Onyeka Onwenu: A neighbour’s recollections

We had just returned to Nigeria from Ghana and were house-hunting. We found a house we liked and in the negotiation phase. But we had heard also how notorious Lagosians could be, selling the same house to two, sometimes even three different people. And so under the cover of night, we went to check out the house, to see it when no developer or agent with the sole aim of profiting off others was there. When we drove through the heavy black gate, we were not expacting to see Onyeka Onwenu. But there she was, sitting on her front balcony in a boubou, enjoying night time breeze and surrounded by plants in the hundreds.

Although we were star-struck, my husband and I, we managed to focus and ask questions about the new development and she allayed our fears. She told us the most reassuring thing the average Nigerian needs. I was in awe of how diligently she attended to each plant. How she knew many of them by their scientific name.

We moved in later. She gave me a plant to nurture. When the plant she gave me died, I could not bring myself to tell her. Compared to her expansive garden, I had one small one and yet couldn’t take care of it. And so I began to avoid her. I exited the gates quickly under the pretense of going for a run or ducked into the house with heavy grocery shopping, tired from work.

One evening, my husband came back home with another plant and said – your celebrity friend said I should give this to you.

She had asked after me when he drove in and said she hadn’t seen me in a while. My husband, in his true unfolded fashion, had said to her “She’s hiding from you, ma. The plant you gave her died.”

I stared at him in disbelief.

“You couldn’t come up with a decent lie for me?” I asked.

“She said I should give you this one and that you must try taking care of it again.” My husband said as he opened the sliding doors to the balcony to place the new pot there.

The next day, I went to thank her for the new plant and she said something to the effect that if we who were humans could be temperamental, why did we expect other creations of God to be docile and pliant?

“Plants have temperament too. You have to figure them out. Some like sun, some don’t. Some prefer shade, not direct sun, some don’t even need water for weeks and they are fine,” she told me.

And thus began a friendship nurtured like her plants, a friendship often interspersed with talks about Nigeria, and the government, and where we bought art from, and what we would do for Nigeria as its upcoming young people.

There’s a familiarity that can breed indifference

A small liberty of disregard. Because of the close proximity, being able to see Onyeka Onwenu through the window, watch her walk through her garden bed and water her plants, it was easy to forget that she was a star. A very big person by Nigerian standard. And whenever I laxed into the perimeters of that familiarity, I was quick to be reminded by a typically innocuous situation just how much weight her person carried.

Like the day an Uber driver drove me home and said out loud after a brief glance to his right. No be Onyeka Onwenu be dat? He did not give me any chance to respond because he ran out of his car in excitement, forgetting to apply the handbrake before running back in again, quickly and then all the way back the drive way to go and prostrate flat to greet her. He must have prostrated nothing less than eight times. Touching the floor and then his chest each time in disbelief. “I’m honoured ma, very honoured ma.” He chanted over and over.

And she smiled, bending towards him each time he did, slightly embarrassed. It was a moment I wished I could capture for the driver’s keepsake. A moment that told the very essence of who Onyeka Onwenu was. A superstar who somehow spent her life taming that stardom, managing to keep it delicately parcel-wrapped in a box she reached into every now and again.

She made meeting and knowing her easy. When you met Onyeka Onwenu, even though she allowed you your brief moment to be star-struck, she immediately after would turn it around quickly to focus on you, making you the centre of the conversation instead. The switch was often effortless, like something she had spent her entire career rehearsing. 40 years is a long enough time in a career to morph into something or someone else but Onyeka was a woman who liked what she liked, stayed resolute to her convictions and made no apologies for it.

She was the type of woman that many people called tough, maybe even difficult. Whenever her name popped up for something on the news or on social media, I would be amazed at the level of privacy she so fiercely created for herself and try to juxtapose the Onyeka Onwenu I had just seen eating a meal or casually chatting with her sons on her balcony with the one on the pages of a newspaper. The quiet legend in some spaces, but the trouble finder in another. The singer of uniting melodies in some spaces.

No one goes through life fighting the demons that Onyeka Onwenu fought in the era that she fought them without coming out tough. But her being a woman meant she was less forgiven for her toughness.

