Obituary: Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017)

Buchi Emecheta’s death on 25 January 2017 at the age of 72 was made known to the world with some fanfare, for good reason. She was a significant figure in African literature by women and for women, a committed human rights campaigner, and her death marks the end of a brilliant chapter in African feminism. She demonstrates this eloquently in her novels, wherein she lived the struggle for women’s emancipation just as she did in her life. Her novels brought new meaning and a sense of place to my African literature classroom, and to a certain period of my history, having grown up in Nigeria. They also help me to navigate the culture of the place where I currently live. Even in the uncertain world of students’ evaluation in a North American institution, one student observed that I taught this author with the passion of a son remembering his beloved mother; and I am beginning to make sense of my personal and literary journey towards Emecheta, who is to date Africa’s “most prolific female writer” (Okonjo-Ogunyemi, 1988: 61).

As the womanist critic Chikwenye Okonjo-Ogunyemi writes, it was Emecheta more than anyone else who, through her fiction, illuminated the truism that “Nigeria is male, a fact that is daily thrust in myriad ways on the Nigerian woman” (Okonjo-Ogunyemi, Vol. 1, 1988: 66; Acholonu, Vol.2, 1988: 217). Deconstructing this idea, and reestablishing the worth of women in this society, was for Emecheta the focus of her larger literary and personal project. Over the course of her career, Emecheta produced a body of texts consistent with the way she saw the world as an African woman who lived in both rural and urban Africa, and as a black writer who navigated the difficulties of living in the Europe of the 1960s and 1970s. But I am only beginning to make sense of the real importance of this writer in the larger scheme of things, and I have done so with greater force in the last few years teaching her work in my North American classroom.

The Joys of Motherhood (1979) was critical to this journey of discovery, but Emecheta published over 20 books, each of them differently defined by the search for the black woman who is equal to her male counterpart. These include In the Ditch (1972), Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), Gwendolen (1989), Kehinde (1994), and The Rape of Shavi (1983). Having grown up in Sapele, a small town in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria, I could relate to the themes of her African novels: Sapele was hardly different from Ibuza, the small town in Delta State of Nigeria that Emecheta made famous in The Joys of Motherhood. Like the novel’s protagonist, Nnu Ego, I also belonged to a large family with several wives and a man at the head, growing up in a compound of children, male and female (Kean, 2017, n.p). Although I do not recall my father giving away his daughters the way it is done in The Joys of Motherhood, as I look back now and with a deeper knowledge of the stories of women in Emecheta’s novels, I recall that the boys in our compound had more latitude than the girls in the way they conducted their everyday lives. In more ways than one, Buchi Emecheta’s novels took me back to that history, and they instigated in me a critical sense of enquiry into the ways that the gendering of space worked at the time. Before I discovered her books, I had taken this history for granted and, like many who lived in this cultural world, believed it to be the natural order of things. Over the last decade, I have come to challenge this, as well as to realize that more than any African women writers that I have read and taught, including evocative authors like Tsitsi Dangaremba and Mariama Bâ, it is Buchi Emecheta’s novels that best exemplify Hélène Cixous’s (1976) call that women must write their bodies into their texts. Emecheta’s texts exude an uncommon belief in writing as a way of taking back agency. The simplicity, even naivety, of her novels’ style offers a sense of authenticity to her writing, largely unmediated as it is by narrative artificiality. Few critics would deny the characteristic spontaneity of Emecheta’s books. Isn’t this the reason why Okonjo-Ogunyemi declares that “[f]or the first time readers through female characters are aware of their subjugation by fathers, uncles, husband, brothers and sons” (1988: 62)? The characters to which Okonjo-Ogunyemi refers speak to us from the African street; they are known to the African reader, and are easily recognizable.

