By Austin Izagbo
The story of Onyebuchi Emecheta, popularly known as Buchi, is at the same time that of a personal and communal triumph –the triumph of the personal will and communal efforts over the vicissitudes of life.
Much has been said about her deprivations at childhood. Without meaning to water that down in any way, I would wish to place it in its truest perspective. She grew up in the 1940s, a time of widespread social change in Nigeria. Primary school education was still sipping into many parts of the Nigerian hinterland, starting from the litoral areas, such as Lagos and Calabar, where the first white Christian evangelists first established their schools.
By the 1940s, poverty was still widespread in Nigeria, and the urban centres were still few and far between. While primary school education was within the reach of any child whose parents were forward looking, or who had embraced Christianity, the Christian missionary schools that were coming up even in the villages, secondary school education were open only for the most fortunate few.
Buchi Emecheta, who, by this time, was already living in Nigeria’s greatest metropolis, Lagos, was among the fortunate few. Her father, a veteran who had fought in Burma during the Second World War on the side of Britain, had an uncommon exposure that opened up several doors. No wonder, he was working in the then elite work force of Nigeria; the railways. So, Buchi had a life of promise before her.
Then tragedy struck! Her father died. She was barely eight years old by then. Despite all the promise of the life of the intellect ahead of her, despite her visible intelligence due to the top-flight results she must have earned in the primary school classes she may have attended. That her father died would have spelt the end of the road for Buchi Emecheta but for something that has remained a major plank of the progress, the remarkable progress, the unstoppable progress, the celebratory progress that has set Ibusa apart as a domain of progress and development.
That thing is communal effort. In Ibusa town, the saying that “it takes a village to train a child”, is still coming true today as it did when Buchi Emechieta was a girl child in need of financial help in the 1940s. When words reached Mr. Hallim, a then senior civil service staff of the old Western Region Civil Service at Ibadan, that there was a prodigiously gifted girl who has exhibited a splash of brilliance in her short stint at school, like a meteor streaking through the night sky, he reacted like the average Ibusa man or woman: that the young Buchi must return to school. We may never know how Mr. Halim came about that fateful knowledge; was it discussed at a meeting attended by Ibusa people? Or was the issue raised by friends of Buchi’s late father? Well, what is important is the result; Buchi returned to school because an Ibusa man who was not her real father treated her as though she were his own real daughter. 
From there, Onyebuchi opened up her wings and soared like the eagle. From there, she studied voraciously. From there, she became the Buchi that was known and celebrated across the globe. From there, she became the Buchi that the world has joined Ibusa town to mourn today.
There is the other Buchi, the product of hard work; the single mother who raised five children and still found the time to author 21 books. The challenges she faced and overcame were fully reflected in Buchi’s often-autobiographical literary harvest.
Somebody wrote about her that: “The main source of inspiration for her writing, however, was Africa, and in particular the villages of Ibusa in (Delta State) Nigeria where her family came from. Even though she had spent a relatively brief period of her childhood there, the villages and the stories she heard on her visits with her mother left an indelible mark on the impressionable young girl and became the lodestone for all she wrote. In The Slave Girl (1977, for which she won the New Statesman’s jock Campbell award), The Bride Price (1976), and the ironically titled The Joys of Motherhood (1979), she poignantly captured, in a manner reminiscent of her male contemporary Chinua Achebe, a vanishing Igbo culture in the process of transition to modernity”. Mr. Sylvester Onwordi, the man who wrote those words should know Buchi intimately because he is her very own son. And not surprisingly, he is a writer, too!
So, even though Buchi Emecheta left Ibusa very early in life, Ibusa never left her for a minute. She remained a true Ibusa daughter, giving her literary creativity sustenance from Ibusa. She not only identified with the Ibusa, she flew the Ibusa flag to the farthest corners of Planet Earth for wherever her books were ever read, the blog on the book covers always announced the name of her home town as though she always felt the duty to pay homage to the place of her birth. Her son wrote: “A constant refrain throughout my childhood was that she would one day return to Ibusa – a place that took on an almost mythical significance for us within the family. She made many plans to return over many years, even building a house in the village while working as professor at the University of Calabar – an experience that formed the basis for her novel Double Yoke (1983). But having lived in the UK for so many years, she found it increasingly difficult to adapt to life in modern Nigeria. And Ibusa, in her long absence, was transforming itself into a town and a conurbation that she barely recognized any more”.
