The writer herself assumed a similar posture when her London publisher, Heinemann, did not properly circulate her books as such stirring a kind of global erasure and a fertile ground for the piracy of her books. Nwapa, quoted by Umeh, decried this ‘multiple marginality’ but refused to be subdued by it; she interfered with that systemic fate, and as noted by Gøril Strømholm in her 1987 documentary for the Norwegian TV station, NRK, Nwapa, armed with staunch resilience, went to her bank for a loan and also asked her reluctant husband for additional financial support and founded Tana Press in 1976, the first African press run by a woman. Umeh notes in her essay that Heinemann’s failure to distribute Nwapa’s works relegated her to the fringes and was one of the key reasons her works became heavily pirated. People wanted to read her, but the books were scarce, as such creating a fertile ground for piracy. Because of that distribution bias, at a time when much emphasis was given to Western authors, a maw had been created and unlike Ossai who, when faced with such, would have ‘shut [herself] out of the world’ and suffered in silence, Nwapa resisted that suffering, proved that it was not a virtue, and demonstrated for her readers what Ajanupu, or even Efuru herself, would have done were both to encounter such limitations: she set up her own publishing house. She laid down this legacy for writers, editors, and publishers coming in the front.

‘The problems confronting these publishers are many: inadequate capital, lack of trained manpower, ineffective distribution, and poor performance by printers,’ Chinua Achebe wrote in his 1979 essay for The Washington Post, which quite suspiciously didn’t list Tana Press as one of the emerging Nigerian presses filling the publishing gap. He, however, explained some of the challenges of publishing in Nigeria, adding that despite these hindrances, Nigerian publishers tackled the ‘financial problems with vigour and optimism.’ They competed against British-owned presses that had dominated especially the academic field. Nwapa, too, refused to be subdued by the economic constraints of publishing in Nigeria. She returned to her desk, steel-spined and unbending, and wrote children’s books with Nigerian storylines. She targeted women’s writing. She made works accessible to niche readers for as long as the press could hold on.

And many decades later I am here wondering how she did it, why she kept going on, considering that this was also at a time when the spotlight was accorded to mostly men writers, as Nwapa herself confirmed to Strømholm. And most notable of these critics were the Bọ́lẹ̀kájà troika of Ibekwe Chinweizu, Onwucheka Jemie and Ihechukwu Madubuike. They jointly wrote a stirring 1974 essay, ‘Toward the Decolonization of African Literature’, published in the sixth issue of Okike: An African Journal of New Writing, and later expanded into a longer work of criticism in 1983. In the essay, they called out Nigerian poets whose works they argued were too Europeanized, with little loyalty paid to indigenous oral forms, and which they insisted was why the reading public was indifferent to the wave of poetry emerging from the continent. While the essay prompted heated and necessary essays and conversations, absent from these spheres and the many literary supplements in the papers and magazines of that period, were criticisms centring the works of women.

The academic and literary critic, Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, described Nigerian literature of the time as ‘phallic.’ She argued in her essay, ‘Women and Nigerian Literature’, that the literary sphere was, ‘dominated as it is by male writers and male critics who deal almost exclusively with male characters and male concerns, naturally aimed at a predominantly male audience.’ These men were ‘insufferable,’ she continued because it was as though they, ‘did not have sisters.’ It indeed was a form of marginalization, a more hurtful one, because it was unlike it was in the case of the London publisher who relegated Nwapa to the position of a ‘minor writer;’ this was home, this was Nigeria, this was where one’s songs should be sung among their people, where they should be included in cultural and critical discourses. But such attention was mostly privileged to men. In response to this disappointing segregation, one that was unarguably steeped in sexism, Nwapa confronted some of those critics. She asked why they refused to write about women like herself, Buchi Emecheta, Ama Ata Aidoo, and others who were doing extraordinary things in the field. ‘Where they come from, there are women,’ she said of those literary bros during her chat with Strømholm, adding, ‘and therefore, they should take us into account. If you don’t write about my work, how could I know that people appreciate what I am doing? It is when you criticize some people that they come out with their best.’

Like Ajanupu, she recognized the madness of the bias designed to stunt women and so rose like the fearless deity that she was and challenged that system. It was an act of resistance similarly echoed by Margaret Busby in her brief appearance in Onyeka Nwelue’s documentary, The House of Nwapa, in which she reveals that Busby once called out Prof. Wole Soyinka for not including enough women in a poetry anthology he had edited and that in 1975, and that Soyinka responded to her in a letter, promising to ‘do better next time.’ This persistent exclusion, or as Umeh defines it—‘canonical politics of erasure’—was obviously one of the reasons why Busby herself decided to edit an anthology of women’s writing, The Daughters of Africa, published in 1992, and featuring Nwapa’s writing.