Onitsha, Gift of the Niger, By Chinua Achebe

"Onitsha is such a phenomenon. ...

Onitsha is an Igbo town which claims Benin origin. If we are to believe historians, this claim is not very well founded. But what really matters is that Onitsha feels different from the peoples and places in its vicinity. And it is different. It sits at the crossroads of the world. It has two faces—a Benin face and an Igbo face—and can see the four directions.... Its market, which had assembled originally on one of the four days of the Igbo week, had likewise grown ‘big eyes’ and engulfed every day in the sky....

Because it sees everything, Onitsha has come to distrust single-mindedness. It can be opposite things at once. It was both a cradle of Christianity in Igboland and a veritable fortress of ‘pagan’ revanchism. Many hinterland peoples ... would often say with a sad shake of the head that an Onitsha man had too much of the world in him to make a good Christian.

There is a story about one of the earliest converts in Onitsha at the turn of the century who did so well in the new faith that the Church Missionary Society decided to send him to England for higher studies and ordination. While in England he quickly lost the faith that took him there and returned to Onitsha where he obstructed the work of evangelization by his nefarious example. Why did the church preach so vehemently against heathen titles, he asked? What were all those knights and barons and dukes if not hierarchies of ozo? He took all the titles he could find and died a pagan.

But then there was also another Onitsha man, the Venerable Archdeacon Nweje, a saint and divine whose sometimes quixotic acts of holiness and other-worldliness are recounted to this day: who once surprised a thief digging up his yams but was less distressed by that than the possibility of the man hurting himself in his reckless flight through the forest of spiky yam stakes. Stop! You will hurt yourself! Come and take some of the yams! he called out in vain.”

            Chinua Achebe

            Morning Yet on Creation Day, 1975, pp. 153-55