NOVELISTS
Nigeria’s Florence Emecheta tilted at patriarchy
The multi-award winning African columnist and writer was a redoubtable African Mother Courage, writes Adekeye Adebajo
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 w...
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