By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu
It was sometime in late
1991. Uniformed soldiers were still in power in Nigeria. Somewhere in Orlu, in
the then Imo State, kinsmen called a meeting with a rather curious agenda. They
were worried that one of their sons, a young lawyer, was wasting his talents on
opposing military rule and taking government to court, when soldiers wielded
power through the gun.
It sounded dangerous. This
meeting was called so the kinsmen would decide on how to get him to become a
more responsible lawyer. If he refused, they told his father, they would make
arrangements to remove him from the far-away city where he resided and get him
closer to home where he could be prevailed upon to listen to his elders.
At the back of the room,
unseen by all the men, a woman had eavesdropped on much of the conversation.
The young lawyer whose work was the reason for the meeting was her former
student. Convinced the meeting was pointless, she decided to take matters into
her hands. In seconds, she drifted quietly into the meeting room with some
refreshments for the men. In an audible whisper, dropped with just the right
dose of deference that the society required women to reserve for such
gatherings, she asked the men whether they had considered that the person that
they were discussing about was an adult who could take decisions for himself.
Before they could notice
her, she had disappeared, leaving behind the refreshments that she knew they
desired. The question was probably not designed to elicit an answer. After all,
this was a meeting of kinsmen to which married women were not allowed. But it
had exactly the effect that she desired it to have – the meeting was
practically over.
Over a lifetime of living
with patriarchy in the south-east of Nigeria, this female teacher, school
manager and mother had become a quietly effective advocate against some of its
most extreme tendencies with a mix of subtlety, stubbornness and calculated
risk-taking.
She was born in March 1945
in the old Orlu Division of what would later become the Eastern Region of Nigeria,
the first child of a Warrant Chief, Ogueze Agha, who named her Ihunnaya,
meaning “the face of her father”. Her father, a produce trader, who had
received no formal education, desired to redress that deficiency with his
children. It was an era in which young girls were taught that their most
elevated ambitions were to be wives and mothers. In primary school, she
excelled, skipping the first year and being admitted as an eight year-old into
the second. After four years, her local girls-only school run my Catholic
Missionaries had no more classes left. Young girls were not supposed, it
seemed, to go beyond four years of basic education. The few who desired to had
to transfer to another girls-only school a considerable distance away.
12 year-old Ihunnaya had
some decisions to make. Some comfortable traders were already interested in her
as a wife. Child marriage was rife and real. She told them where to get off. In
the same year, 1957, she became baptized as a Catholic, taking the name
Anthonia (after Saint Anthony of Padua, the Patron Saint of lost items). But
there was the small matter of her education. She convinced her father to
accompany her to the local boys-only school where they persuaded the school
management to turn the school co-educational and admit her to complete the last
two years of primary education. At the new school, the boys taunted her,
telling her repeatedly that her place was in the kitchen not in school. As
their punishment, she became the best student in the school, leaving primary
school as the valedictorian.
Over two decades beginning
from 1962 and lasting through a civil war, post-war reconstruction and
mothering ten of her own children, Ihunnaya built a career in education as a
teacher, schools manager and social justice and reproductive health advocate
for women.
Her primary concern was
with patriarchy and equipping women to create safe spaces for themselves in
contexts in which such spaces were rare and opportunities for leisure and
renewal for women did not exist. When she got married in 1964, she recalled,
the leadership of the local Christian Women’s Organisation (CWO), was in the
hands of two men as if the women were children, incapable of organizing or
leading themselves. To make it a women’s organization, she led the women to
organize and wrest leadership from the men.
It was a concern that would
inform her life-long investment in reproductive health education for rural
women. She traveled long distances teaching women the importance of having the
skills to manage the burdens of family sizes, child spacing, and numbers.This
commitment came from hard lessons learnt from her brutal experience from having
had and raised 10 children of her own.
Patriarchy, she argued, did
not invent or replicate itself. It was enabled by family systems that made boys
entitled to expect service from girls and women happy to see themselves as
vassals and vessels for reproduction. So, she decided that all her children
would receive life skills in cooking, cleaning, home management and
child-minding. A roster for domestic chores ensured that all her children took
turns in doing all of these. As a teacher, she said, the first test of her
skills was with her children. All of them would also become her pupils or
students through school.
Diagnosed with illness that
would ultimately prove terminal a little over five years ago, Ihunnaya decided
to defer her own treatment in order to nurse her husband who was then ailing.
By the time of his burial in January 2016 her own diagnosis turned out to be a
malignant metastasis. Given less than one year to survive, she said she had one
final class to teach and set about writing the story of her life with
patriarchy. In the event, she beat the doctors’ prognosis by well over two
years.
It all began really over a
pivotal eight-year period from 1957 to 1964, when Ihunnaya became in succession
a Christian, a teacher, a wife and a mother. To her, these roles were all part
of a coherent system of values formation, which only made sense if they were
placed at the disposal of serving others and making the world better for those
whom we meet along the way.
I was one of the most
privileged whom she met along the way: Ihunnaya was my mother, my teacher and
my most committed advocate. On 19 February, I kissed her forehead and her feet,
knowing that would be the last time I saw her alive. The following day, she
received the final rites from my brother, Obinna, a Catholic Priest. Within 36
hours, on 22 February, she breathed her last. On 29 March 2019, her mortal remains
will be committed to earth.
