In the world of History, there are two kinds of historians: those who narrate history, and those who make history while narrating it! Professor Nwando Achebe is the latter—one of the few daughters of Africa to attain the status of full Professor at a Research 1 University, due to the dint of her hard work and research. By taking the less-travelled road of chronicling the histories of African women to carve the distinct path of her scholarship, she has evolved history into herstory.
I am endeavouring to talk about one of Africa’s greatest children, who was formally robed on September 22nd with both the vestment and “skin” of academic attainment along with the challenge to do even more. So, how does one begin to talk about the achievements of someone whose contributions to historical scholarship are a work of history in themselves? Indeed, how best can one capture the excellence of the scholarship of Professor Nwando Achebe, a scion of great storytellers of Africa, who has distinguished herself in her own right by forging also her own path of storytelling in the often treacherous terrain that we call academia?
For those of us who talk for a living, sometimes finding the right words to convey the profundity of a moment such as this can be difficult. It is neither because word has failed us nor just because word can ever fail even us; it is mostly because, at times like this one, language itself teases us. Words challenge us to find enough of its component parts to express the depth of the overwhelming emotion that one senses on a day like this one. Consequently, we search for the right words and, as soon as they are spoken, we realize our feelings are even more intense. Therefore, please forgive me, my colleagues and fellow Africans if, when you read this piece, you sense that my words still do not adequately convey the import of what we are celebrating. What I underscore today can only transport a fraction of the pride and admiration I genuinely feel for Professor Nwando Achebe, a Scholar’s Scholar! Whatever is deficient about my abilities to fully swoop the magnitude of this moment into a few minutes’ tribute (just as the swift hawk swoops down on a chick for its meal), time and history will make up for it as the academy registers the weight of her contributions to global history and scholarship in the years to come; in the end, history will absorb her.
The late and legendary Chinua Achebe once said “It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have – otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.” Derek Walcott’s endorsement of this line of thinking is, in fact, very dense: “Time is the metre, memory the only plot.” Since I don’t have the literary license to add an exclamation after Walcott’s “plot,” I won’t do it now! However, the more I ponder on the words of these two great literary giants and intellectuals, the deeper their embedded truth resonates with me. The storyteller defines a culture, people, and their history, while taking liberty with the “metre” of that past and time to generate a series of plots. The storyteller, coupled with the historian, is the one who ensures that the children of the survivors of catastrophic historical events can rise from the rubbles of the past and, like the Biblical Nehemiah, embark on the project of the restoration of the present.
Dr. Nwando Achebe embodies the political task with which the historian is imbued by the scope of her research in African history. As we all know, her area of specialization is women, gender, and sexuality and, on those scores, she has delivered excellently. In the process, she has deployed her robust intellectual energy to tell the stories of African women that would have otherwise been tucked away in dusty archives and women’s oral history that have declined, according to the order of nature. She has revived the memories of these women of our past and we, the descendants of those women, can walk taller. Prof. Achebe’s scholarship has created a memory for us to know the paths our mothers have once walked. Now we too can forge our own paths with the light the historian has provided, rather than be mere shadows in the light of others. Her work reminds us to honour women.
Endowed Professor Nwando Achebe’s first book showed women in their multifaceted contours. Entitled Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland, 1900-1960, the book confronts the age-long belief that the Igbo had no kings. In a jarring confrontation of this belief, Farmers, Traders, Warriors and Kings, does explore the northern part of Igboland where the idea of Igbo kings was not an aberration, but in fact, they had female kings! Contrary to the stereotypical depiction of African women as passive and eternally dependent on male strength, women in these areas served as warriors and some of them even took on traditionally male roles by marrying other women themselves. This book throws into relief the complexity of socio-political interactions, spiritual principles, local customs, and the gender politics of pre-colonial Igboland. Her study of the triadic phase of African colonial history—pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial—yielded valuable insights into the place of gender in African thought, indeed, in such a way that Western feminist scholarship, which has dominated the field, has not been sufficiently analyzed.
Her second book, The Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe, continued in her activist scholarship of telling women’s own stories. Prof. Achebe excavates the story of a woman, Ahebi Ugbabe, who became a king in colonial Nigeria, not just a Queen by British tradition for the female royalty, a study that provides the fascinating trajectory that led her to the throne. Like the exiling to the Seychelles of the Asante royalty by the British back in the then-named Gold Coast (now called Ghana since 1957), Ugbabe was also exiled from Igboland, to become during her banishment, an adventurer who travelled far across cultures. She took up prostitution and along the way, she learned many languages as well. Ugbabe would eventually become a king with the support of the network of friendship and power she developed along the course of her travels and eventual odyssey. This critical biography shares numerous insights into a female’s route to gendered power and authority in the colonial history of Nigeria, similar to how the lives and times of the Asantehene (or King of Asante in Ghana) has enriched the cultural history of neighbouring Ghana.
Indeed, in the recognition of the sterling work of scholarship Dr. Achebe invested in this book, she was awarded the 2012 Gita Chaudhuri Prize by The Western Association of Women Historians, the 2012 Barbara “Penny” Kanner Prize (Western Association of Women Historians) Winner, and the 2013 Aidoo-Snyder Book Award of the African Studies Association Women’s Caucus.
Time and dwindling space will not permit me to continue talking about all of the other excellent published works by Prof. Nwando Achebe; for, she is not only a researcher par excellence, but also a distinguished writer as well, indeed a fine chip from the old block. From the time she completed her Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Los Angeles, having studied with some of the best historical minds of that institution, she has distinguished herself by showing that a rolling stone gathers no moss, hence staying at MSU this long; she has also shown distinction in the field of African (or Africana) Studies. Our dear Professor Nwando Achebe has written many refereed and popular articles on contemporary issues, particularly about women in Nigeria, with many more works to be published soon. She has also delivered more than a hundred invited and endowed lectures in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, China, and Portugal (where she and her distinguished mother, Professor Christine Achebe, co-presented a recognition to her distinguished father in celebrating 50 years of Things Fall Apart). A public intellectual to be reckoned with, Prof. Achebe also regularly makes contributions in the media via TV, podcasts, newspapers, and high school books. She is currently serving as a member of the African Studies Association’s Board of Directors and is past co-Convenor of the ASA’s Women Caucus. She is also the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of West African History. Additionally, she has been the recipient of several research grants, including from the Rockefeller Foundation, the Fulbright-Hays Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, amongst others.
I join in celebrating Prof. Achebe as she is awarded The Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professorship of History at Michigan State University (MSU). We are celebrating a woman whose research embodies one of the most beautiful names we give our children in the south eastern part of Nigeria–Nkolika, the female name that means “remembering is supreme.” Our fathers gave their daughters this name because, just like what the great storyteller (Chinua Achebe, himself) once said about historians, they create the memory that forms the arsenals of those who have survived history. Historians like Prof. Nwando Achebe, often rare breeds, make us remember, and because remembering is supreme, we know the paths we have walked before. We know where we want to go, and how we should remember today for tomorrow. We owe it all to historians, or as in this case, the herstorians, including Professor Nwando Achebe; the women and, indeed, scholars like her, who help us to remember through the histories of the women they narrate. And, above all, in relating this history and the stories of these women, Prof. Nwando Achebe (as the creator) makes her own history in academia and outside of it as well.
Congratulations, indeed!
- Prof. Falola of University of Texas at Austin
