Having been brought up in a culture of storytelling, Buchi Emecheta would have been aware, from a young age, of ways in which her local tradition marginalized women and reinforced male supremacy.
I discovered Buchi Emecheta one muggy Saturday morning, sitting behind a long table in the refectory of Uzommiri Study Center, an Opus Dei club for children in Enugu where I grew up, to which I went faithfully every weekend. I believe Uzommiri was only for girls (or maybe boys came on a different day) and our activities often involved arts and craft, games and baking. I don’t recall any of the games we played or the craft we made or what we baked but I remember sitting in front of a screen and being mesmerized by the story of this Nigerian woman in England who was both a single mother and a writer. In my memory, the documentary showed her children, spread out like tentacles around her. Years later, when I started writing in Belgium as a young mother, I drew strength knowing that Emecheta had done it before me and had done it successfully under more trying circumstances...
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