Nigeria’s Emecheta tilted at patriarchy
One of the pioneering generation of postindependence African literature, Nigerian novelist Florence “Buchi” Emecheta, died last week at the age of 72.
As a child, she had to convince her parents to let her join her brother at school, which she abandoned at 17 to marry Sylvester Onwordi, to whom she had been engaged since she was 11.
Emecheta moved to London, where her husband went to study in 1960. She had five children in six years, and endured an abusive, loveless and sometimes violent marriage. Her spouse burnt the manuscript of her first novel, The Bride Price, which she later had to reconstruct.
Demonstrating the incredible resourcefulness, discipline and strength of many of the female characters in her often semibiographical novels, Emecheta — a redoubtable African Mother Courage — often woke up early in the morning to write, even as she brought up five children, worked as a library officer in the British Museum and completed a bachelor’s degree in sociology.
She would later work as a youth and community worker in Camden.
Emecheta wrote a regular column for the New Statesman, which provided the inspiration for her 1972 novel, In The Ditch, which described the difficult experiences of a single mother, Adah, living in a grimy housing estate in London while struggling to bring up five children. Her novels Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977), The Joys of Motherhood (1979) and Destination Biafra (1982) all dealt with similar themes of gender discrimination; racial, sexual and colonial oppression; the disempowerment of women; and female independence and ingenuity. All these tales had strong female lead characters struggling to free themselves from the shackles of patriarchal domination.
Emecheta relentlessly excoriated the male chauvinist notion that the main ambition of women should be to have children and stay at home as properties of their husbands.
She wrote in an uncompromising style, determined to give voice to the voiceless in portraying the bleak world to which African women were often consigned by social hierarchies.
Emecheta’s most famous novel, The Joys of Motherhood, remains a pan-African classic. Bathed in pathos and the unfulfilled dreams of the heroine, Nnu Ego, the book is an ironic exposition of motherhood’s many humiliations and unfulfilled expectations, amid enormous unacknowledged sacrifices. The heroine dies a lonely and tragic death, abandoned not only by friends but by her seven children.
Her lament is truly heart-wrenching: “God, when will you create a woman who will be fulfilled by herself, a full human being, not anybody’s appendage?”
Emecheta’s iconoclastic novel sought to shatter the stereotypical, one-dimensional ideal of the pure, heroic mother-figure often portrayed in the first-generation of African literature. She was a pioneer, tackling patriarchy even before an international women’s movement had arisen, championing a new generation of social rights.
Despite her unflinching commitment to gender equality, Emecheta had her critics who accused her of stereotyping gender roles and of reverse prejudice in her portrayal of male characters.
She once controversially said: “I’m not a feminist. I’m just a woman.”
Emecheta was doubtless expressing her discomfort with the alienating, western middle-class feminism that she encountered in Europe that she felt did not speak directly to her own lived experiences. As she later noted, “If I am now a feminist, I am an African feminist.”
Emecheta published 16 novels, an autobiography, Head Above Water (1984), three children’s books and three plays.
She won the Jock Campbell Award for The Slave Girl in 1978; was listed by Granta magazine as among the Best Young British Novelists in 1983; two of her plays — A Kind of Marriage and A Family Bargain — were produced for BBC television in 1976 and 1987, respectively. She was honoured in 2004 by the British Library as being among the 50 black and Asian writers to have made a major contribution to British literature and, a year later, was awarded an OBE.
Emecheta inspired a generation of African and black British writers. She was regarded by friends as “warm, caring and humorous”. Her books have formed part of the curriculum of universities across Africa and its diaspora for decades and, it was in the diaspora that Emecheta lived most of her life and that she died. A dyed-in-the-wool pan-African, she once famously exhorted: “Black women all over the world should reunite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.”