It is hard to quantify the loss of Buchi Emecheta to the global literary community, especially in Nigeria. A day after the announcement of her death, newspapers in Nigeria were clear about her role as a writer and women’s rights activist; for at least a week, she was a national hero. In the southern part of the country, the reporting of her death was even more personal. Ifeanyi Okowa, the governor of Delta State where Emecheta was born, announced his condolences in more than one Nigerian national newspaper (Alakam, 2017; News Nigeria, 2017). And there was a surfeit of praises for her among writers all over the country and globally. She was praised for her doggedness in the pursuit of the cause of women, and for the strength of her spirit. All agreed that her death at the age of 72 was a hard blow to the cause of women, on behalf of whose struggle she spent her life fighting. She will be mourned by generations of women to come, and for those not fortunate to know her and her fight for women’s rights, they will be consoled by the fact that she left behind a rich body of literary work for them to follow. She published children’s fiction as well as autobiographical works (Emecheta, 1980; 1981). Her novels define a new way of fighting patriarchy, not just for the benefit of African women but for girls and women everywhere.

Almost all Emecheta’s writings — novels, children’s stories, television plays, and memoirs — carry some autobiographical elements. While many African women writers have deployed autobiographical features to underscore the oppression they felt and still feel, this is particularly pronounced in Emecheta’s work, affirming her place in the world and writing her body into the texts. Emecheta’s work is not just an individual woman’s story, but that of a woman writing her body into the social and cultural spaces defined by patriarchy. She constantly challenged the gendering of this space by inserting herself in each work that she produced. In all that she wrote, her original, spontaneous passion for and about life was at the forefront. As Margaret Busby, her longtime friend and publisher puts it, she wrote “pioneering fiction […] Given the odds she had to overcome, it was a triumph that she produced the powerful writing for which she will be remembered” (2017: n.p.). Deeply invested in the two worlds of Nigeria and Britain, like her characters, Emecheta became fluent in both countries’ cultural codes. She moved inside and between these worlds with facility. In 2005, she was awarded the OBE for her “service to British literature”. It was a formal adoption into British society, and one can surmise that this came as an important marker of mainstream recognition for a writer who often wrote about living at the fringes of British society. In an interview which she gave to Jane Bryce in 1983, she pointed to her possession of a British passport as a crucial factor in her being named as one of Granta’s Best Young British Writers that year. Notwithstanding this accolade, Emecheta’s ambivalence towards British society remained strong, in her writing and outside it.

Traces of this ambivalence can be found even in her last novel, The New Tribe (2000). In this novel, Emecheta returns to one of her two major themes, the plight of the migrant in the United Kingdom. It was the culmination of an exercise in self-discovery, and in some ways her swan song. In The New Tribe she yet again channelled her personal pain into communal catharsis for all women, and especially for those who lived and worked in the difficult world defined by patriarchy and racism. She wrote about black women and about black bodies in the stifling atmosphere of her homeland, Nigeria, and also of the gruelling pain of racism they experienced in Europe when they ventured there as migrants. Racism was as large a theme for Emecheta as the degradation of women by repressive African traditional practices.

A Kind of Marriage (1986) was initially published as a play in 1976, and was then adapted for BBC television. Quintessentially Emecheta, this play deals with the intractable problems of a difficult marriage. Reviews of this play were generally positive, and it became the primary material for the autobiographical work, Head Above Water (1984). According to Okonjo-Ogunyemi, this play was part of the essential process of this author’s “struggling for and gaining independence from her male kith and kin” (1988: 62). The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979), and Double Yoke (1982) are all emblematic of Emecheta’s works built around the struggle against the shackles imposed on women in many parts of Africa. Firmly opposed to all aspects of tradition that oppressed women, Emecheta illuminates with passion and unsparing wit the ways that patriarchy works in rural Africa so as to undermine women’s humanity. From birth though her upbringing in the gendered spaces of the traditional family, she exposes the child-bride’s anguish, her forced or arranged marriage, and the noxious levirate system that supports the inheritance of a wife by male members of the same family on the death of her husband. The Bride Price, which appeared in the Flamingo Paperback Series in 1976, was her first novel. The story of the heroine who outsmarts her conservative stepfather and the rich suitor that he favours is only rivalled by Emecheta’s descriptions of social life. In interviews, Emecheta regularly recounted how her husband burnt the original manuscript of this novel, when she showed it to him because she wanted his approval.

