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Flora Nwapa (1931-1993) |
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Nigerian writer, teacher, and administrator, a forerunner of a whole generation of African women writers. Flora Nwapa wrote on Igbo life and traditions. With Efuru (1966) Nwapa became black Africa's first internationally published female novelist in the English language. She has been called the mother of modern African literature "They saw each other fairly often and after a fortnight's courting she agreed to marry him. But the man had no money for the dowry. He had just a few pounds for the farm and could not part with that. When the woman saw that he was unable to pay anything, she told him not to bother about the dowry. They were going to proclaim themselves married and that was that." (Efuru by Flora Nwapa, Long Grove: Waveland Press, 2014, p. 7; first published by Heinemann in London in 1966) Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa was born in Oguta, eastern
Nigeria, which was then a British colony. Flora was the oldest of six
children. Both of her parents,
Christopher Ijeoma and Martha Nwapa, were teachers. Nwapa was educated at the University of Idaban, receiving her B.A. in 1957. Nwapa continued her studies in England, earning in 1958 a degree in education from the University of Edinburgh. After returnig to Nigeria in 1959 Nwapa worked as an education
officer in Calabar for a short time, and then she taught geography and
English at Queen's School in Enugu. From 1962 to 1964 Nwapa was an
assistant registrar at the University of Lagos. During the Nigerian
Civil war, which broke out in 1967, she left Lagos with her family.
Like many members of the Igbo elite, they were forced to to return to
the eastern region after the end of the conflict. Nwapa served as
Minister for Health and Social Welfare for the East Central State
(1970-1971). Her tasks included finding homes for 2000 war orphans.
Later on she worked for Commissioner for Lands, Survey, and Urban
Development (1971-1974). In 1983 the Nigerian government under President Shehu Shagari
bestowed on
her one of the country's highest honors, the Officer of the Order of
the Niger (OON). By
her own town, Oguta, she was awarded in 1978 the highest chieftaincy
title, Ogbuefi of Oguta
(Killer of a cow), which is usually reserved for men of achievement.
Nwapa's work has been the subject of many graduate theses and doctoral
dissertations. Besides writing books, Nwapa established Tana Press Limited, which published adult fiction. It was the first indigenous publishing house owned by a black African woman in West Africa. The success of Nwapa's enterprise made it possible for her to to distribute her books herself without being dependent on Heinemann. Between 1979 and 1981 Nwapa produced eight volumes of adult fiction. She set up also another publishing company, Flora Nwapa Co., which specialized in children's fiction. In these books she combined Nigerian elements with general moral and ethical teachings. As a business woman, she also encouraged with her own exaple to break the traditional female roles of wife/mother and strive for equality in society. However, Nwapa did not call herself a feminist but a "womanist," a term coined by the American writer Alice Walker in her collection of essays, In Search of My Mother's Garden: Womanist Prose (1983). As
a novelist Nwapa made her debut with Efuru, published by
Heinemann Educational Books. This work was based
on an old folktale of a woman chosen by gods, but challenged the
traditional portrayal of women. Efuru, which Nwapa started to
write in 1962, was the first internationally published novel by a
Nigerian woman in
English. Nwapa's fellow Ibgo writer Chinua Achebe,
as editor of the African Writer's Series, helped her to get the book
out to a broader audience. By coincidence, Grace Ogot's The Promised Land,
published by the East African Publishing House,
appeared
also in 1966; both Nwapa and Ogot were pathbreakers in their own right in that special
year. Marie Umeh brings to the fore the autobiographical elements in
Nwapa's narrative: "a re-reading of the novel and Nwapa's interviews
with
a number of critics, journalists, Nwapa's mother, brother, sisters,
relations and friends, indicate that the story of Efuru is her story
where Efuru plays the role of the author. In the late fifties Nwapa's
relationship with Gogo Nzeribe, a trade unionist, ended in
disappointment, sadness, and anxiety. Gogo abandoned Flora after the
birth of their child in 1959." ('Introduction' by
Anthonia Kalu, Legacies of Departed
African Women Writers: Matrix of Creativity and Power, edited by
Helen O. Chukwuma and Chioma Carol Opara, London: Lexington Books, 2022, p. 17) Efuru,
the heroine, is a
strong and beautiful woman. She loses her child and has two unhappy
marriages, but struggless against all obstacles to become a successful
businesswoman. Uhamiri, the goddess of the lake, chooses Efuru to be
one of her worshippers. Efuru must keep her taboos. At the same time
she breaks out of her conventional role as a mother. "Then suddenly it
struck her that since she started to worship Uhamiri, she had never
seen babies in her adobe. 'Can she give me children?' she said aloud. .
