Flora Nwapa: Nigeria’s first female novelist every feminist adores

Although she never described herself as one, Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa, is one of many darlings of feminism in Africa.

At a time advancing the course of women wasn’t so popular, Nwapa blazed a trail many now trod with ease.

In the 1974 she founded Tana Press and in 1977 the Flora Nwapa Company, publishing her own adult and children’s literature as well as work by other writers.

Tana has been described as “the first press run by a woman and targeted at a largely female audience. A project far beyond its time at a period when no one saw African women as constituting a community of readers or a book-buying demographic.”

Nwapa said her objective was “to inform and educate women all over the world, especially Feminists about the role of women in Nigeria, their economic independence, their relationship with their husbands and children, their traditional beliefs and their status in the community as a whole”.

She was born in Oguta, in south-eastern Nigeria, to Christopher Ijeoma – an agent with the United Africa Company – and Martha Nwapa, a teacher of drama. Flora Nwapa was the first of six chimdren.

She attended school in Oguta, Port Harcourt and Lagos. She went on to earn a BA degree from University College, Ibadan, in 1957. She then went to Scotland, where she earned a Diploma in Education from Edinburgh University in 1958.

She has been called the mother of modern African literature. The forerunner to a generation of African women writers, she is acknowledged as the first African woman novelist to be published in the English language in Britain and achieve international recognition, with her first novel Efuru being published in 1966 by Heinemann Educational Books.