BUCHI EMECHETA LITERARY SOCIETY

 

BUCHI EMECHETA LITERARY SOCIETY

Buchi Emecheta Literary Society is an organization established to promote Buchi Emecheta’s Works and Literary ideologies.

AIMS AND OBJECTIVES OF THE SOCIETY

1.      To promote the Literary Legacies  and ideologies of  Buchi Emecheta

2.      To organize an annual event  in his honour

3.      To promote his creative works

 MEMBERSHIP OF THE SOCIETY

The membership of Buchi Emecheta Literary Society shall comprise any student duly registered as a member into the Society and who has a strong believe in the author’s literary legacies.

PRIVILEGES OF MEMBERS

Members shall have the right to:

1. Use facilities provided by the Society
2. Participate in legally convened meeting or social or formal function of the Society
3. Vote and be voted for in elections subject to the articles of the Society governing the conduct of election
4. Attend and vote at the Society’s general meetings
5. Pay the prescribed seasonal dues.

SOCIETY’S ADVISERS

The Society shall have three staff advisers each drawn from the school.

PATRONS OF THE SOCIETY

The patron of the Society shall be:

Any senior members of religious institution, political institution, commercial institution or health sector respectively.

FUNCTIONS OF THE FINANCE SECRETARY

1. Shall keep all money’s accruing to the Society
2. Shall keep financial records of the Society
3. Perform any other duties as may be assigned by the Society from time to time

FUNCTION OF INFORMATION SECRETARY

The information secretary of the Society shall:

1. Prepare press releases on the activities of the association with the approval of the President
2. Be responsible for the proper display and circulation of all the Society’s publicity materials
3. Publish the Society’s magazine at least once in a month and also as the Society’s librarian
4. Provide, maintain and co-ordinate public opinion
5. Perform such other functions as may be assigned from time to time by the general secretary

FUNCTIONS OF THE SOCIAL/WELFARE SECRETARY

The social or welfare secretary shall:

1. Coordinate all social activities of the Society
2. Be the custodian of all the audio-visual instruments and equipment of the Society
3. Maintain a proper inventory of all audio-visual instruments and equipments of the Society
4. Ensure that all the audio-visual instruments and equipments are properly maintained and kept within the Society’s designated store.

EDUCATION SECRETARY

The Education Secretary shall:

1. Liaise with educational institutions outside the Society’s environment both locally and internationally
2. Organize programmes of educational and literary interest

FUNCTIONS OF THE SECRETARY

1. Subject to the condition of these rules, the secretary shall record the preceding of meetings of the Society and also prepare and circulate minutes of meetings at least 72 minutes before meeting.

1. Shall be responsible for the general secretarial duties of the Society
2. Shall summon all statutory meetings of the EXCO and the Coordinator
3. Shall at the request of the Coordinator or three executive members summon emergency or other kinds of EXCO meetings.
4. Shall record and retain minutes of all meetings of the EXCO
5. Shall conduct with the directives of the Coordinator, all correspondence of the Society
6. Shall prepare and present reports about the activities of the Society at regular intervals of three months
7. Shall annually compile the lit of members of the Society at the end of members’ registration exercise
8. And also shall be  signatory to the Society’s account

FUNCTIONS OF THE ASSISTANT COORDINATOR

1. Assist the Coordinator  in the performance of his/her functions and duties
2. Act in the capacity  of the Coordinator in the absence of substantive officer

FUNCTION OF THE COORDINATOR

1. Shall advise the Secretary to summon the meetings
2. Shall preside over all meetings
3. Shall have a deciding voting right
4. Shall coordinate and harmonize the activities of the Society and its various arms
5. Shall have power to refer any act of indiscipline of any members
6. Shall represent or delegate to any member of the Society
7. Shall be a principal signatory to the Society’s account