. . "She cannot give me children, because she has not got children
herself." (Ibid., p. 165)
Uhamiri is
like a mirror of herself, but she can also be regarded as the alter ego
of the author, who controls the characters. Locally the river goddess
was known as
Ogbuide. Maryse Conde saw that the conclusion of the book reduced women to their position as childbearers. ('"How Sistrers Should Behave to Sisters": Women's Culture and Igbo Society in Flora Nwapa's Efuru' by Patrick Colm Hogan, English in Africa, Vol, 26, No. 1, May 1999, p. 45) At a conferense, "Queens, Queen Mothers, Priestesses and Power," Nwapa revealed that she has thought of writing a sequel to Efuru, to be titled Efuru in Her Glory. Nwapa's second novel, Idu(1970), was a story about a woman, whose life is bound up with that of her husband, Adiewere, the male protagonist. The couple is happy but childless, which has worried Adiewere since the first year of his marriage. When he dies, Idu choices to seek him out in the land of dead rather than to live on as a mother. "Her final choice emphasizes that it is the matter of choice itself that is most important in the woman's identity." ('Flora Nwapa,' in Women Writers in Black Africa by Lloyd W. Brown, Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1981, p. 151) The critical reception of the novel was mainly hostile. Eustace Palmer in African Literature Today and Eldred Jones in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature compared it with Elechi Amadi's The Concubine (1966), also published in the African Writers series (No. 25), but not in Nwapa's favour. Never Again (1975) was a thinly disguised account of the Biafra War based on the author's own experiences. The Nigerian literary critic and journalist Chidi Amuta dismissed this work in his much referred to article 'The Nigerian War and the Evolution of Nigerian Literature' (1983) as a failure due to Nwapa's "preoccupation with feminist propagandising." Nwapa said once in an interview that during the Nigerian Civil War, women began to enjoy "their economic independence. So what they tolerated before the war, they could not tolerate" after the war. (Choice and Discovery: An Analysis of Women and Culture in Flora Nwapa's Fiction by Mary D. Mears, The University of South Florida, dissertation, 2009, p. 160) Wives at War, and Other Stories (1980) dealt with the Biafran conflict. Nwapa wrote short stories, poetry and children's books, such as Mummywater (1979), which brought to life a water deity - the water goddess Ogbuide or Uhamiri appeared also in her adult fiction; Mummywata was her westernized Igbo counterpart. A central theme in her fiction was childlessness, from her early novels to Women Are Different (1986), in which her four major female characters choose between such options as self actualization in their career and the marriage institution, life in the town and in the country. "Her generation was telling the men, that there are different ways of living one's life fully and fruitfully. They are saying that women have options," one of the women argues. "They have a choice, a choice to set up a businesss of their own, a choice to marry and have children, a choice to marry or divorce their husband. Marriage is not THE only way." (Women Are Different, Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. 1992, p. 199) Noteworthy, spinsterhood without children is not a positive option and Nwapa never had the interest to deal with the theme of lesbianism. Flora Nwapa died from pneumonia on October 16, 1993 in Enugu,
Nigeria. She was buried at Amede's Court in Ugwuta. Until
her death she was a visiting professor and lecturer at numerous
colleges in the U.S. and Nigeria. Nwapa was married to Chief Gogo
Nwakuche, a business man; they had three children. She remained
Nwakuche's first wife, although he took other wives. Because she wanted
her children to have a father, she did not leave or divorce him. At the time of her death, Nwapa had completed The Lake Goddess, her final novel, entrusting the manuscript to the Jamaican Chester Mills. This work focused on the lake goddess Mammy Water, the eternal spring and mythical inspirer of Nwapa's fiction. Legends tell that the fairy godmother has her adobe on the bottom of Oguta Lake, near the author's birthplace. For further reading: Legacies of Departed African Women Writers: Matrix of Creativity and Power, edited by Helen O. Chukwuma and Chioma Carol Opara (2022); The Black Woman Speaks: A Study of Flora Nwapa and Buchi Emecheta by Nandini C. Sen (2019); Writing the Nigeria-Biafra War, edited by Toyin Falola & Ogechukwu Ezekwem (2016); The Igbo Intellectual Tradition: Creative Conflict in African and African Diasporic Thought, edited by Gloria Chuku (2013); Love, Motherhood and the African Heritage: The Legacy of Flora Nwapa by Feml Nzegwu (2003); 'Nwapa, Flora,' in Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century, Vol. 3, edited by Steven R. Serafin (1999); 'Flora Nwapa' by Christine Loflin, in Postcolonial African Writers: A Bio-bibliographical Critical Sourcebook, edited by Pushpa Naidu Parekh and Siga Fatima Jagne (1998); Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Marie Umeh (1997); Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women by Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi (1996); 'These Days [III] - A Letter to Flora Nwapa' by Ama Ata Aidoo, in Research in African Literatures, edited by Marie Umeh and Ogunyemi Chicwenye Okonjo (1995); Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender by Florence Stratton (1994); Motherlands: Black Women's Writing from Africa, ed. Susheila Nasta (1992); Nigerian Female Writers, ed. Henrietta Otokunefor and Obiageli Nwodo (1989); Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves (1986); 'Flora Nwapa,' in Women Writers in Black Africa by Lloyd W. Brown (1981) Selected works:
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