People · 1931–1993
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She grew up beside Oguta Lake, home of the goddess Uhamiri. Achebe sent her the money to post her first novel. She went on to start her own publishing house in Enugu, and her last book was called The Lake Goddess.
Oguta sits in Imo State beside the biggest natural lake in the state. Oguta Lake is long and thin, about eight kilometres from east to west and two and a half kilometres across. It formed when river sediment dammed the lower Njaba River. For the towns around it, the lake meant water and fish, and for a long time it was a road too. Canoes used to carry trade from there down the Orashi river towards the coast. During the civil war, Biafra kept a naval base on it.
The lake has a goddess. Her name is Uhamiri, sometimes written Ogbuide, and she is the lady of the lake.
Florence Nwanzuruahu Nkiru Nwapa was born in Oguta on 13 January 1931, the eldest of six children. Her father, Christopher Ijeoma, was an agent for the United Africa Company. Her mother, Martha, taught drama. Flora went to school in Oguta, then to secondary school at Elelenwo near Port Harcourt, then to CMS Girls School in Lagos, which later moved to Ibadan.
In 1957 she finished a degree at University College, Ibadan, and the next year she earned a Diploma in Education from Edinburgh University in Scotland. She came home and worked as an education officer in Calabar, then taught English and Geography at Queen's School in Enugu from 1959 to 1962. After that she became an assistant registrar at the University of Lagos.
All this time she was writing. And the world she kept writing about was the one she grew up in, the lake town, its women, and its goddess.
In 1962 Nwapa sent the manuscript of her first novel to Chinua Achebe. He was already famous for Things Fall Apart. He wrote back warmly, and he put money in with his reply to pay the postage for sending the manuscript to Heinemann in England.
The book was Efuru, and Heinemann published it in 1966. That made Flora Nwapa the first African woman novelist to be published in English in Britain. Efuru is the story of a strong, successful woman in a lake town. People often call Nwapa the mother of modern African literature, and a whole generation of African women writers came after her.
She saw her subject clearly. She once said her interest had always been the rural and the urban woman trying to survive in a fast-changing world run by men. Funny enough, she didn't call herself a feminist for a long time, because she felt the word was unfair to men. She came to terms with it later. More novels followed Efuru: Idu, Never Again, One Is Enough and Women Are Different, plus the story collections This Is Lagos and Wives at War, and a book of poems.
Her reach went far beyond Nigeria. Her stories appeared in Présence Africaine and Black Orpheus in the 1960s and 70s, and later in Margaret Busby's 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa. Over the years she taught at New York University, Trinity College, the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan and the University of Ilorin. In 1989 she became a visiting professor of creative writing at the University of Maiduguri.
Nwapa wasn't content to wait for publishers in London. After the war she started Tana Press, and in 1977 the Flora Nwapa Company, both in Enugu. She published her own books, for adults and children, and other writers' work too. Tana has been described as the first press run by a woman and aimed at a large female readership, at a time when hardly anyone thought of African women as people who bought books.
She worked in government after the war as well. She was Minister of Health and Social Welfare in East Central State from 1970 to 1971, and she worked with orphans and refugees the war had left behind. Then she was Minister of Lands, Survey and Urban Development until 1974. She was made a chief in her community and held the title Ogbuefi, a title otherwise held only by men.
The water spirit kept turning up in her work. One of her children's books was called Mammywater. A scholar, Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, wrote a whole study of the Mammywater idea in her novels.
Flora Nwapa died of pneumonia in Enugu on 16 October 1993, at 62. Her last novel came out after she died, in 1995. It was called The Lake Goddess. She'd started with a lake town and its goddess, and she ended with them too.
In 2017 Google marked her birthday with a Doodle. A year earlier the filmmaker Onyeka Nwelue made a documentary about her family called The House of Nwapa, and her son's Flora Nwapa Foundation marked fifty years of Efuru with events in several cities. Back in Oguta, the lake is still there, and so is the goddess the town's best-known daughter wrote about.
