Afamefuna: The Headstrong Historian

Illustration by Yvetta Fedorova

(By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) – The Headstrong Historian

Many years after her husband had died, Nwamgba still closed her eyes from time to time to relive his nightly visits to her hut, and the mornings after, when she would walk to the stream humming a song, thinking of the smoky scent of him and the firmness of his weight, and feeling as if she were surrounded by light. Other memories of Obierika also remained clear—his stubby fingers curled around his flute when he played in the evenings, his delight when she set down his bowls of food, his sweaty back when he brought baskets filled with fresh clay for her pottery. From the moment she had first seen him, at a wrestling match, both of them staring and staring, both of them too young, her waist not yet wearing the menstruation cloth, she had believed with a quiet stubbornness that her chi and his chi had destined their marriage, and so when he and his relatives came to her father a few years later with pots of palm wine she told her mother that this was the man she would marry. Her mother was aghast. Did Nwamgba not know that Obierika was an only child, that his late father had been an only child whose wives had lost pregnancies and buried babies? Perhaps somebody in their family had committed the taboo of selling a girl into slavery and the earth god Ani was visiting misfortune on them. Nwamgba ignored her mother. She went into her father’s obi and told him she would run away from any other man’s house if she was not allowed to marry Obierika. Her father found her exhausting, this sharp-tongued, headstrong daughter who had once wrestled her brother to the ground.

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.