One of Africa’s most revolutionary female writers, Buchi Emecheta passed on in her sleep on Wednesday in London.
Born Florence Onyebuchi “Buchi” Emecheta on the 21st July 1944, she was by far one of Nigeria’s earnest female voices in the literary world since the early 1960’s.
Based in Britain since the independence, Buchi had written plays and autobiography, as well as books for children. She was the author of more than 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979).
Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education won her considerable critical acclaim and honours, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. 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.” She has been characterised as “the first successful black woman novelist living in Britain after 1948”.
Our thoughts are with her family.
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