'The House of Nwapa' is a documentary on Flora Nwapa - a Foremost Female Novelist in Africa often referred to as 'Africa's First Female Novelist'.
Her very first novel, 'Efuru' will be 50 years old this year but according to Onyeka Nwelue, ''the little problem is that there is just one documentary on Flora Nwapa, made by a Norwegian TV channel. This was done in 1987, a year before I was born'' .
Onyeka Nwelue, a Nigerian film maker, is the arrow head of this documentary project which premiered on the 28th of August 2016 at the International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF) in Harare, Zimbabwe.
For the past two years he has been filming, travelling and asking questions as to who Flora Nwapa was? Her relationship with Chinua Achebe? Why she married another woman for her husband, Gogo Nwakuche? and many more questions.
He has interviewed different people, from Africa's first Nobel Laureate for Literature, Wole Soyinka, to James Currey of Heinemann, down to Mabel Segun, presumed to be her rival and then to the three biological children of Flora Nwapa, Ejine, Amede and Uzoma and to German anthropologist, Sabine Jell-Bahlsen.
According to Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka: “I feel really stimulated by the work Nwelue is doing on Flora Nwapa, a 'missing' figure in the overall consciousness of our younger literati generation, so a documentary on her is long overdue.”
Onyeka Nwelue, a Nigerian film maker, is the arrow head of this documentary project which premiered on the 28th of August 2016 at the International Images Film Festival for Women (IIFF) in Harare, Zimbabwe.
For the past two years he has been filming, travelling and asking questions as to who Flora Nwapa was? Her relationship with Chinua Achebe? Why she married another woman for her husband, Gogo Nwakuche? and many more questions.
He has interviewed different people, from Africa's first Nobel Laureate for Literature, Wole Soyinka, to James Currey of Heinemann, down to Mabel Segun, presumed to be her rival and then to the three biological children of Flora Nwapa, Ejine, Amede and Uzoma and to German anthropologist, Sabine Jell-Bahlsen.
According to Nobel Laureate, Wole Soyinka: “I feel really stimulated by the work Nwelue is doing on Flora Nwapa, a 'missing' figure in the overall consciousness of our younger literati generation, so a documentary on her is long overdue.”
Onyeka Nwelue, a cousin to Flora Nwapa, was born on 31st January 1988 to a politician-father, Chief Sam Nwelue. He has been a nominee twice for the 'Creative Artiste of the Year Future Awards', and he has won both the 'TM Aluko Prize for Fiction' and the 'Ibrahim Tahir Prize for First Book'. His latest book, 'Hip-Hop is Only for Children' won the Creative Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2015 Nigerian Writers’ Awards.
'The House of Nwapa' will be showing at the Lagos Book & Art Festival from 10-13th November, 2016.
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