ELECTION

The election shall be held in accordance with the following rules

1. Every duly registered member of the Society shall have the right to vote and be voted for
2. A member shall be eligible to contest for an office if he/she has registered
3. A member who is found guilty of any misconduct not worthy of the office shall be disqualified from running for an elective post
4. Nomination paper shall be deposited with the Secretary of the electoral committee not less than five working days from the date of an election.
5. At least 48 hours before the election date, the electoral committee shall publish the list of candidates qualified to stand for each offices at such places it may deem fit subject to the proper screening of all candidates at the close of nominations
6. Each voter shall be entitled to cast only one vote for each office to be filled
7. Counting shall be immediately after the close of voting, at the designated voting centre
8. The electoral committee shall be constituted by the Patrons
9. All contestants shall act in accordance with the guidelines and rules stipulated by the electoral committee from time to time
10. Where a candidate or voter has many complaint over the conduct of any election, such a complaint shall be made in writing and communicated to the election committee for adjudication
11. The candidate or voter who obtains the largest number of votes for a particular office shall be declared elected to that office. In the event of a clear winner not emerging, a run off election shall be conducted not later than two weeks from the date of the first election.
12. BUCHI EMECHETA
    
    
    Buchi Emecheta OBE (born 21 July 1944, in Lagos) is a Nigerian novelist who has published over 20 books, including Second-Class Citizen (1974), The Bride Price (1976), The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979). Her themes of child slavery, motherhood, female independence and freedom through education have won her considerable critical acclaim and honours, including an Order of the British Empire in 2005. Emecheta 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."
    
    
     
    Early 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).
    Early career
    
    
    From 1965 to 1969, Emecheta worked as a library officer for the British Museum in London. From 1969 to 1976 she was a youth worker and sociologist for the Inner London Education Authority, and from 1976 to 1978 she was a community worker.
    
    
    Following her success as an author, Emecheta travelled widely as a visiting professor and lecturer. From 1972 to 1979 she visited several American universities, including Pennsylvania State University, Rutgers University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
    
    
    From 1980 to 1981, she was senior resident fellow and visiting professor of English, University of Calabar, Nigeria. In 1982 she lectured at Yale University, and the University of London, as well as holding a fellowship at the University of London in 1986.
    
    
    From 1982 to 1983 Buchi Emecheta, together with her journalist son Sylvester, ran the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company.
    Awards
    
    
        BSc (Honours), University of London, 1972.
        New Statesman Jock Campbell Award for The Slave Girl, 1979.
        British Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race, 1979.
        Arts Council of Great Britain bursary, 1982-3.
        One of Granta′s "Best of the Young British Novelists", 1983.
        PhD, University of London, 1991.
        Order of the British Empire, 2005
        Who's Who in Anioma, 2011
        Who's Who in Ibusa, 2011
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    
    BUCHI EMECHETA
    
    
    
    
    BIOGRAPHY
    
    
        Nigerian writer Buchi Emecheta was born to Ibo parents in Lagos on 21 July 1944. She moved to Britain in 1960, where she worked as a librarian and became a student at London University in 1970, reading Sociology. She worked as a community worker in Camden, North London, between 1976 and 1978.
    
    
        Much of her fiction has focused on sexual politics and racial prejudice, and is based on her own experiences as both a single parent and a black woman living in Britain. Her first novel, the semi-autobiographical In the Ditch, was published in 1972. It first appeared in a series of articles published in the New Statesman magazine, and, together with its sequel, Second Class Citizen (1974), provides a fictionalised portrait of a poor young Nigerian woman struggling to bring up her children in London.
    
    
        She began to write about the role of women in Nigerian society in The Bride Price (1976); The Slave Girl (1977), winner of the New Statesman Jock Campbell Award; and The Joys of Motherhood (1979), an account of women's experiences bringing up children in the face of changing values in traditional Ibo society. Her other novels include Destination Biafra (1982), set during the civil war in Nigeria; The Rape of Shavi (1983), an allegorical account of European colonisation in Africa; Gwendolen (1989), the story of a young West Indian girl living in London; and Kehinde (1994), about a middle-aged Nigerian wife and mother who returns to Nigeria after living in London for many years. Her latest work of fiction, The New Tribe, was published in 2000.
    
