The first book I wrote was The Bride Price which was a romantic book, but my husband burnt the book when he saw it. 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.

Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017), the Nigerian-born novelist who built her career in Britain, often recounted the early obstacles she faced as a young wife and mother trying to write. In interviews and talks she described composing an early manuscript—connected with what would become her first published novel, The Bride Price (1976)—in private, hoping for her husband’s approval. Instead, she said he destroyed the manuscript and refused even to read it. The anecdote is typically told to illustrate the gendered constraints on women’s education and artistic ambition in her milieu, and to frame her later determination to write about women’s lives, marriage, and autonomy.

The quotation dramatizes a collision between creative self-expression and patriarchal authority. Emecheta’s phrase “the typical African woman” signals how deeply social expectations of female deference and domesticity had been internalized: she writes “privately,” seeking validation from a husband positioned as gatekeeper. His burning of the manuscript becomes both literal censorship and symbolic erasure of a woman’s voice. The refusal to read underscores that the threat is not the book’s content alone but the act of authorship itself. In Emecheta’s broader work, such moments expose how control over women’s labor, sexuality, and speech is enforced—and why writing becomes an act of survival and resistance.