Journeying to the seeds of slavery in Ngozi Achebe’s Onaedo: The Blacksmith’s Daughter
felt like I had journeyed back to the seed, when I began to read Ngozi Achebe’s NLNG prize shortlisted novel Onaedo: the Black Smith’s Daughter (AfricAgenda, 2010). The novel is partially set in the fictional village of Abonani, Igbo land, in the 16th century, about 300 years earlier than the setting of Things Fall Apart […]
felt like I had journeyed back to the seed, when I began to read Ngozi Achebe’s NLNG prize shortlisted novel Onaedo: the Black Smith’s Daughter (AfricAgenda, 2010). The novel is partially set in the fictional village of Abonani, Igbo land, in the 16th century, about 300 years earlier than the setting of Things Fall Apart (Heinemann, 1958), the novel by Ngozi Achebe’s famous uncle Chinua Achebe. Onaedo takes us back to near the beginning of the coastal encounter between Guinea Coast dwellers and Portuguese traders—back before colonialism, before the trans-Atlantic slave route had grown large, before “Europe underdeveloped Africa.” In the novel we see an equal encounter between two civilizations—both with their cities and politics and arts and trade. This was the era when the Christian king of Kongo sent his son on a diplomatic mission to the Portuguese king. And in Delta City on the coast of Guinea few generations before, a daughter of a Delta nobleman was banished inland to Abonani by her father because she chose to love a Portuguese merchant sailor rather than marry the heir of the Delta throne.
Like “Journey to the Seed,” the historical portion of the novel is embedded within in a more contemporary frame. The novel begins in 1999 in the United States. Maxine, a recently divorced writer, has conflicted memories of her father, an Igbo student who thirty years before had abandoned his studies and his American family to go back and fight for Biafra. As Maxine waits for her father to arrive in Philadelphia on a visit, she picks up a copy of her recently published book, which retells stories written by a Brazilian slave four centuries earlier. Maxine had discovered the slave’s ancient diaries at a neighbor’s rummage sale. Although she had long felt distant from her father and her father’s country, the diaries thrust her far deeper into her background than she had ever expected to go. Maxine’s story fades into that of Onaedo, the beloved daughter of Abonani’s most respected blacksmith, and the great granddaughter of the rebellious Niger Delta woman who chose a stranger over social prestige.
Achebe vividly brings to life characters of over 400 years ago: the beautiful headstrong Onaedo, with her love for the poor apprentice Dualo; the arrogant Oguebie who keeps coming between the lovers; Onaedo’s best friend Adanma with her irrepressible crush on Onaedo’s married older brother; Onaedo’s mother Ugodi, with her close and sometimes testy relationship with her sister Aku. If Chinua Achebe’s novels tell history from a man’s perspective, Ngozi Achebe describes life in a historical Igbo village mostly from a woman’s perspective, subversively undermining the assumptions of a static “traditional” society unquestionably ruled by men. Onaedo’s mother has a soap making business and is a proud holder of the ozo title. Her aunt Aku, a seer, a healer and a midwife, questions the society’s rejection of twins. Onaedo’s sister-in-law offers her kola and jokes about the supposed taboo on women breaking kola nut. “Let them come and catch me.”
As the novel begins to wind down towards a happy ending, there is an abrupt change. The slave trade breaks in on a society that was modernizing in much the same way Europe of the time was. Achebe’s novel shows us the beginnings—the shift from a friendly equal exchange of goods to trade in slaves, the greedy traitors who help provoke wars so as to more easily kidnap slaves, the beginning of Europe’s subjugation of Africa. Onaedo and her family find themselves caught up in heart break, as the novel transitions from the inland Abonani to the coastal Delta City to the Portuguese island colony of Sao Tome in the Gulf of Guinea.
Most of the other novels of slavery I have read have been written about descendents of slaves already in the land of slavery. Achebe’s novel, on the other hand, is more like the beginning of Oluadah Equiano’s 18th century memoir, describing his life at home before his capture. Achebe’s heart is clearly with Abonani. She lingers over the happy story, the description of the dignified ordinary lives of people in this 16th century Igbo town. About three quarters of the book takes place in this setting. Life in Sao Tome is telescoped, on fast forward. We see our characters’ encounters with Christianity—attempts to reconcile the Catholic Virgin Mary with the Igbo earth goddess Ani, the creole culture that develops as slaves from many African cultures interact on a sugarcane plantation.
Perhaps because she is writing of the early days of Portuguese slavery, Achebe writes with fewer of the harsh binaries of good and evil presented by novelists of slavery in the “New World.” She explores a complex mix of characters. There are the clear villains—the hard-drinking, murderous Portuguese slaver Alvarez; the greedy, adulterous Oguebie; the cruel, leering plantation overseer Marco. But then, there are also the more ambiguous characters: Pasquale, the Portuguese trader who dreams of starting a printing press back in his hometown. He is tempted into the dirty slave trade in an attempt to make some quick money. The kind Padre Joao, a Catholic priest, knows slavery is wrong but is caught up in the structures of Portuguese imperialism. He tries to alleviate the worst excesses, but never directly challenges the rapidly developing racial inequalities of the plantation or its extension into the church. Even a womanizing, gambling plantation owner is shown somewhat sympathetically. Achebe, like her uncle, presents her characters with both strengths and flaws and lets us make our own judgments about their moral fiber. It is in the exploration of their lives that she shows the evils of slavery: the heartbreak of families abruptly severed, the tragedy of dreams corrupted by greed, stories cut off before they are finished.
The style of the novel reminds me of the historical romances I used to devour as a teenager. As I read, I kept hoping for the happy ending of those novels, but this was a story determined by the future. We end up back in the frame story of Maxine, whose old neighbor has left her yet another box of diaries from Brazil. By the time we return to the twentieth century, her father has come and gone. This is the part of the novel that feels the scantiest. In a novel so rich with historical description, I wish we were given a bit more time with the contemporary Maxine and her Nigerian father. But, although Achebe does not grant her readers the pleasure of eavesdropping on family reunions, she does give us the hope that we might be reunited with both Maxine and Onaedo in a sequel as they each travel across the Atlantic, one to the East and one to the West, one into the past and one into the future. Separated by centuries, the two women meet in what Alejo Carpentier describes as the “mysteries of the written word” those “black threads” that tangle up fate with history.