    
        Buchi Emecheta is also the author of several novels for children, including Nowhere to Play (1980) and The Moonlight Bride (1980). She published a volume of autobiography, Head Above Water, in 1986. Her television play, A Kind of Marriage, was first screened by the BBC in 1976.
    
    
        In 1983 she was selected as one of twenty 'Best of Young British Writers' by the Book Marketing Council. She lectured in the United States throughout 1979 as Visiting Professor at a number of universities and returned to Nigeria in 1980 as Senior Research Fellow and Visiting Professor of English at the University of Calabar. She runs the Ogwugwu Afor Publishing Company with her son. It has branches in London, where she lives, and in Ibuza. Since 1979 she has been a member of the Home Secretary's Advisory Council on Race. She was a member of the Arts Council from 1982 to 1983, and is a regular contributor to the New Statesman, the Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian.
    
    
    Critical Perspective
    Emecheta’s writings document the author’s multi-layered yet intersecting identities: the diasporic single woman, the sociologist observing grim urban realities, the best-selling novelist, the narrator of African myths and traditions that clash against modernization, the re-creator of her continent’s enslaved traumatic historical past.
    Bibliography
    
    
    2000
        The New Tribe, African Writers Series, Heinemann
    1994
        Kehinde, African Writers Series, Heinemann
    1989
        Gwendolen (The Family), Collins
    1987
        Family Bargain, BBC
    1986
        Head Above Water, Fontana
    1986
        A Kind of Marriage, Macmillan
    1983
        The Rape of Shavi, Ogwugwu Afo
    1983
        Adah's Story, includes 'In the Ditch' and 'Second Class Citizen', Allison & Busby
    1982
        Naira Power, Macmillan
    1982
        Double Yoke, Ogwugwu Afo
    1982
        Destination Biafra, Allison & Busby
    1981
        Our Own Freedom, photographs by Maggie Murray, Sheba
    1980
        The Wrestling Match, Oxford University Press
    1980
        The Moonlight Bride, Oxford University Press
    1980
        Nowhere to Play, Allison & Busby
    1979
        Titch the Cat, Allison & Busby
    1979
        The Joys of Motherhood, Allison & Busby
    1977
        The Slave Girl, Allison & Busby
    1976
        The Bride Price, Allison & Busby
    1974
        Second Class Citizen, Allison & Busby
    1972
        In the Ditch, Barrie & Jenkins
    
    
    
    
    
    
    Buchi Emecheta: A Short Biography
    
    
    Buchi Emecheta was born in Lagos in 1944. Although young Buchi was a brilliant child while in school, she did not have a smooth life as a child. Her brilliance and intelligence won her scholarship to the then prestigious Methodist Girl’s High School at the age of ten; but after the death of her father things began to fall apart for Buchi and the family. So when she was 17 Buchi was forced, due to circumstances beyond her control, to marry and had a child. Her marriage was not a happy one: there was always a misunderstanding between Buchi and her husband.
    
    
    In 1960 Buchi Emecheta moved to London to join her husband who had gone there to study Accounting. Things were more difficult for her in London. She later opted out of the marriage to save herself from the ceaseless battering from her husband. But in spite of her marital challenges, Buchi proved a strong woman when she worked hard and earned herself an Honours Degree in Sociology. In this way, she was able to work as a social worker in London while she single-handedly fended for her five children. Rather than be drowned by the challenges before her, Buchi Emecheta saw freedom and self-expression in writing; so she began to write to complement her job so as to enable her to adequately support her family. She wrote very early in the morning every day before she went to work. Little wonder then that most of Buchi Emecheta’s writings are based on her personal experiences. 
    
