1/ #BuchiEmecheta was born Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta on July 21, 1944 , in (Yaba) Lagos. Her mother, Alice Ogbanje Ojebeta Emecheta was a former slave girl, sold into slavery by her brother to a relative to raise money for silk head ties for his coming-of age dance.
2/When her mistress died, Ogbanje Emecheta returned home to freedom. Ogbanje Ojebeta, like her alterego in the novel she inspires, trained as a seamstress. She married Jeremy Nwabudinke, a railway worker.
3/Buchi’s parents moved from Umuezeokolo, Odanta, Ibusa ,(now Delta State), their ancestral home, to Lagos to seek their fortune. They had two children, Buchi and her younger brother, Adolphus Chisingali Emecheta.
4/Like many in their situation, they went back to Ibusa during the holidays so their children could stay rooted to their culture, their values and their ancestors’ way of life. In Ibusa, Buchi and her brother helped on the farm and listened to folktales.
5/When Buchi’s father died in 1953, the family disintegrated. Alice was ‘inherited’ by her dead husband’s brother (and moved back to Ibusa where she bore him a son), Buchi and Adolphus were sent to live with relatives in different parts of Lagos.
6/She lived with a family who did not treat her well. She appropriated two shillings from the family’s food money to pay for a scholarship application and entrance examination to high school.
7/She passed the entrance exam and won a scholarship to the coveted Methodist Girls’ High School, a missionary school, where she discovered and reveled in Shakespeare and Keats and Brooke
8/ In an Eng. Lit. class taught by an English missionary, Miss Humble, Buchi shared her dream of being a writer. She writes of this in her auto. Head Above Water, ‘Pride goeth before a fall!’ Miss Humble said .. ‘Go.. to the chapel.. and pray for God’s forgiveness.’ (21)
9/Buchi never prayed for forgiveness. She kept the dream of writing and of moving to the UK close to her heart, never disclosing them to anyone else lest it got her in trouble.
10/ At sixteen, Buchi graduated from Methodist High and succumbed to pressure to get married. She refused to marry any of the men picked for her. If she must marry, it had to be to someone who shared some of her dreams.
11/In Sylvester Onwordi, a handsome, young man from Ibusa who also harbored dreams of migrating to the United Kingdom, Buchi imagined that she had found a soul mate.
12/In 1961, Sylvester went ahead of his family to England while Buchi earned good money working at the American Embassy and saved up enough to join him in 1962 with their two children.
13/Buchi arrived England on a cold, wet, March morning . It was nothing like she had expected and was a foreshadowing of her early years: there were no jobs waiting for her;
14/her husband lived in a rented one room apartment where their 3 children slept on the couch he had bought with part of the money Buchi had sent him to buy her a coat (the rest of the money he spent on a coat for himself);
15/twelve days after her fourth child was born, she came home to find her husband in bed with another woman ; when she finished her first novel and gave it to him to read, he burned the manuscript.
16/Refusing to settle into a menial job, she got a job at the British Museum. Threatened by her growing independence, and dissatisfied with burning her manuscript, Sylvester sought ways to break her. He found ways to coerce her into sex, cornering her on her way to work
17/When Buchi eventually moved out with the children, he discovered where they were and raped her, getting her pregnant with her fifth child.
18/When she took him to court, he denied that he was the father of the children, denied that he and Buchi were married and as he had burned all legal documents, there was no way of proving otherwise. Buchi, not yet 22 and eight months pregnant, was now free of him.
19/But she was also left to raise the children on her own and go to university. By sheer force of will, she got a university grant, bought a car and began a new life that was , understandably, often difficult. She began to write again
20/A student of Sociology at the Polytechnic of Central London and a single parent, she wrote for four hours every Saturday and Sunday, writing what would become In the Ditch. First serialized in the New Statesman, it got her the attention of agents and publishers
21/ In the Ditch, came out in 1972. It chronicles the difficulties Adah, Emecheta’s alter-ego, encounters in London as a black woman and as a single parent to five children, straddling two cultures.
21/Semi-biographical, or ‘lightly disguised autobiography,’ as Charlotte Brunner terms it, Adah’s resilience and determination to get her family out of the slums of London and out of the ditch pays off.
22/ at least twenty more books followed including Second Class Citizen (1974) which tells the fictionalized story of Emecheta’s early life in Nigeria and her early years in England; The Slave Girl (1977) inspired by her mother’s life;
23/The Joys of Motherhood (1979) ; The Rape of Shavi (1983) a dystopian sci-fi novel and Destination Biafra (1982), one of the earliest and one of the few fictionalized accounts of the Biafran war by a woman author
24/ Emecheta was made an OBE – Officer of the British Empire- in 2005. Predeceased by 2 of her 5 children, she died on January 25, 2017 in London, UK after an illness. #Hero
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