Buchi Emecheta

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Biography

Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta was born to Ibo parents in Lagos on 21 July 1944. She moved to Britain in 1960, where she worked as a librarian and became a student at London University in 1970, reading Sociology. She worked as a community worker in Camden, North London, between 1976 and 1978.

Much of her fiction has focused on sexual politics and racial prejudice, and is based on her own experiences as both a single parent and a black woman living in Britain. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical In the Ditch, was published in 1972. It first appeared in a series of articles published in the New Statesman magazine, and, together with its sequel, Second Class Citizen (1974), provides a fictionalised portrait of a poor young Nigerian woman struggling to bring up her children in London.

She began to write about the role of women in Nigerian society in The Bride Price (1976); The Slave Girl (1977), winner of the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award; and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), an account of women's experiences bringing up children in the face of changing values in traditional Ibo society. Her other novels include Destination Biafra (1982), set during the civil war in Nigeria; The Rape of Shavi (1983), an allegorical account of European colonisation in Africa; Gwendolen (1989), the story of a young West Indian girl living in London; and Kehinde (1994), about a middle-aged Nigerian wife and mother who returns to Nigeria after living in London for many years. Her latest work of fiction, The New Tribe, was published in 2000.

Buchi Emecheta is also the author of several novels for children, including Nowhere to Play (1980) and The Moonlight Bride (1980). She published a volume of autobiography, Head Above Water, in 1986. Her television play, A Kind of Marriage, was first screened by the BBC in 1976.

In 1983 she was selected as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Writers' by the Book Marketing Council. She lectured in the United States throughout 1979 as Visiting Professor at a number of universities and returned to Nigeria in 1980 as Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Calabar. She runs the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company with her son. It has branches in London, where she lives, and in Ibuza. Since 1979 she has been a member of the Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race. She was a member of the Arts Council from 1982 to 1983, and is a regular contributor to the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.

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Genres (in alphabetical order)

Autobiography, Children, Fiction, Screenplay

Bibliography

In the Ditch   Barrie & Jenkins, 1972

Second Class Citizen   Allison & Busby, 1974

The Bride Price   Allison & Busby, 1976

The Slave Girl   Allison & Busby, 1977

The Joys of Motherhood   Allison & Busby, 1979

Titch the Cat   Allison & Busby, 1979

Nowhere to Play   Allison & Busby, 1980

The Moonlight Bride   Oxford University Press, 1980

The Wrestling Match   Oxford University Press, 1980

Our Own Freedom   (photographs by Maggie Murray)   Sheba, 1981

Destination Biafra   Allison & Busby, 1982

Double Yoke   Ogwugwu Afo, 1982

Naira Power   Macmillan, 1982

Adah's Story   (includes 'In the Ditch' and 'Second Class Citizen')   Allison & Busby, 1983

The Rape of Shavi   Ogwugwu Afo, 1983

A Kind of Marriage   Macmillan, 1986

Head Above Water   Fontana, 1986

Family Bargain   BBC, 1987

Gwendolen (The Family)   Collins, 1989

Kehinde   (African Writers Series)   Heinemann, 1994

The New Tribe   (African Writers Series)   Heinemann, 2000

Read about books by Buchi Emecheta at encompassculture.com - the British Council's book database and global online book club

Buy books by Buchi Emecheta at Amazon.co.uk

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Prizes and awards

1979   New Statesman Jock Campbell Award for Commonwealth Writers   The Slave Girl

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Critical Perspective

The characterization of Adah as a 'second-class citizen,' the definition which also gives Emecheta’s second novel its title, illustrates the author’s thorough exploration of gender discrimination in her native Nigerian society and in African immigrant communities in Britain. Like the majority of women in Emecheta’s works, Adah is a second-class citizen in Nigeria where her parents initially deny her a proper education and arrange her marriage. She is equally second-class in England both because she is black ('She knew that there was discrimination all over the place') and because the Nigerian diasporic community replicates the patriarchal values of the mother country: 'The sharpness [in her husband’s voice] seemed to say to her: "It is allowed for African males to come and get civilised in England. But that privilege has not been extended to females yet."' Yet, in spite of her second-class status, Adah engages in a tenacious struggle for freedom and self-achievement which ultimately allows her to improve her situation through education. The female protagonists of Emecheta’s fiction challenge the masculinist assumption that they should be defined as domestic properties whose value resides in their ability to bear children and in their willingness to remain confined at home.