    
    
    
    Buchi Emecheta became a full-fledged writer when she published her very first novel, In the Ditch (1972) – a detail of her experience as a single parent in London. Then in 1974 her second novel titled Second Class Citizen came out. This novel also has London as its setting. After these two novels are The Bride Price, The Slave Girl and The Joys of Motherhood published in 1976, 1977 and 1979 respectively. Among all of these The Joys of Motherhood seems the most popular. In 1982 Emecheta felt the need to pass her own comments on the Nigerian civil war; so she produced Destination Biafra. The indefatigable Emecheta did not stop at that. She wrote other interesting novels which include Double Yoke (1983), The Rape of Shavi (1983), Gwendolen (1989) and Kehinde (1994).
    
    
    Besides the novel Buchi Emecheta also wrote a number of children stories, an autobiography—Head Above Water (1986), a radio play titled A Kind of Marriage (1986), and several critical essays.
    
    
    Indeed, Buchi Emecheta is one of the most remarkable writers Nigeria can boast of. Her contributions to the annals of writing in Nigeria will never be forgotten. 
    
    
    
    
    BUCHI EMECHETA
    
    
    Biography
    
    
    Many say that Buchi Emecheta is to date the most important female African writer.  She is certainly Nigeria’s best known woman writer, and is respected for her imaginative and documentary writing about African women’s experiences in Africa and in Great Britain.
    
    
    Emecheta was born with the full name Florence Onye Buchi Emecheta, in Yaba near Lagos, Nigeria on July 21, 1944.  Her mother was Alice Ogbanje Okwuekwu Emecheta, and her father was Jeremy Nwabudike Emecheta, who worked as a molder on the railways.  Buchi dreamed of being a writer from an early age, influenced by an older aunt who told stories to the children after dinner.  After her father was killed as a soldier in the British army in Burma, Buchi was sent to a Methodist Girls’ High School in Lagos.
    
    
    In 1960, Emecheta married Sylvester Onwordi, a student to whom she had been engaged since the age of eleven.  After bearing two children in Nigeria, Buchi followed her husband to London where he was a student.  The young family struggled with poor living conditions to help finance Onwordi’s education.  Emecheta worked as a library officer at the British Museum and bore three more children, and at the same time began writing.  Sylvester was not supportive of Buchi’s efforts, and was sometimes abusive.  She separated from her husband in 1966 when he burned the manuscript to her first book, The Bride Price.  According to Emecheta, “I was the typical African woman, I’d done this privately, I wanted him to look at it, approve it and he said he wouldn’t read it.  And later he burnt the book ... and that was the day I said I’m going to leave this marriage and he said ‘what for, that stupid book’ and I said ‘I just feel you just burn my child’” (BBC website).
    
    
    So at the age of 22, Buchi set out on her own.  She struggled to support her children and continue writing.  From 1970 to 1974, Emecheta studied and received an honors degree in sociology at the University of London.  At the same time, the British left wing magazine The New Statesman published passages subsquently gathered into her later novel In the Ditch (1972).  Thus Emecheta began her dual career, working as a social worker with youth and other communities, while writing in the early mornings at the kitchen table with her children playing around her.
    
    
    Struggling against reluctant publishers and male-dominated audiences, Emecheta has published nine novels to date.  Her first two published novels, In the Ditch (1972) and Second-Class Citizen (1974) are largely autobiographical, describing a woman’s struggles against sexual discrimination in Nigeria and racism, classism, and sexism as an immigrant to Britain.  Other novels including The Slave Girl (1977) and The Joys of Motherhood (1979) address the harmful potential of rigid gender structures amidst otherwise changing Nigerian culture.  The allegorical novel The Rape of Shavi (1983) details the clash of Western and traditional African cultures.  She has also written four works of teenage fiction, two works of children’s fiction, and an autobiography entitled Head Above Water (1986).  She has written numerous plays for the BBC and won several awards, including being selected as one of the Best British Young Writers in 1983.
    
    
    From 1972 to 1982, Emecheta served as a visiting lecturer and professor at universities in the United States, England and Nigeria.  Shortly thereafter, she and her journalist son founded a publishing company in London and Nigeria, named Ogwugwu Afor.  Since 1979 Emecheta has also served on numerous British committees as a respected voice for arts, integrationist, and women’s issues, although she rejects the feminist label.  She achieved a PhD in social education in 1991.