On August 3, 1966, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart had already been in print for eight years and was reshaping the study of African literature worldwide — but the Nigerian woman who had written the first modern novel by a West African woman was still being described in British publishing records as a "housewife."

Flora Nwapa was born on January 13, 1931, in Oguta, in what is now Imo State, Nigeria. She studied at the University of Ibadan and Edinburgh, became an educator and government administrator in Biafra, and in 1966 published Efuru through Heinemann's African Writers Series. It was the first novel by an African woman published in the series and one of the first by any West African woman.

Efuru follows a woman who defies the expectations of her community — she chooses her own husband, succeeds at trade without male support, loses children, leaves unsatisfying marriages — and is ultimately drawn to worship of Uhamiri, the lake goddess, over the domesticity demanded of her. It is a book about female autonomy in a society that cannot fully accommodate it, written from inside that society's own idiom.

Critics reviewed it with caution. Reviewers noted her "simple" prose. The African Writers Series gave the book a fraction of the promotion given to Achebe. British publishing assumed its audience for African literature was educated white readers who wanted entry into an exotic culture, not African women who recognized themselves on the page.

Nwapa understood what was happening. In 1977 she founded Tana Press, the first African-owned publishing house for children's literature, and later Flora Nwapa Books — making her the first woman to establish and run a publishing company in Africa. She published writers who were being ignored by Heinemann and other Western houses. She controlled the means of distribution.

She died in 1993. African literary studies have spent the subsequent decades retroactively installing her in a canon that spent decades marginalizing her. She is now considered the "mother of African literature" — a title Achebe was never made to share.