White Nigerian Americans from my village!
John and Mark Dunaway, the last two sons of an American missionary gentleman, were born in Nigeria. (According to the Nigerian constitution, people who were born in Nigeria before October 1, 1960 are considered Nigerian citizens even if their parents can’t trace their ancestral provenance to any part of what is now Nigeria). And they […]
John and Mark Dunaway, the last two sons of an American missionary gentleman, were born in Nigeria. (According to the Nigerian constitution, people who were born in Nigeria before October 1, 1960 are considered Nigerian citizens even if their parents can’t trace their ancestral provenance to any part of what is now Nigeria). And they consider Okuta in the Borgu area of Kwara State to be their hometown. Their fondest childhood memories are located there. Their formative years were incubated there. And the people they consider their best childhood friends are still there. So that makes them my fellow townsmen, my white Nigerian American townsmen.
Although the Dunaway family left Nigeria in the late 1960s, their legacy endures in our hometown to this day. My extended family especially has fond memories of this wonderful family. I’ve been fed with stories of the Dunaways since I was a child. My dad, a retired Islamic Studies/Arabic teacher, and my granddad, who passed away in 1993 at the age of 125, always had nice stories to share with us about the white American missionary family who were more immersed in our culture than was thought possible for white people; whose matriarch, Mrs. Dunaway, spoke better Batonu than many native speakers of the language. I had never imagined for a split second that I could ever get to meet any member of the Dunaway family. But by a stroke of serendipity, I got to meet John and Mark here in Atlanta!
One day in 2005, while in Louisiana, I decided on a whim to search my last name on Google. And it turned out that one of the matches I got was an article by a John Dunaway. The article made several references to members of my extended family. I eagerly clicked on the link to the article. I think John was recounting his most recent visit to Okuta after a long while hiatus. Immediately after reading the article I went to the “Contact Us” page of the Web site where the article was posted and sent off an email to the owner of the site requesting that he give me the email address of John Dunaway.
A few days later, I got a response. It turned out that the owner of the site, Anthony Dunaway, was John’s son. I told him I was a member of the Kperogi family that his dad wrote about and would like to establish contact with him. He forwarded my email to his dad who took longer than expected to get back to me. He later told me that when his friends saw his excitement upon reading my email, they cautioned him to be wary of Nigerian 419 scammers. Although he trusted his hunch that I was real, he decided to heed his friends’ advice. He waited to see if I would shoot him another email.
I did—through his son again. I wrote that I was the grandson of the Kperogi who was a friend to his dad. He was convinced. So he responded. From then on, we constantly spoke on the phone and immediately hit it off. As fate would have it, in 2006, I relocated to Atlanta where John and his family lived. He was ecstatic—as I was.
We became family friends and would often vicariously relive experiences growing up in Okuta. I met his wife and son and later his younger brother, Mark, who introduced himself to me as “Sabi,” the generic Batonu name for the second son in a family. Incredibly, John and Mark still spoke an appreciable smattering of the Batonu language and sang our local songs with near-native proficiency.
Rather strangely, in the times we got together, I felt more comfortable in their company than I ever felt with Nigerians I’ve met here. John would often invite me to their home to celebrate Christmas, New Year, and Thanksgiving. When my wife and daughter visited in 2007 and 2008, we visited each other constantly. Mark’s first daughter, who was only 12 when we first met, already knew so much about Nigeria and my hometown. She told me her greatest desire was to visit Nigeria someday and see the place of her dad’s birth.
The story of the Dunaway family’s coming to Nigeria is an intriguing one. The older Dunaway was originally from the racially volatile state of Mississippi in southern United States. By John’s account, his dad, like most white Mississippians at the time, nursed a lot of racial animosity towards black Americans. Then one day, he was told that he had been called by God to be a church minister. Although he’d never wanted to be a church minister, he said he had no problems with the call if it won’t require him to minister to black folks in America.
Well, after his seminary training, he was told that he would be sent to some derelict village called Okuta in a malarious African desert in the predominantly Muslim Borgu division of northern Nigeria. This was in the late 1940s. He was devastated. But, John told me, the older Dunaway consoled himself by saying God must be telling him something.
Till he died in Zimbabwe, John told me his dad’s greatest joy was being in the company of black people. (He was denied a visa to return to Nigeria, with which he totally fell in love, because Yakubu Gowon determined that he had sympathies for the Biafran cause). His wife, who was a nurse, also loved black children with a passion. Both husband and wife shed their southern racist upbringing and embraced the common humanity that binds us all.
To be concluded next week