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Buchi Emecheta: Nigerian author who championed girls dies at 72

1/27/2017 10:02:00 am GIVERS FORUM 0 Comments



Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta, whose works included The Joys of Motherhood, Second-Class Citizen and The Bride Price, died on the 25th of January at her home in London at the age of 72.

Emecheta's books were on the national curricula of several African countries.

She was known for championing women and girls in her writing, though famously rejected description as a feminist.
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.

Lagos-born Emecheta had 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.

She left her husband when he refused to read her first novel and burnt the manuscript.

Later, she wrote about civil conflict in Nigeria and the experience of motherhood in a changing Ibo society.

The female protagonists of Emecheta's fiction challenge the masculinist assumption that they should be defined as domestic properties whose value resides in their ability to bear children and in their willingness to remain confined at home.

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