Buchi Emecheta, 72; Nigerian writer gave voice to African women . By
William Grimes New York Times . Buchi Emecheta, a British-based
Nigerian writer who, in "Second-Class Citizen," "The Joys of
Motherhood," and other novels gave voice to African women struggling to
reconcile traditional roles with the demands of modernity, died Jan. 25
at her home in London. She was 72. Ms. Emecheta came to the attention
of British readers in the early 1970s when New Statesman began running
her accounts of the travails of a young Nigerian woman in London. Adah,
a thinly disguised version of the author, lived in a dreary apartment,
worked menial jobs to support her young children and abusive husband,
studied at night, and weathered the slights meted out by a racist
society. Buoyed by ambition and pluck, she remained undaunted. "In the
Ditch," a novel based on those columns, appeared in 1972. With the
publication two years later of a second Adah novel, "Second-Class
Citizen," critics in Britain and the United States hailed the arrival
of an important new African writer. Like her immediate predecessor
Flora Nwapa, Ms. Emecheta revealed the thoughts and aspirations of her
countrywomen, shaped by a patriarchal culture but stirred by the modern
promise of freedom and self-definition. "Scarcely any other African
novelist has succeeded in probing the female mind and displaying the
female personality with such precision," the Sierra Leonean scholar
Eustace Palmer wrote in African Literature Today in 1983. In several
novels set in Nigeria, including "The Bride Price" (1976), "The Slave
Girl" (1977), "The Joys of Motherhood" (1979), and "Double Yoke"
(1983), Ms. Emecheta dramatized, in often harrowing detail, the dire
poverty and tight web of family obligations that thwarted aspiring
women, their worth determined by the number of sons they could bear.
Against long odds, they fought. "Emecheta's women do not simply lie
down and die," The Voice Literary Supplement wrote in 1982. "Always
there is resistance, a challenge to fate, a need to renegotiate the
terms of the uneasy peace that exists between them and accepted
traditions. She was born Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta on July 21, 1944,
in Yaba, near Lagos, Nigeria, to Jeremy Nwabudinke and Alice
Okwuekwuhe. When she was 9, her father, a railway worker, died of
complications of combat wounds he had suffered in Burma during World
War II. After being kept at home while her younger brother went to
school, in accordance with tradition, she won a scholarship to
Methodist Girls' High School at 10. Her mother died a year later, and
she was passed from one distant relative to another in Lagos while she
attended school. One day she was beaten in front of her class when she
announced that she wanted to be a writer. It was a cherished dream,
born when she visited the family's ancestral village, Ibuza, and
listened to a blind aunt telling stories about their people, the Ibo.
"I thought to myself, 'No life could be more important than this,' "
Ms. Emecheta told The Voice Literary Supplement. "So when people asked
me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I told them I wanted to be a
storyteller - which is what I'm doing now. At 16, she married Sylvester
Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since she was 11. When
he went to Britain to study accounting, she followed, with their two
children in tow. Three more children would follow in rapid succession.
Onwordi, a failure at school, took out his frustrations on his young
wife, whose early attempts to write he regarded with suspicion. When
asked to read the manuscript of her first novel, "The Bride Price," he
burned it. After painstaking reconstruction, it was published after her
Adah novels. Much to her husband's astonishment, Ms. Emecheta left the
marriage and, from 1965 to 1969, worked as a library officer at the
British Museum. Aided by a government grant, she studied nights at the
University of London while working as a youth counselor for the Inner
London Education Authority. She received a sociology degree in 1972. As
her novels attracted critical attention, Ms. Emecheta began lecturing
at universities in the United States. In Nigeria, she was a visiting
professor of English at the University of Calabar in 1980 and 1981. In
1983, the literary journal Granta listed her among the 20 best young
British novelists, placing her alongside such rising stars as Martin
Amis, Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. Ms. Emecheta took an experimental
leap with the postcolonial fantasy "The Rape of Shavi" (1984), about an
airplane carrying Western passengers that crashes in a mythical
sub-Saharan country. Once repaired, the plane returns to Europe,
carrying with it the king's son. Disaster ensues. With "Gwendolen"
(1989), published in the United States as "The Family," Ms. Emecheta
returned to more familiar fictional territory, telling the story of a
Jamaican girl sexually abused in Jamaica by her uncle and in England by
her father, whose child she bears. Through the female protagonist of
"Kehinde" (1994) and the male protagonist of "The New Tribe," Ms.
Emecheta explored the predicament of Nigerians with their feet in two
cultures. "My books are about survival, just like my own life," she
told the Nigerian magazine The Voice in 1996. Ms. Emecheta, who
received the Order of the British Empire in 2005, wrote a memoir, "Head
Above Water" (1986), and several books for children, including "Tich
the Cat" (1979) and "The Moonlight Bride" (1981). "Apart from telling
stories, I don't have a particular mission," Ms. Emecheta once said. "I
like to tell the world our part of the story while using the voices of
women.
