Great African Reads discussion

We are featuring the work of Buchi Emecheta in May! She is a new author for me and I am excited to see how many books she has published. Bear with me while I finish putting together this intro post, but do feel free to comment below in the meantime...

Buchi Emecheta has a lot of books...can anyone make suggestions of where to begin?

oh gosh start with the slave girl then her autobio head above watee

Serwah wrote: "oh gosh start with the slave girl then her autobio head above watee"

Thanks! i just requested them from the collections at work. :)

I really loved joys of motherhood!

Joys of Motherhood was amazing!

I added it!

I also started The Slave Girl and am enjoying it.

The Slave Girl takes place in the early twentieth century when Britain is consolidating its hold on (what will become) Nigeria as a colony...so I am planning to read up on that time period in the Toyin Falola book.

Part of the story involves a lot of men dying from "felenza," but it's not clear to me what felenza is. it seems to have something to do with the white people/colonists. i thought maybe it had something to do with guns, but then the little girl (who would become the slave girl) lost her mother to this felenza after losing her father to it...anyone know what felenza is?

Felenza meant influenza. During that time it must have been one of the deadly diseases.

Oh! That makes sense! There was something about a headache. I also thought there was something about powder but maybe I'm crazy; I'll go back and reread with influenza in mind.

It seemed like the felenza was affecting mainly men--must be because they would go away to work among the white people. The little girl's mother must have caught it from her father just before he died.

Oh.. That must have been traumatic for the little girl. Let me find that book and read it too. I've read books by Buchi but I was quite young and it seems like a long time ago.

I love this book. I'm about halfway through.

I'm so confused about how I hadn't even heard of Buchi Emecheta before?! I'm so glad we decided to do this project and thank you all who voted to feature her work this month :D

She's a seasoned writer - Buchi. There is an extract of her background from the internet. I think it will help you understand some of her writing. She wrote from the heart and the pain of life.

(Florence Onye) Buchi Emecheta was born on 21 July 1944, in Lagos to Igbo parents, Alice (Okwuekwuhe) Emecheta and Jeremy Nwabudinke, both parents from Ibusa, Delta State, Nigeria. Her father was a railway worker in the 1940s. Due to the gender bias of the time, the young Buchi Emecheta was initially kept at home while her younger brother was sent to school; but after persuading her parents to consider the benefits of her education, she spent her early childhood at an all-girl's missionary school. Her father died when she was nine years old. A year later, Emecheta received a full scholarship to the Methodist Girls School, where she remained until the age of 16 when she married Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since she was 11 years old.

Onwordi immediately moved to London to attend university and Emecheta joined him in 1962. She gave birth to five children in six years. It was an unhappy and sometimes violent marriage (as chronicled in her autobiographical writings such as Second-Class Citizen).[1] To keep her sanity, Emecheta wrote in her spare time; however, her husband was deeply suspicious of her writing, and he ultimately burned her first manuscript.[2][3] At the age of 22, Emecheta left her husband. While working to support her five children alone, she earned a BSc degree in Sociology at the University of London.

She began writing about her experiences of Black British life in a regular column in the New Statesman, and a collection of these pieces became her first published book in 1972, In the Ditch. The semi-autobiographical book chronicled the struggles of a main character named Adah, who is forced to live in a housing estate while working as a librarian to support her five children. Her second novel published two years later, Second-Class Citizen (Allison and Busby, 1974), also drew on Emecheta's own experiences, and both books were eventually published in one volume as Adah's Story (1983).

Five children in six years!
Wow, she is an amazing woman. Thanks for posting that. I have been really remiss in setting up the introductory comment for this thread.

Oh what a shame i missed this discussion while i was very busy with work. I read The Joys of Motherhood earlier this year with the Year of Reading Women group and added all her books to my list as I enjoyed it so much (heres my review https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... )
Is anyone reading anything of hers at the moment or planning to soon?

I really want to read more, Zanna, but not sure when I will get to it. But I'm so glad she is on my radar now. I seriously still don't understand how I had never come across her work before!

I don't think she's very famous in the UK, which is ridiculous!

Just read Second Rate Citizen (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8...) (Sorry 'Add book' doesn't work?)
Great read!
My review here. Especially impressed with the elegance of telling the story loyally from her protagonists point of view!