Head Above Water

Buchi Emecheta was born Florence Onyebuchi Emecheta on July 21, 1944, in Yaba, Lagos, Nigeria. Coming two months early, she had not been expected to survive. Her mother, Alice Ogbanje Ojebeta Emecheta was a former slave girl, sold into slavery by her brother to a relative in another town to raise money for silk head ties for his coming-of-age dance. (Ogbanje Emecheta’s story is the inspiration for Emecheta’s 1977 novel, Slave Girl.) When her mistress died, Ogbanje Emecheta returned home to freedom. She trained as a seamstress. She married Jeremy Nwabudinke, a railway worker. The couple moved from Umuezeokolo, Odanta, Ibusa (now Delta State), their ancestral home, to the then-capital city of Lagos to seek their fortune. They had two children, Buchi and her younger brother, Adolphus Chisingali Emecheta. Like many in their situation, the family went back to Ibusa during the holidays so their children could stay rooted in their culture, their values and their ancestors’ way of life. In Ibusa, Emecheta and her brother helped on the farm and listened to folktales.

Having been brought up in a culture of storytelling, Emecheta would have been aware, from a young age, of ways in which her local tradition marginalized women and reinforced male supremacy. She would have been aware of folktales in which independent-minded women were punished and ‘proud’ girls who dared to be picky with the suitors who came to ask for their hands in marriage ended up marrying ghosts (and not escaping unscathed from their spirit husbands). These stories obviously, contrary to the lessons they were supposed to teach, made Emecheta painfully sensitive to the gender roles expected of women as well as the erasure of women in her patriarchal, Nigerian society in public spaces. Expected to marry (eventually) and have children, girls were, as a rule, not sent to school. Sending a woman to school, it was reasoned, was a waste of money...