Centre for Memories, Enugu: Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo for ‘Nwoke Nụchaa Ọgụ, Nwanyị Enwere akụkọ’ May 2
By Anote Ajeluorou
ON Friday, May 2, 2025 at 4.00pm, the Centre for Memories at its Agwu Street, Independent Layout, Enugu will host a distinguished scholar and creative writer Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo to its monthly speaker series (also known as Ñkàtà Ụmụ Íbè). Up for discussion is the important topic, ‘Nwoke Nụchaa Ọgụ, Nwanyị Enwere akụkọ’ – men fight wars, women own (tell) the narrative, with the subtitle ‘A Critique of War, Memories and Power in the Reimagination of Igbo Historical Narratives’. Patrick O. Okigbo III and Nnana Ude are both conveners of the centre’s core activities.
Indeed, the topic ‘Nwoke Nụchaa Ọgụ, Nwanyị Enwere akụkọ’ conceived by the conveners that ought to tease out the social consciousness of women in communal living as storytellers also serves as a dismissive proverb that sets limits to what women can attain. Whereas it is men who go to war to found domains and establish territorial rights and perform all the manly duties tradition demands of them, it is to the women that the gift of narrative longevity and gift belongs. In this regard, women are lampooned for appropriating what they have no right over since they are no participants of battles much tell what happened in battles. Men fight the wars and die in it, but it is the women who, by default, own or tell the war narratives to the young ones, as a ritual of historical continuum, so no one forgets, so the war tales are transmitted from generation to generation. The saying: ‘never forget whose son or daughter you are!’ is an inescapable truism in these narratives, and as a warning to keep the ancestral torch burning bright in succeeding generations, and never to let the ancestral lineage go into oblivion.
According to the organisers, “For too long, women’s contributions to defining historical moments in Ala Ìgbò, especially during the Nigeria-Biafra War, have been both underrepresented and mischaracterised. Despite serving as soldiers, administrators, farmers, homemakers, cooks, aid distributors, and nurses during the war, the historical narrative has often relegated Ìgbò women to mere bystanders or victims, obscuring the reality of their active and transformative roles.
“In this edition, we challenge that perspective by interrogating the enduring Igbo adage, Nwoke Nụchaa Ọgụ, Nwanyi Enwere Akụkọ, a metaphor that has traditionally been misused to marginalise women’s roles in historical events. Instead, we aim to reframe the conversation by highlighting that Ìgbò women have not only been integral participants but have often led and defined glorious moments in our collective past.
“Professor Adimora-Ezeigbo will illuminate the overlooked and dynamic contributions of Ìgbò women, extending the discussion beyond wartime experiences to explore how re-envisioning historical narratives can fortify contemporary Ìgbò identity and cultural continuity.”
Adimora-Ezeigbo’s task at the Centre for Memories, Enugu will be to reclaim the woman agency and the need for inclusiveness in communal narratives. But essentially too, the art of storyteling usually fall to women. It is to the wives who get the gifts of tales of battles, yet begrudged of their right to this ritual. They outlive the men anyway, and they are duty-bound to relay the messages told them at those rare moments to the children, their sons particularly, so they know the lay of the land and guide it as their inheritance. It is part of the mothering role, to raise a clan of noble men for the community who are versed in the communal tales that last to generations after them.
Like most women married to war veterans, Adimora-Ezeigbo’s war stories also benefited immesely from marrying a husband who went to war; also also saw the war, lived through it, wrote about it and has also read extensively what others have written about it, and is therefore at a vintage position to talk about it like a mother regaling her young ones with moonlight tales to keep the communal ethos alive. ‘Nwoke Nụchaa Ọgụ, Nwanyị Enwere akụkọ’ therefore provides her such rare opportunity to summon to her aid war narratives Nigerian men fought some 55 years ago for which she has owned a part of the narrative in her own works.
‘Fact & Fiction in the Literature of the Nigerian Civil War’ in 1992 is perhaps her first foray in writing war literature, which would seem like testing the waters in critical writing perspectives before creative fiction came handy. And in 2011 she would publish a full length novel, Roses and Bullets; that was some 51 years after the Nigerian Civil War in what has easily become Nigeria’s never-ending war narrative literature. The novel has been renamed A Million Bullets and A Rose and published in the UK. Other civil war novels and memoirs have since come out of Nigeria, with the most recent being Chigozie Obioma’s The Road to the Country (2024) and Uwem Akpan’s New York, My Village (2021). Others are Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a yellow Sun (2006), Onuorah Nzekwu’s Troubled Dust (2012). Of course, not to mention ancestor Chinua Achebe’s Girls at War and Other Stories, a collection of short stories centred on the war that raged for 30 long months and decimated millions of lives.
While it may bot be easy to have a glimpse of what Adimora-Ezeigbo will speak about, it’s instructive that the organisers settled for an excellent choice to speak on the chosen topic for obvious reasons. Adimora-Ezeigbo’s profile says it all. She is not an innocent bystander in war literature or narratives. As a youth in Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War, Adimora-Ezeigbo was part of the corps that ensured orderliness in her own part of the breakaway country. This important work in the thick of war enabled her gain unfettered and illuminating access to aspects of the war that she would later write about in both fiction and critical essays.
If anything, Obioma gives Agnes primal agency not seen before in war writing in The Road to the Country. Having lost her husband to mad rioters in Makurdi before the war, Agnes returns to Biafra and goes on the quest to avenge her husband at the warfront. She picks up gun like every other man and heads for the battle front where she dodges as many bullets from the enemy as she fires at them. Obioma is perhaps the first novelist to put a gun in a woman’s hands in Nigerian Civil War literature. Agnes would distinguish herself as a soldier and lover in the thick of war and would be consumed in it like other male soldiers.
These works and more will afford Adimora-Ezeigbo materials to tease out her speech; they will provide her a handle to give unique perspective to ‘A Critique of War, Memories and Power in the Reimagination of Igbo Historical Narratives’. Of course, ‘Igbo historical narratives’ go beyond the civil war, but it’s the war that ‘reimagination’ has been most keen and also where ‘memories’ most acute, and which has collectively coalesced into a potent literary offering that the world thirsts for, with alternative narrative voices like those of Akpan and Nimi Wariboko (Songs of Childhood: Biafra War Memories – poetry), both from the Niger Delta that have added a deeper, multi-layered, nuanced dimension to what some have called ‘the danger of a single’ war stories by writers of Igbo extraction. Akpan and Wariboko provide another dimension to the civil war fictional narrative that reflects the suffering minorities were subjected when they fell under Biafra soldiers’ control before they were ‘liberated’ by the federal army to resume another kind of ‘suffering’. Other memoirs in this category include Nestor Udo’s Civil War Children and Dr. Albert Ekop’s The Tailor, a war doctor who mended shrapnel-torn human flesh like a skilled tailor, thereby encountering the worst of soldiers from both sides of the war divide.
Prof. Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo
