OBITUARY: Emecheta, the author who left her abusive husband after he tore her manuscripts

We have lost a rare gem in this field. Her works would forever live to speak for her… She was known for championing the female gender and we would forever miss her.

Those were the words of Denja Abdullahi, president of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA), on the death of Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta, Nigerian-born literary icon who took her last breath in her London home on Wednesday.

The deceased had a humble beginning. She lost her father, a railway worker, while she was nine years, and didn’t start school on time due to the gender discrimination in her era.

GOT ENGAGED AT THE AGE OF 11

Immediately after she finished school in 1960, she got married to Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged to as an 11-year-old girl. Her husband went to study in London and she joined him two years later, travelling by boat with two of her children. After her arrival, she had three more children. The young mother gave birth to five children in six years. Emecheta was expected to spend two years in England, but she lived there for well over five decades.

As revealed in Second-Class Citizen, one of her over 20 novels, her marriage was an unhappy and sometimes violent one. To keep her sanity, she wrote in her spare time. The trying moment came when rather than read her first novel, her husband decided to burn it. The book, In the Ditch, was eventually published in 1972. In 1974, she wrote Second-Class Citizen, her second novel. The book fictionalised portraits of a young Nigerian woman struggling to bring up children in London.

STRUGGLING YOUNG MOTHER

After leaving her husband, she struggled to fend for her children. She worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London, a youth worker for the Inner London Education Authority, and also a community worker in Camden, north London. All these did not stop her from becoming a student of London University, where she bagged a degree in sociology.

Emecheta later said The Bride Price, which was published in 1976, would have been her first book but she had to rewrite it after it was destroyed.

AN OUTSTANDING CAREER

Following her success as an author, Emecheta travelled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer. 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.

Between 1980 and 1981, she was a senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English, University of Calabar. In 1982, she lectured at Yale University, and the University of London, as well as holding a fellowship at the University of London in 1986.

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.

The Joys of Motherhood, her most popular book, gives an account of bringing up children in the face of changing values in traditional Igbo communities. Her first play, A Kind of Marriage, was widely praised when it was screened on BBC. Ten years later, she adapted the play into a novel, in the same year in which she published her autobiography Head Above Water.

NOT A FEMINIST, JUST A WOMAN

Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education won her considerable critical acclaim and honour.

The topics she covered in her writing included child marriage, life as a single mother, abuse of women and racism in the UK and elsewhere.

“I work toward the liberation of women but I’m not feminist. I’m just a woman,” she had written.

Emecheta 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 the problems become identical”.

“Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us,” she said.

In 2005, she received the award of the Order of British Empire (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 journalist son Sylvester, Emecheta ran the publishing house Ogwugwu Afor, which published her work.

HER IMPACT UPON THE BRITISH SOCIETY

Margaret Busby, her friend and publisher, showered encomiums on her for 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.

“When I first happened upon her writing in the early 1970s, I was in no doubt about the importance of making her personal experiences – transmuted into autobiographical literature – known to the British society in which we both found ourselves.”

An assessment of her writing, published by the British Council, says: “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. They are resourceful and turn adverse conditions into their triumph.”

Commendations have continued to pour in for the woman who in the words of Oliver Smith, another great writer, stooped to conquer.