My Father’s Daughter by Onyeka Onwenu : A Review

 



Book Publisher: Expand Press Limited, Lagos  

Date of Publication: 2020 

 

Rare is a published memoir by a Nigerian musician. Lady Onyeka Onwenu has served the reading public with this intriguing insight into her life. To her long-time fans, the title “Lady” may come as a surprise to many who have followed her over the decades, she is known simply as “Onyeka.   


My earliest memory of Onyeka is watching her on television circa 1983, in her much younger days, roll across the bonnet of a black Rolls Royce car, singing away (or probably more accurately, miming away) a song that I can’t remember, but easily outshining the Spirit of Ecstasy, the sculpture that adorns Rolls Royce bonnets. It was a sensual dance, one can say with the benefit of hindsight, but my childish brain thought, “Hmm, that’s a very playful person. I should marry her. Evidently, by the time, Onyeka was aware of “the power of Kpongem” — the power of a “firm backside” which she proclaims in her memoirs was passed down the family line from the maternal roots. After all, this was the 1980s, when Kris Okotie implored whoever was so inclined to show him their backside, long before he became a Pentecostal pastor. A fan of her music was created after sightings of that music video. The first music album I bought with my own money — her self-titled 1990 album “Onyeka”, sponsored by Benson & Hedges, the cigarette brand.  


Onyekachi Akuchukwu Onwenu was born in Obosi, on the 29th of January 1952 to schoolteacher and politician Dixon Kanu (DK) Onwenu and Hope Onwenu aka Sister, who was a teacher and trader. Onyeka takes us through her early childhood memories, growing up in Port Harcourt as her father’s favourite daughter, and her evolution into a proud independent, feminist Igbo woman and one of Nigeria’s most easily recognizable celebrities.  


“I am a feminist because I am a woman who is blessed, talented, hardworking, and imbued with the strong belief that I can contribute my quota to make the world a better place…Being a woman does not make me the weaker sex, she writes firmly, for the avoidance of doubt for those doubtful of her stance on women’s rights.    


“My Father’s Daughter” is an autobiography filled with previously unknown things about Onyeka. The most defining moment in Onyeka’s life was the tragic loss of her father when she was four years and eleven months old. The loss of that son of Arondizuogu village in a car accident; he was an elected member of the Federal House of Representatives under the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC). “Most times, when death calls, it gives no warning. It does not give you time to prepare. It burrows through the door of your house like the typical unwanted guest,” Onyeka muses. Her vivid narration of the day he died and burial show that the memory is deeply implanted. Her attribution of his death to what is popularly regarded in Nigeria as “diabolical means” is no less riveting. The mantle of steering the young family subsequently fell on Onyeka’s mother, Hope Onwenu, daughter of the Nwokoyes of Obosi. Onyeka also details her mother’s pitiable struggles as a thirty-seven year old widow in 1950s Port Harcourt, dodging the wiles of “big men” who either wanted to marry her or have her sell her late husband’s property to them at giveaway prices.  


Onyeka lived through the Nigerian Civil War which commenced when she was fifteen. “The world has no conscience,” her mother’s cousin lamented to her during the war, as they sought refuge, migrating across towns like millions of other south-easterners, to avoid Nigerian army troops, who from all accounts, did not often distinguish between south-eastern civilians and actual Biafran combatants when they carried out extrajudicial killings. “Two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, the fires died down. Yet, the ashes continue to smoulder in my memories,” she writes. In lucid language, she contends that the war caused a loss of innocence and morality in her home region. “For many, everything became about money…The natural Igbo inclination for collective progress was soon replaced by ruthless individualism,” she avers in lucid language, comparing life before and after the war.  


In 1971, she visited Lagos, the then capital city of Nigeria, for the first time, before her imminent departure to the United States of America for further education; her formal education was suspended during the war. As if the universe, in its ever mischievous method, was informing her of a future career in music, she recounts a fortuitous meeting with Fela Anikulapo-Kuti who pulled alongside her on the streets of Surulere and invited her to his nightclub; an invitation that she accepted but admits to not having any intentions of fulfilling even on the spot. 

“Stepping into the dining hall, dressed in an Ankara trouser and top, I was immediately aware that all eyes were on me,” Onyeka writes about her first days at the Baldwin School, Pennsylvania, a prep school she attended prior to proceeding to Wellesley College, Massachusets, where she studied International Relations and Communication. As is the common experience of emigres of the day, she remarks with slight amusement on the shock of her western classmates about her “spoken English and overall academic performance.”  


Onyeka serves up interesting and hilarious anecdotal encounters with international and Nigerian political figures and entertainment celebrities. There’s an unintended interruption of a conversation between the bemused spouse of Yasser Arafat and Hilary Clinton, herself a Wellesley College alumnus; her meetings and relationship with Winnie Mandela, wife of Nelson, for whom she wrote and dedicated an eponymous song that was performed when the famous man visited Lagos in 1990, just after his release after twenty-seven years of incarceration by South Africa’s Apartheid government.  


