerian culture and myth, the award winning writer cleverly weaves narratives of female characters "through an African woman's eyes" from the age-long African oral tradition of story-telling much of which, she experienced as a child as well as a mother who suffered abuses from her husband. Given the themes of most of her writings which revolve around child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education, Buchi won international acclaim and numerous awards. As a matter of fact, Emecheta had 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 their problems become identical." Recalling her narratives "In the Joys of Motherhood" the novelist, herself, a mother of five said…"I created a woman who had eight children and died by the wayside" Despite her many children, Nnu Ego,( the main character in the novel) still died alone. For Buchi, this conveys the message that "having so many children does not mean you are going to be rich in your old age".
From 1969 to 1976 she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority, and from 1976 to 1978 she was a community worker. Following her success as an author, Emecheta travelled extensively as a visiting professor and lecturer. 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 senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English at the University of Calabar, from where she began to lecture at the Yale University and the University of London. In 1986, Florence Onye-Buchi Emecheta became a fellow at the same University. It is important to note that some of her works, semi-autobiography as well as her main biography, all chronicled her experiences and struggles when she was forced to live in a housing estate while working as a librarian to support her five children. Buchi Emecheta was honoured with the Order of the British Empire in 2005. She lives in London where she runs the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company, together with her journalist son Sylvester.
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