The Joys of Motherhood (1979) is without doubt the most popular of Emecheta’s Africa-focused novels. In this novel, Emecheta offers a robust critique of the attitude of the rural African woman locked in the stifling world of patriarchy. At the centre of this story is Nnu Ego, whose absolute belief in the ways of patriarchy creates, for her, a tortuous path in her village as well as in the city of Lagos. The daughter of Ona, an equally memorable woman, Nnu Ego lived a charmed life as the daughter of a mother who is a “male daughter” (a woman who does not marry, but stays at her parents’ home and has children). As a male daughter, Ona’s life is defined by an uncommon freedom, including sexual freedom in a world in which the sexuality of women is carefully guarded. Charged by tradition to remain unmarried and produce a male heir for her father who does not have one, Ona’s only child is a girl, Nnu Ego. Ona dies during her second childbirth. Keeping her pledge to her lover, the proud village aristocrat Nwokocha Agbadi, Nnu Ego is given to him and she lives a life defined strictly by her father where she learns to conform to a regime of absolute patriarchy.

In the intricate narrative of this heroine’s development, Emecheta presents a forceful story about the ways that patriarchy undermines women in traditional Africa. Like Umuofia in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958/1967), Emecheta’s Ibuza is a microcosm of the larger African continent. Ona’s apparent sexual freedom ultimately amounts to nothing, because it is still dictated by the men in her society. She is defined by her father, Umunna, and remains his, under his yoke. Ona’s daughter, Nnu Ego, is also sold off according to the conditions laid out by her village’s patriarch. Nnu Ego’s character does not alter even when she moves to Lagos to be with her second husband, Naife, after her first marriage fails because she is unable to give Amatokwu, the first husband, a child. In Lagos, she encounters a new environment to which she fails to adjust, as she is unable to shake off her village’s values. The novel reaches a climax when Nnu Ego declares after experiencing the “joys” of motherhood many times over: “God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled, a full human being, not anyone’s appendage?” (Emecheta, 1979: 186). Her pain, and by extension that of all the women in her situation, is palpable to the reader. But for Nnu Ego, the realization comes too late. She returns to Ibuza from Lagos, and dies at a crossroad without anyone present to comfort her.

As Emecheta calls upon the reader to understand the psychology of this woman, she also offers a way out of the cul de sac of patriarchal conspiracy. Adaku, Nnu Ego’s co-wife, who shares the latter’s rural upbringing in Ibuza, rejects this dead end once she realizes that Lagos is different from Ibuza. She gets out of her marriage, takes to prostitution in Lagos, and vows to use the money earned to educate her female children. It is Adaku’s radical rejection of patriarchy that opens the way for Emecheta to set the agenda for the new African urban woman. The focus here is not merely on Adaku as a memorable feminist individual, one of the most daring characters in all of Emecheta’s writing; it is that her action is presented as a pioneering collective move for women’s action towards liberation. This is one of the main reasons that The Joy of Motherhood is the most widely taught African feminist text in universities around the world, especially in Nigeria. It espouses a feminism that is for all women, not just in Euro-America. Indeed, asked about feminism by Jane Bryce, Emecheta stated: “ours is a problem more than feminism so that is why it is difficult to identify 100%” (1983: 35). She found the label Eurocentric, and insufficient to cover the specific problems that women faced in Africa and in the African diasporas. The rejection of the label of “feminism” has a lot to do with asserting difference and her African roots. In the end, she opted for the label, “womanism”, which, as Okonjo-Ogunyemi puts it, “is black centered, it is accommodationist. It believes in the freedom and independence of women like feminism; unlike radical feminism, it wants meaningful union between black women and black men” (1988: 65). Adaku’s decision may not be uplifting in the short-term term but, in the larger scheme of things, her actions predict a new direction for the African woman. Who can doubt that the influence of urbanization in the age of (post)colonial modernity plays a crucial role in the activities undertaken by Adaku? Emecheta had also experienced this and gained intimate knowledge of how urbanization affected lives, as she conveys clearly in The Joys of Motherhood.