An entire chapter is dedicated to recollections of meetings and relationships with notable Nigerian figures. She explores her relationships with other female Nigerian musicians and the travails they had to suffer in a largely conservative society where women are supposed to be seen and not heard. She recounts the innuendos, especially of a sexual nature, spread about her, and other female musicians, simply to smear their reputations because they refused to do as they were told. “If you must date someone, do so because you want to, but not for political or financial reward,” she advises women, young and old. It may surprise many old timers to know that Christy Essien-Igbokwe, the “lady of songs” and Onyeka’s assigned rival number one (assigned by fans of both singers), shared a close friendship. The late Tyna Onwudiwe (African Oyibo and also alleged to be a one-time lover of Charly Boy Oputa) also had an intense friendship with Onyeka. Onwudiwe shared a flat in Surulere after Onyeka quit her job at the United Nations and decided to return to Nigeria to put her energy where her mouth was, all based on a chance encounter with another Nigerian who chastised her for being an arm chair critic pillorying the nation from the safety of the comfortable offices of the UN   


A “stern” encounter with former Nigerian president, the late Shehu Shagari, “usually soft spoken” leaves her surprised.  


“You this Squandering of Riches woman,” she says were his first words to her. It was an allusion to a 1984 BBC documentary she presented, which focused on corruption and maladministration under the civil rule during the Second Republic. The documentary features the young Onyeka and Tyna Onwudiwe dancing vigorously with the cheerful abandon of happy youths in a Nigeria that was not exactly what they desired, but was, from all accounts, better than the one in which she has written the book. She laments that the migration pattern is now predominantly westwards, as young Nigerians move to the west to fulfil their potentials. 


There is a second meeting with Fela Kuti circa 1985 who surprise, surprise asked her to marry him, a proposal she rejected on the spot. There is a #MeToo moment with Sonny Okosuns yes, of the famous “Papa’s Land” anti-Apartheid freedom chant whom she accuses of ungentlemanly conduct in an alleged quest to get her to show gratitude for helping her to record her first album at EMI International’s famous Abbey Road, London studios, where famous musical acts like the Beatles recorded. There are hints at financial malfeasance on Okosuns’s part; he negotiated her recording deal with EMI International, terms of which she insists she was never made fully aware of due to naivety and doing music at the time as a hobby.  


The rumours of a romantic dalliance with King Sunny Ade, juju music maestro, receive severe dismissal. They were so widespread that even General Ibrahim Babangida, the then Nigerian military president, was compelled to inqure from her if they were true. “Even you?” she recalls asking the man. Onyeka insists that the relationship with Sunny Ade did not go beyond the professional boundaries of recording the hit songs, “Choices” and “Wait For Me”.     


Onyeka dishes on her love life, describing a teenage crush that was lost and ruefully expresses regret at some point about what might have been. She describes falling in love and being the live-in-lover of “a Yoruba Muslim” she met in 1984, at the time she had just come onto fame and fortune as a singer. In a move guaranteed to elicit admirable nods from privacy-philes, and reactions of disbelief from many of today’s young generation, her (now ex-) husband’s name and pictures are completely absent from the book. She attributes this to an agreement they reached early not to share their relationship with the world. In these days of active over-sharing, by celeb and non-celeb alike, this is uncommon. For years, the “junk media” of the eighties, at the height of her fame, hounded her about the identity of her husband. The closest she disclosed was her children’s identity, not only in the book, but in an interview from the late 1980s with the now defunct Weekend Concord, owned by Chief MKO Abiola. 


Like DK Onwenu, Onyeka Onwenu, could not escape the lure of political involvement. She explains her role in the “One Million Man March” organized in 1998 to encourage military dictator, Sani Abacha, to “run” for the office of president. “I did not acknowledge Abacha in whatever capacity. I made no comments other than to wish the Super Eagles the best of luck at France ’98,” she insists. That single episode of her appearance at the march marred her estimation in the minds of many of her fans. It was considered a monumental betrayal by die-hard supporters of the then imprisoned Chief MKO Abiola, winner of the annulled June 12, 1993 presidential election. She admits that Abiola was often a financial benefactor of hers who made public showings of his support of her musical career. Another national figure she hobnobbed with and campaigned for (she wrote and performed a song for his 2011 presidential campaign “Run, Goodluck Run), ex-president Dr Goodluck Jonathan, appointed her as the director-general of the National Centre for Women Development, Abuja. The public space, online and offline, is filled with complaints persona while she held sway at the centre, with some describing her as an arrogant and inconsiderate boss. Her own account of her tenure at the National Centre for Women Development is so filled with drama, it is worthy of a television series all by itself.  


Lady Onyeka Onwenu, the elegant stallion, singer, actress, administrator, business woman, will always be a part of the memory of generations of Nigerians “of a certain age”, and perhaps of the younger ones who saw her turn as the diabolical mother in the movie adaptation of the novel “Half Of A Yellow Sun” by Chimamanda Adichie. Her songs will linger in the nation’s artistic memory, as will images of her with her low cut afro, white patch just above her forehead, will accompany the memories of those musical classics. The image of the author on the back cover of the first edition may throw longtime fans aback somewhat the black braids certainly surprised this writer! Her politics has divided, and will continue to divide her fans, and maybe non-fans. One thing may well be beyond question to the curious reader My Father’s Daughter” is a well-written recollection of a most interesting life.


Rating: Five out of five stars

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