Having escaped a deadly war, perhaps she was paranoid of people, and rightfully so.

She was a woman who had come into her own, fully and often did not give a damn. The sort of woman whose boldness and bravery annoyed the average Nigerian man because she wouldn’t cower to bullying.

In sitting comfortably in that bravery and courage, that ability to stand on business, to stand on what she believed in, she perhaps did not realise that she became the type of Nigerian mummy to aspire to — well educated, fully thinking and well spoken. And when she smiled, her gap-toothed smile, it exumed warmth and home and femininity.

Once, my father (Smollete Shittu-Alamu) was visiting and when I mentioned that Onyeka Onwenu was the neighbour to our left, he looked at me incredulously and said Odindi Onyeka Owenu lo kan fi enu pe baun, which loosely translates to is it a whole Onyeka Onwenu you so casually speak of like that?

He is of the generation of Nigerians familiar with her much older body of work like For the Love of You and In the Morning Light long before popular tracks like You and I, and Wait for Me featuring King Sunny Ade became popular radio and television programme fillers when there was no ongoing show in the 90s.

He had MC’d an event at Trenchard Hall University of Ibadan back in 1984 where she performed to the delight of students of the university.

Some of the old vinyl records I inherited from my father are of Onyeka Onwenu, her voice more poignant and deeply moving in death.

I think about the small things that made her Onyeka. How she covered her food with another plate and waited for it to cool because she didn’t like hot food.

How she said “Oga put on the generator now, do you want us to die of heat?” with poise, even though she was visibly angry at the security man’s lack of proactivity.

How proudly she spoke about working on her book. I consider it a small privilege to have known this detail before the rest of the country and often remember how I let the news of it simmer inside me, a secret between a Nigerian icon and me. A small honour.

How her eyes shone like a little girl when I gifted her a box of chocolate made in Nigeria by my friend.

When I introduced my friend who had recently started her chocolate-making factory, it was Onyeka Onwenu who was star-struck, incredibly impressed at the sight of a young woman attempting such a venture. When she tasted her chocolate, something she admitted was a weakness, especially dark chocolate, she exclaimed aloud – this can match all the fancy ones they sell us from Belgium and Switzerland.

And each time after that, when she asked after my friend, I was struck by the fact that she never said how’s your friend the chocolate seller. Instead, she said how’s your friend the chocolatier. There was a ring to the way she said chocolatier, in that elegant manner with which she often spoke. Choc-la­teur- rolling sweet off her tongue in perfect diction.

I think about how she was harassed and bullied on Twitter for kneeling to greet the sitting president at the time during a presentation in Aso rock. Some said she did it to court favours from him to remain in the position she held as a director of the National Centre for Women Development.

Although kneeling to greet elders and those in authority is not Igbo culture, Onyeka having lived long enough in Lagos, was probably used to doing it. I’m not sure that whatever the difference in opinion, it warranted attacking her in such a manner as she was.

I have since thought about her final moments before passing, some of which played out in front of Nigerians, considering it was at a public event. And it strikes me that one of her final acts, besides the beautiful singing she was well known for was of her kneeling to greet a former presidential aspirant, an Igbo man like her, who by every stretch is far younger than she was.

I don’t necessarily believe in omens but I found an amusing irony in that.

I think of what her own contributions to Nigeria were.

Her incredible work as a journalist. Her purposeful voice on that BBC documentary — A squandering of Riches. What it would have meant to take on so stoicly a country she dearly loved.

To write songs of peace for a land in distress. Songs of regard for women and children.

And then pivoting into acting. A career path she chartered with no fear, channeling the true resilience of her Igbo roots as Mama in ‘Half of a Yellow Sun’. And Genevieve and Phyno’s supportive mummy in ‘Lion Heart’.

Her life’s work served the country that she so dearly loved and I hope that she knew before passing that her nation is incredibly proud of her.

I pray for her sons, Tj and Abe, whom she spoke so proudly and remarkably of and for her family, that as they grieve, the Sun will not stay away for too long and that a brighter day comes soon.

I pray that, collectively as a country, we can all, as her song says, take heart in a new tomorrow.

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