Initiative and determination become the distinguishing marks of Emecheta’s women. It is thanks to her determination to regain dignity that Adah is able to apply the title of 'second-class citizen', which the reader has come to associate with her, to Nigerian men who 'failed to gain a foothold in England' and thus married a white woman as a consolation: 'That, at least, would not have been possible at home ... The dream of becoming an aristocrat became a reality of being a black, a nobody, a second-class citizen.' Women are resourceful and turn adverse conditions into their triumph, yet men are characterized as lazy and passive. While, at the end of Second-Class Citizen (1974), Adah has become conscious of her potential and supports her children alone, her husband Francis keeps failing his university exams and is still jobless. Adah’s ability to come out of the ditch where her marriage has thrown her, is paralleled by Emecheta’s own progress as a writer, which she details in her autobiography, Head Above Water (1986).

In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen, Gwendolen (The Family) (1989) and Kehinde(1994) explore the lives of African women in British society; Emecheta’s other novels such as The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), whose title is clearly ironic, Destination Biafra (1982), and Double Yoke (1982), take place in Africa. In spite of the different locale, they still stress Emecheta’s main thesis that women have to struggle to succeed in an exploitative patriarchal society. The Slave Girl, set at the beginning of the 20th century, goes as far as using slavery as a universal condition for women in Nigeria. As Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi has pointed out, the slave girl becomes the leitmotif of Emecheta’s fiction - 'the archetypal African woman buried alive under the heavy yoke of traditional mores and customs'. Slavery and marriage are equated: 'Every woman, whether slave or free, must marry. All her life a woman always belonged to some male. At birth you were owned by your people, and when you were sold you belonged to a new master, when you grew up your new master who had paid something for you would control you.' When, at the end of the novel, Ojebeta is freed from slavery by her husband's payment to the son of her master, the narrator concludes bitterly: 'So as Britain was emerging from war once more victorious, and claiming to have stopped the slavery which she had helped to establish in all her black colonies, Ojebeta, now a woman of thirty-five, was changing masters.' Thus, the novel also functions as a powerful indictment of Britain’s colonial and imperialist past. The Rape of Shavi (1983), Emecheta’s most unusual work where a group of Europeans fleeing from nuclear holocaust arrive in the fictional African kingdom of Shavi, further develops the theme of the encounter between Africa and the West. The novel shows how the impact on the West on Shavi can take both positive and devastating turns.

Emecheta’s fiction, like many other post-colonial texts, is deeply rooted in the contrasting senses of place and displacement. Several of her characters are concerned with the development or recovery of an effective relationship between their selves and the place where they live or where they were born. Emecheta’s protagonists are often caught between two worlds, to neither of which they fully belong. Their sense of self may have been challenged by dislocation resulting from migration, yet the return to the homeland is described as an emotional crisis in Double Yoke, Kehinde and The New Tribe (2000), a most atypical Emecheta novel in its focus on Chester, a Nigerian male adolescent adopted by a white English couple. The return to Africa signifies the end of Chester’s nostalgic dream to reclaim his African kingdom and brings him into contact with Nigeria’s harsh reality of social and political chaos. Tellingly, at the end of the novel, Chester is reunited to his adoptive family and to her fiancée Esther who had warned him before he embarked on his expedition: 'You don’t seem ready to accept reality ... We don’t belong in Africa, we’re British. Black British maybe, but this is our home now.' To Esther, Chester’s idea to leave for Africa is like 'chasing a dream'.

Emecheta’s characterization of her books as being about 'survival ... just like [her] own life,' calls attention to the autobiographical element that pervades them. Throughout her prolific literary activity, Emecheta has reproduced her struggle against the social, economic and cultural forces that, according to her, lead to the exploitation of black women. Yet, the attempt to translate personal experience into a sociological interpretation of African womanhood has proved problematic and has been challenged by other black women writers, most notably by fellow Nigerian author Flora Nwapa who claimed that she 'did not see women as second-class citizens'.

Luca Prono, 2004

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Contact information

Publisher (General enquiries) Heinemann Educational Publishers Halley Court Jordan Hill Oxford  OX2 8EJ England Tel: +44 (0)1865 310533 Fax: +44 (0)1865 314641 E-mail: enquiries@harcourteducation.co.uk http://www.harcourteducation.co.uk

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