Buchi Emecheta
Buchi Emecheta
Buchi Emecheta OBEis a Nigerian novelist based in Britain who has published more than 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen, The Bride Price, The Slave Girland The Joys of Motherhood. Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education have 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…… women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer...
NationalityNigerian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth21 July 1944
CountryNigeria
I came to England in 1962 as a very young bride, in my teens, hoping just to stay two years and go back.
I usually make sure that my stories are from Africa or my own background so as to highlight the cultural background at the same time as telling the story.
I like to be called a Nigerian rather than somebody from the Third World or the developing or whatever.
Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.
In all my novels, I deal with the many problems and prejudices which exist for Black people in Britain today.
Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World.
The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. I was the typical African woman, I'd done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn't read it.
I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger.
I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.
As soon as I finish a book, I sell the paperback rights to different publishers and that's where I recoup my money.
I am a woman and a woman of Africa. I am a daughter of Nigeria and if she is in shame, I shall stayand mourn with her in shame.
But who made the law that we should not hope in our daughters? We women subscribe to that law more than anyone. Until we change all this, it is still a man's world, which women will always help to build.
Few things are as bad as a guilty conscience.
A hungry man is an angry one.