INSPIRATHURSDAY!- THE INSPIRING STORY OF BUCHI ECHEMETA

     Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta OBE (21 July 1944 – 25 January 2017) was a Nigerian-born novelist, based in the UK from 1962 . She also wrote plays and an autobiography, as well as children books.  She authored more than 20 books, including Second Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979).

   Most of her early novels were published by the London-based company Allison and Busby. 

       Emecheta's themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education gained recognition from critics and honours. She  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 the problems become identical." Her works explore the tension between tradition and modernity.She is regarded  as "the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948".

    Emecheta was born on 21 July 1944, in Lagos, Nigeria, to Igbo parents,Alice (Okwuekwuhe) Emecheta and Jeremy Nwabudike.Her father was a railway worker and moulder. Due to the gender bias of the time, the 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. When she was nine years old her father died due to complications brought on by a wound contracted in the swamps of Burma, where he had been conscripted to fight for Lord Louis Mountbatten and the remnants of the British Empire.

 A year later, Emecheta received a full scholarship to Methodist Girls' School in Yaba, Lagos, where she remained until the age of 16 when, in 1960, she married Sylvester Onwordi,a schoolboy to whom she had been engaged since she was 11 years old.Later that year, she gave birth to a daughter, and in 1961 their younger son was born.

     Onwordi immediately moved to London to attend a university, and Emecheta joined him there with their first two children in 1962. She gave birth to five children in six years, three daughters and two sons. Her marriage was unhappy and sometimes violent, as she wrote  in her autobiographical writings such as 1974's Second-Class Citizen.To keep her sanity, Emecheta began to write in her spare time. However, her husband was deeply suspicious of her writing, and he ultimately burned her first manuscript, as revealed in The Bride Price. That must have been really heart shattering. 

Anyways ,The bride price was eventually published in 1976. That was her first book, but she had to rewrite it after the first version had been destroyed. She later disclosed that there were five years between the two versions.At the age of 22, pregnant with her fifth child, Emecheta left her husband. While working to support her children alone, she earned a B.Sc (Hons) degree in Sociology in 1972 from the University of London.In her 1984 autobiography,Head Above Water she wrote: "As for my survival for the past twenty years in England, from when I was a little over twenty, dragging four cold and dripping babies with me and pregnant with a fifth one—that is a miracle." It is really a miracle and I respect her a lot,it must be hard out there at the time,being black,Nigerian,female,and without money. She was really a strong woman. She went on later to gain her PhD from the university in 1991. 

   Buchi Emecheta suffered a stroke in 2010,and she died in London on 25 January 2017, aged 72. But then she left a living legacy and she still lives on through her words ,because art is immortal and so is literature.

   Among honours received during her literary career, Emecheta won the Jock Campbell Award  from the New Statesman in 1978 for her novel The Slave Girl,and she was on Granta magazine's 1983 list of 20 "Best of Young British Novelists". She was a member of the British Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race in 1979.

   In September 2004, she appeared in the "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 for services to literature.

    She received an Honorary doctorate of literature from Fairleigh Dickinson University in 1992.

   Buchi Echemeta ,lives on in our hearts ,and her books. She will forever be respected. 

Rest in peace Buchi...