Buchi Emecheta's The Wrestling Match was first published in 1983 in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, in conjunction with University Press Ltd. of Nigeria. The story is a deceptively simple tale of a boy coming of age in a Nigerian village, but Emecheta uses the tale as a commentary on war, as well as on relationships between generations and the need for everyone to have productive work.

Emecheta retains the strong storytelling tradition of her Nigerian homeland; The Wrestling Match is told in simple yet vivid language, and makes readers feel as if they're in "an open clearing in which children and old people sat, telling stories and singing by the moonlight," as the narrator of the book notes.

Many of Emecheta's works deal with poverty and the oppression of women, both in Nigeria and in England; in this sense, The Wrestling Match is a departure, as it tells the story of a young man and his uncle, and the women in it are marginal characters who retain their traditional roles as wives or wives-to-be.

In an interview with Julie Holmes in The Voice, Emecheta told Holmes that writing is the "release for all my anger, all my bitterness, my disappointments, my questions and my joy."