Emecheta’s contribution to debate about immigrants in Britain constitutes a strong part of her legacy as a writer, womanist, and human rights advocate. Her weapon of choice for advocating for women’s rights was literature but hers was also a strong voice in public debate, and in 1979 she was appointed as a member of the British Home Secretary’s Advisory Council on Race. She assertively articulated her ideas about race relations in her books; most obviously in her London novels, such as Second-Class Citizen (1974). Other notable works in this category include Gwendolen (1989/2000), Kehinde (1994), and of course her last novel on the subject of race and child adoption across race lines, The New Tribe (2000). In his monograph about transcultural adoption, Life Lines, John McLeod observes that The New Tribe’s special contribution is “Emecheta’s exploration of genealogical bewilderment as the outcome of adoptive parenting rather than primal wounding”, and commends her for “ask[ing] critical questions about those determined not to embrace colour-blind family-making” (2015: 149; emphasis in original).

The theme of female victimhood is common to all Emecheta’s novels, often framed by the issue of sexual violence against women, all over the world — for example, in Destination Biafra (1982) and The Rape of Shavi (1983). Weaving together the narratives of rape and migrancy, in Gwendolen Emecheta writes about a young girl from another sector of the black diaspora, Jamaica. Gwendolen is raped by her father while her mother is absent, soon after the family has migrated to England. Gwendolen becomes pregnant but cannot reveal her father’s guilt for fear that he might be sent to prison. The father dies before Gwendolen’s mother becomes aware of the truth, and Gwendolen is hospitalized after a mental breakdown following the birth of her child. Even in The Rape of Shavi, a so-called postcolonial fantasy novel, rape is central to the plot. A telling narrative of the brusque and brutal takeover of a well-run and democratic African state by a strong external force, the narrative positions rape as an essential plot motif. Emecheta retells the colonial story of her homeland, Nigeria, and indeed the story of the African continent through the guise of fantasy.

Destination Biafra is an unusual contribution to her oeuvre, and Emecheta admits that it is “different from my other books” (1982/1989: vii). It is about the Nigerian Civil War (1969–1971) and Biafra, the new nation declared by Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu in the late 1960s. Debbie Ogedengbe, Emecheta’s war heroine, soon discovers that the idea of Biafra is nothing but a game of power-grab. Risking her personal safety, she sets out to promote the idea of a single Nigeria. For Emecheta, writing this novel was a personal triumph, a fact she admits in the “Author’s Foreword” to this novel (1982/1989: vii–viii); where, too, she judges it to be her only “masculine” book. The publication of this book also made another kind of history, since it led to the breakup of her relationship with her longtime London publisher, Allison and Busby. According to William Grimes, “It was based on research she had carried out surreptitiously after taking a job as a cleaning woman at Sandhurst, the royal military academy, for that purpose” (2017: n.p.). Grimes also notes that the book was “poorly reviewed” (2017: n.p.). Partly for this reason, and also to gain absolute control over her fiction, Emecheta set up an independent publishing outfit, Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company, with her son Sylvester Onwordi in 1982.

Important as Destination Biafra was to her, it was Second-Class Citizen, which was commissioned by BBC Television, that captured the imagination of many in Europe and Africa. The novel relates the story of Adah Obi, a recent migrant to London, who contends with an abusive husband while discovering that her race will be a constant disability in what she had eagerly anticipated as her new home. Yet, at the same time, the novel also charts Adah’s emergence, in the face of adversity, as a writer. The London novels, especially In the Ditch, Second-Class Citizen, Kehinde, and The New Tribe, capture vividly Emecheta’s mixed feelings about her adopted home where she lived out her adult life and died.

Misty L. Bastian (1979) wrote of the “strangeness” of the world of Emecheta’s African novels to her North American students. For me, as a reader and as a teacher, they are anything but strange, and speak to an African past eloquently. The Joys of Motherhood has a special personal urgency when I put my mother in the place of Nnu Ego, trying to understand what she might have felt in that large compound of ours in the small town, Sapele, where we lived “happily”. Like Bastian, I tell my Canadian students that Emecheta’s novels are contextually real, carefully letting them know that to get into the “groove” of these novels, they have to reach out to a different world, a different culture. Buchi Emecheta’s passion for literature was only surpassed by her activism for the rights of women, not just African women, but women of the world. Her dream was to push women beyond the consciousness of Nnu Ego, who dreams of the mythological instead of the material world of pain and anguish. More than anything else, Emecheta remains the “salt” of African literature, not just one of the most significant voices of African women’s writing in Africa. Buchi Emecheta is dead; long live the work of Buchi Emecheta.