Just like Buchi the girl that left Ibusa in her childhood changed, so too did her dear town also change for change is the only constant in life. None can begrudge her not returning to live fully in Ibusa, no that would be asking for too much. That she knew and cherished where she came from, is enough for us. What has never been in doubt is her love for Ibusa.
Although the first reaction, upon hearing of her death, is to mourn, this is not dirge. Instead, I hereby raise a hymn of celebration to thank God for sending to Ibusa such a wonderfully gifted writer. Instead of mourning, I hereby celebrate her focus in life and the hard work behind all she achieved.
Yes, I celebrate Onyebuchi Emecheta, the Ibusa girl who conquered the world. She lived a life of great productivity that she lifted herself to the pantheon of the immortals with the Chinua Achebes; for as long as her books continue to be read, for that long she is salive.
Buchi Emecheta can never be forgetten you, for she has given us so much to remember you by. She typifies a success story that will continue to serve as a role model to every girl child all over the world. Rest in perfect peace, dear daughter of Ibusa, “Ezigbo ada Igbuzo nodu nma.”
Dr. Austin Izagbo is the President-General, Ibusa Community Development Union (ICDU) Worldwide.
…What writers say about Emecheta
By HENRY AKUBUIRO
Reacting to the death of the legendary writer, Nigerian literary scholars and writers, said she was a leading Nigerian literary theorist and a consummate scribbler with a bent for fighting the woman cause.
Prof. Akachi Ezeigbo
She was an authority in African feminist literature, who rose to prominent with her unique feminist bent. Though Flora Nwapa was a pioneer in feminism, Emecheta was the one who took it to the highest level and attracted many followers. She pioneered African feminist literary tradition because she produced very striking literature that recreated the African woman totally than what was written before.
Her magnum opus was The Joys of Motherhood. She was one of the most prolific Nigerian authors, having written more than twenty books. You can only compare her to Cyprian Ekwensi. She was one of our foremost writers.
Though she lived abroad, she never forgot home, as she constantly travelled to Nigeria. Though she wrote about African women, she didn’t also forget to write on women in Diaspora.
Professor Hope Eghagha, Head, Department of English, University of Lagos
Emecheta was a writer who had brought the history of female oppression and exploitation to the fore. She wasn’t, strictly speaking, a feminist in the radical sense, but she emphasized in her writings the need that, in any relationship, the woman should not be an underdog.
Why we really enjoy her writing is that she presented her own experiences in a fictional manner; so, whole reading her, we can identify with her characters and their experiences in the sense in which we can say she was among the very first to highlight the plight of African women in her writings.
Although she lived abroad most of her life, she is very popular with female undergraduates, in fact, in African literature, and this is because they identify with his characters, especially the female characters, and the sufferings they pass through.
Prof. Femi Osofisan, University of Ibadan
Emecheta belonged to that generation of writers, now rapidly dwindling, whose lofty minds conceived of art as a grand and holy vocation, a house of healing and dreaming and self-regeneration, a fountainhead of humane values.
They are being replaced by the buccaneers of our new mercantile age.
Why the loss is so painful; a further mile away from the golden morning when the artist was priest, prophet and pilot of enlightenment and joy. Emecheta is gone! Goodbye, our grand old Lady of the Pen!
Mallam Denja Abdullahi, ANA President
Buchi Emecheta orchestrated the birth of the womanist theory and advocacy in the literary space and the domestication of feminism within the ambience of womanism through her works devoted to exploring the place of the female in a highly patriarchal society. A committed writer and a master story teller, Buchi Emecheta has left a loaded basket of books and literary materials widely recommended and in use in different parts of the world.
She, alongside Flora Nwapa, were the inspirational springs for many of our female writers of the latter generations in Nigeria. In 2002 he was with us at the ANA convention which held in Asaba,Delta State, to facilitate a creative writing workshop for younger writers. A lot of young person who attended that convention found her to be of immense encouragement to their fledgling art.Her iconoclastic and firm commitment to living her art through personal example would be missed.
Prof. Jasper Onuekwusi, Department of English, Imo State University, Owerri
Buchi Emecheta’s works strengthened the foundations of feminist writings in Africa. Her novels were the young students’ favourites, even when they shot the mind of the mature reader into the realms of philosophy. In her oeuvre, a new novel arrived her reader’s table he finished a former.
It comforts us that her literary fecundity won her the honour and significance which the biological did not bring to her protagonist, Nnuego in Joys of Motherhood. May Buchi’s soul and fertile; imagination rest in peace.