This biography, written by Ejine Olga Nzeribe and Ebere Okereke, has been republished with permission from the Dangerous Women Project, created by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh.
Born: 13 January 1931, Nigeria
Died: 16 October 1993
Country most active: Nigeria
Also known as: Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa
To Nigerians, who would be considered a dangerous woman?
Flora Nwapa, (b.1931 d.1993), considered Africa’s first internationally published female novelist fits this bill.
Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkeiru Nwapa, popularly known as Flora Nwapa was born into two prominent families in Eastern Nigeria – Nwapa Nduka and Onumonu Uzoaru. The latter, her maternal grandfather and Madam Ruth, his influential wife, established the Anglican Church in Oguta. Flora’s father worked as a UAC agent in Nigeria whilst her mother was the first local woman to achieve a standard 6 pass at St. Monica’s School Ogbunike.
Flora’s secondary school education was at the famous Elelenwa Girls School, followed by CMS Girls School and Queens College Lagos. She attended University College Ibadan in 1953, where she was President of the Queen’s Hall, meeting the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh during their visit to Nigeria. After her BA degree, she attended Edinburgh University and obtained a Diploma in Education.
Flora Nwapa started her career life as a Woman Education Officer in the Ministry of Education Calabar, from where she moved to Queen’s School Enugu as a teacher. She soon left for the University of Lagos where she started as an Administrative Assistant and rose to the position of Assistant Registrar in charge of Public Administration in 1966. Efuru was published the same year. Flora had sent the manuscript to Chinua Achebe who sent it to Heinemann Educational Books London. Upon its publication, Flora innocuously became the first African female writer to be published internationally. Heinemann published Idu in 1970. This Is Lagos and Other Stories and Never Again were subsequently published by Nwamife Publishers Enugu. Other books, essays, articles, followed in quick succession, depicting a writing career of 30 years.
During the Nigerian Civil War she married Chief Gogo Nwakuche who became an Industrialist. At the end of the war, Flora was appointed the first woman Commissioner for Health and Social Welfare of the newly created East Central State. After stints as Commissioner for Lands and Survey and Commissioner for Establishments, she set up Tana Press Limited and Flora Nwapa Books Limited to print and publish books. She still found time to lecture in creative writing or literature in Nigeria and abroad. Consequently, she was at various times a visiting lecturer at the Alvan Ikoku College of Education Owerri, Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Maiduguri, and she gave lectures in many universities in the United States. She was billed to travel to East Carolina University, North Carolina as an Associate Professor in Creative Writing for one year when she died in 1993.
Apart from Efuru, Idu, This Is Lagos and Other Stories, and Never Again, Flora wrote One is Enough, Women are Different, Wives at War, Cassava Song and Rice Song, Emeka, Drivers Guard, and other stories, some of which are yet to be published. Her children’s books included Mammywater, Journey to Space, and Miracle Kittens, these were books she wrote to preserve the oral tradition of storytelling that she had experienced whilst growing up, and to provide books that would make sense to Nigerian and African children.
Flora never set out to be a writer. She maintained that the feeling came from within based on a particular interest in both rural and urban women in their quest for survival in a fast-changing world dominated by men. She was not a feminist. She proclaimed herself a womanist, believing that a woman must be economically independent in her own right.
She was truly a dangerous woman.