Buchi Emecheta dies at 72

Buchi Emecheta, the pioneering Nigerian author whose 20 novels mined her experience as a black single mother in Britain to produce work that inspired a generation of black British writers, has died at the age of 72 on the 25th of January 2017. It was said that she passed away in her sleep in London.

The author, has produced works that encompasses adult and children’s fiction, as well as plays.

Her friend and publisher Margaret Busby paid tribute to her pioneering fiction, which explored sexual and racial politics in the Britain of the 1960s and 70s. “Given the odds she had to overcome, it was a triumph that she produced the powerful writing for which she will be remembered,” Busby said.

Author Aminatta Forna described Emecheta 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 Africaand Africans into literary existence. They embraced the task.”

Born in Lagos in 1944, Emecheta moved to England in 1960 with her husband Sylvester Onwordi, to whom she had been engaged from the age of 11. Her 1974 autobiographical novel Second Class Citizen described their unhappy and sometimes violent marriage, which included his burning manuscripts of her work. At the age of 22, Emecheta left her husband and worked to support herself and five children. During this time, she completed a sociology degree at the University of London and contributed a column to the New Statesman about black British life. The columns formed the basis of her 1972 book Into the Ditch.

Until 1978, she wrote while working as a community worker in Camden, north London, using her experience to inform her fiction. Her third novel, The Bride Price, was the first of many where she focused on the role of women in Nigerian society. Among her most famous works was The Joys of Motherhood, an account of bringing up children in the face of changing values in traditional Igbo communities. In 1976, her first play, A Kind of Marriage, was widely praised when it was screened on BBC TV. Ten years later, she adapted the play into a novel, in the same year in which she published her autobiography Head Above Water.

Her talent was recognised in 1983 when she appeared alongside Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis on the inaugural Granta Best of Young British Novelists list. In 2005, she was made an OBE for services to literature. She published her last novel The New Tribe in 2000 and continued to work as a publisher and writer. However, a stroke in 2010 halted her writing. In her later years, with her son Sylvester, Emecheta ran the publishing house Ogwugwu Afor, which published her work.

Some of her works includes;
2000    The New Tribe

1994    Kehinde

1989    Gwendolen (The Family)

1987    Family Bargain

1986    A Kind of Marriage

1986    Head Above Water

1983    Adah's Story

1983    The Rape of Shavi

1982    Destination Biafra

1982    Naira Power

1982    Double Yoke

1981    Our Own Freedom

1980    The Wrestling Match

1980    The Moonlight Bride

1980    Nowhere to Play

1979   The Joys of Motherhood

1979   Titch the Cat

1977   The Slave Girl

1976   The Bride Price

1974   Second Class Citizen

1972   In the Ditch

Some awards she won included: OBE in 2005, Best of Young British Novelist in 1983, New Statesman Jock Campbell Award for Commonwealth Writers in 1979.