Gloria: Hope out of Adamawa in Abidemi Sanusi’s new memoir of Gloria Kwashi

The publication of a new memoir of a “village girl” from Adamawa whose own education enabled her to provide refuge and education to thousands of other children is timely. Gloria: the Archbishop’s wife is the story of a Nigerian hero, Gloria Kwashi (wife of Anglican Archbishop of Jos, Ben Kwashi), as told to author Abidemi […]

The publication of a new memoir of a “village girl” from Adamawa whose own education enabled her to provide refuge and education to thousands of other children is timely. Gloria: the Archbishop’s wife is the story of a Nigerian hero, Gloria Kwashi (wife of Anglican Archbishop of Jos, Ben Kwashi), as told to author Abidemi Sanusi. The book, published by Hippobooks, an imprint shared by the Christian publishing companies ACTS in Nigeria, Challenge Enterprises in Ghana, WordAlive in Kenya, and Zondervan in the United States, was dedicated at the Ecumenical Centre in Abuja on Tuesday of this week. I read the Amazon Kindle e-book version, but it should be available in ACTS bookshops in Jos by next week and shortly thereafter in their branches around Nigeria. (Unfortunately, although published by a Nigerian publisher, it was hit by the substantial new import tariff on books.)
Sanusi , whose novel Eyo was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Prize in 2010, does a remarkable job of translating her interviews with the Kwashi family into memoir, beautifully capturing the voice of each narrator in stories that made me laugh and made me cry. The book is told mostly in the first person voice of Gloria but also features stories by her husband Ben and several of their children Hannatu, Rinji, and Nendel, as well as a friend Susan Essam.
Gloria grew up in Numan, Adamawa State, the fourth of ten children. Her mother gave birth to her in 1958 on the side of the road near a market. She describes how after cutting her umbilical cord with a sharpened corn stalk, “they washed me down with rain water, wrapped me in rags and carried me back to our village, near Numan town, in a basin.” The infant was so sickly that her mother did not name her, thinking that she would die, but when a Fulani man at the clinic where she had taken the baby heard she had no name, he gave her the name Ladi, since she was born on a Sunday. It was as if the name kept her alive. She answered to “Ladi” her entire childhood until she changed her name to Gloria in college in Yola when she was confirmed in the Lutheran Church. She felt the name, which she took to honour a neighbor, was symbolic for “what I believed… That my life should glorify” God. However, before she became Gloria, her shame at her abject birth followed her through her childhood. She was teased by her siblings for being born on the road. “I have always felt different—like I didn’t belong anywhere,” she narrates. She grew into a stubborn, fiercely independent young woman, who, after caring for her mother in the hospital until her death, applied in 1980 to attend the Theological College of Northern Nigeria (TCNN), in Bukuru. She was the second woman to be admitted into the seminary, and it is here that she met her husband. It is also here that the funniest part of the story appears, and I was roaring with laughter as I read the comedy of errors surrounding the courtship of the romantic young Ben and the prickly, studious young Gloria. As Ben grew in the ranks of the Anglican church, Gloria became involved in theological education for women and girls. After she began to teach her own children at home using the international Accelerated Christian Education (ACE) course, she began to include other children, and now teaches 270 children. She and her husband have also founded dozens of other schools in under-served areas of Plateau State and beyond.
Gloria describes how in 1992 both she and her husband were offered full scholarships to do their doctorate of divinity in the United States. The offer coincided with an offer of the bishopric of the Anglican church to Ben Kwashi. As a reader, I was disappointed when the couple turned down the scholarship to deal with church politics in Jos, but by the end of the book I was a little ashamed of my “selfish” desire for them to “take a break” in the U.S. Their dedication to Nigeria resulted in an impact on their community that blows my mind. From the beginning of their marriage, the couple has taken young people into their home and sent them to school. In the mid-2000s, Gloria intervened in a mismanaged orphanage. Gloria graciously describes the American orphanage director as a “friend,” but the “non-religious” orphanage turned out to be a horrific place. While the director raised money in America, children were abused and went without food in filthy environs. The Kwashi family ended up taking dozens of orphans into their own home. Both Gloria and her husband gently criticize NGO culture, which often seems more interested in grant applications and receipts than providing parental love to abandoned children. The couple are now “the official parents of about three hundred adopted children,” who have lived and are living with them in the bishop’s residence in Jos. Many of the children have previously been abused and traumatized. Some are disabled. The Kwashis put them through school and give them the Kwashi name. When grown, the children go out into the world, no longer orphans. They have a bishop for a father and an angel for a mother.
The trajectory of the book is a hopeful one, but it is not a hope that comes out of privilege or luck, and the narrators admit to their own failings. The Kwashis have faced crises that would have destroyed many other families. In 1987 when their first two children were still babies, their home and church in Zaria was attacked and burned down. On a later assignment in Kaduna, the few possessions the young family had sent ahead to their lodgings were entirely eaten by rats. In 2006 and 2007 in Jos, the family were twice attacked and assaulted by a gang of over thirty assassins who besieged their home with equipment that could cut through their reinforced steel door. The gang took nothing but beat the children and attacked Gloria, blinding her in the process, (later she was able to have surgery to regain her vision) and threatened to kill the bishop. The book also records the extreme poverty that still plagues Nigeria despite its status as the largest economy in Africa: villages where a child orphaned at four raises her two year old sister, abandoned structures in cities where adolescents squat trying to eak out a living.
My internal postcolonial critic sometimes cringes at some of the words the narrators use, “heathen,” “witchdoctor,” but often this language is used with an ironic humour, in the same sentence as “apocalyptic rats.” And there is an earnestness to the narrative matched by the saintly devotion of its narrators that makes it hard to be too critical. One of my main quibbles with the book is the title which subsumes the life of the remarkable Gloria to her role as wife of the archbishop. On the other hand, Archbishop Ben Kwashi signs his forward to the book as “Ben Kwashi, Gloria’s husband,” so perhaps the entwining of their identities in their marriage most accurately reflects the way the couple has supported each other in good work. Gloria Kwashi signs her epilogue with the relationships that define her: “God’s daughter, Mother, Archbishop’s wife.”
Gloria: the Archbishop’s Wife is published by a Christian company and is told from a particularly northern Nigerian Christian perspective for a Christian audience. But it is also a Nigerian story of redemption: of how one family was able to turn poverty and suffering into hope. I hope that Sanusi’s book will inspire others to follow the Kwashis lead in their love for their impoverished neighbor over their own comfort. If only I had fraction of such grace!