Popular Novelist, Buchi Emecheta, Is Dead

SAN FRANCISCO, January 26, (THEWILL) – Nigerian author and popular novelist, Buchi Emecheta, has died at her home in London at the age of 72, according to report.

The UK-based novelist and author of The Joys of Motherhood, Second-Class Citizen and The Bride Price, is renowned for championing women and girls in her writing, though famously rejected the  description as a feminist.

Emecheta's books were on the national curricula of several African countries. She is respected for her creativity and Afrocentric novels.

Her works focus largely on child slavery, motherhood, female independence through education and are also based on her experiences as both a single parent and a black woman living in Britain.

Born in Lagos to Igbo parents, Emecheta got married at 16 and immigrated with her husband to London in 1962.

The topics she covered in her writing included child marriage, life as a single mother, abuse of women and racism in the UK and elsewhere.

Her first book, 'In the Ditch,' was published in 1972 while her second book, 'Second-Class Citizen', which followed in 1974, were fictionalised portraits of a young Nigerian woman struggling to bring up children in London.

She later wrote about civil conflict in Nigeria and the experience of motherhood in a changing Ibo society.

“I work toward the liberation of women but I'm not feminist. I'm just a woman,” she said.

“Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.”

Born in Lagos, Emecheta moved to the UK in 1960, working as a librarian and becoming a student at London University, where she read sociology. She later worked as a community worker in London for several years.