Buchi Emecheta Quote

“I work toward the liberation of women, but I’m not feminist. I’m just a woman.”

This provocative statement from Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta reveals a profound tension between her life’s work and the labels that sought to define it. Emecheta, who wrote unflinchingly about women’s struggles in both traditional African societies and as immigrants in the West, dedicated her literary career to exposing patriarchal oppression, economic exploitation, and the particular burdens placed on African women. Yet she resisted the feminist label with equal conviction.

Emecheta’s distance from Western feminism wasn’t a rejection of women’s liberation itself—her novels like The Joys of Motherhood and Second-Class Citizen stand as powerful testimonies to women’s resilience and humanity. Rather, her hesitation reflected a critical awareness that feminism, as it was often articulated in the 1970s and 1980s, emerged from Western experiences that didn’t always translate to African realities.

The feminism Emecheta encountered frequently centered on white, middle-class concerns—access to careers and reproductive choice—while overlooking the ways colonialism, racism, and economic exploitation shaped Black women’s lives differently. For many African women, the struggle wasn’t simply against patriarchy but against interlocking systems where gender, race, class, and colonial legacy created distinct forms of oppression.

This phrase carries a democratic impulse: her commitment to women’s liberation didn’t require academic credentials or alignment with any particular school of thought. It simply required being present to the realities of women’s lives and bearing witness through her art.

Her quote reminds us that labels can both illuminate and obscure, and that sometimes the most radical act is to define liberation on one’s own terms—grounded in lived experience rather than borrowed ideology. Emecheta worked toward women’s liberation not because feminism told her to, but because as a woman who had endured and witnessed suffering, she could do nothing else.