As a novelist she wrote detective fiction in English, "adapting the genre of the crime thriller to an Igbo or Yoruba context".

[2] Born in Aba, Eastern Nigeria, daughter of an Igbo Chief, she attended the local missionary school, but at the age of 15 was sent to the U.S. to study.

[3] She supplemented her income by writing the occasional newspaper column, working as a nanny, and as a film extra appearing, for example, in the 1953 film White Witch Doctor that starred Susan Hayward and Robert Mitchum.

She subsequently married Deryk James and had three children Heather, Angela and Martin.

[citation needed] Her first novel, Many Thing You No Understand (1970), "controversially (for the first time) used pidgin English to dramatise the interaction between colonial officers and local people in the pre-independence era, as did her subsequent works, Many Thing Begin For Change (1971), Who Is Jonah?