21st July, 2019
One of the greatest storytellers, Florence Onyebuchi “Buchi” Emecheta would have been 75 today.
The Search Engine Google today changed its logo to a doodle, or illustration, portraying her, to celebrate her posthumous birthday in the UK and Nigeria.
Emecheta, regarded as the first successful black woman novelist in Britain died on 25 January 2017. She was 72.
She joined her husband, who had gone to study in Britain in 1962. While there, she flourished as a writer, while having to cope with domestic violence and an unhappy marriage. Her husband reportedly burnt her first manuscript, The Bride Price. But she rewrote it five years after in 1976, after publishing Second Class Citizen in 1974.
Her other books were The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979).
She once described her stories as “stories of the world, where women face the universal problems of poverty and oppression, and the longer they stay, no matter where they have come from originally, the more the problems become identical.”