Tab Article

Every life is a story. Some stories are painted in bright colours of privilege, comfort, and ease. Mine, however, began in shadows — a tapestry woven with pain, hunger, loss, sickness and rejection. Yet, even in those shadows, a faint light flickered, and that light was hope. The earliest days of my life were marked not by the warmth of a mother’s embrace but by the cold, unfamiliar grip of loss. I was born into the fire of war — the Biafran war — and into a family that was already wounded by sorrow. My mother, Nnennaya Nnochiri Chigbundu, passed away only a few months after giving birth to me. She was my father’s sixth wife. I never knew her face until decades later, when a cousin uncovered a faded photograph. For more than half a century, I carried no memory of the woman who bore me — only a hollow absence I was born into a polygamous household of thirteen wives. My mother, Nnennaya, died just months after bringing me into this world. I never saw her face until fifty-five years later, when my cousin, Uchechi Ogbonnaya, found an old, torn photograph. That discovery was bittersweet — joy at finally seeing her, sorrow at what I had been denied all those years. My father, Chief Johnson Nnochiri Chigbundu, was a wealthy merchant before the war, trading in stockfish, salt, and transportation. But by the time I was old enough to know him, life was already unravelling. The war had stripped him of much, and illness crept in like a thief. Yet, in the darkness of that absence, a flicker of love refused to go out. That love came from my father, Chief Johnson Nnochiri Chigbundu. He was not only a wealthy merchant before the war — trading in stockfish, salt, and running transportation — he was also a man of fierce determination. After my mother’s death, people advised him to send me away to a motherless babies’ home. It would have been the easier path for him, a man already burdened with thirteen wives and many children, and now a war threatening the very fabric of survival. But he said no. He chose me. That decision of choosing me changed the course of my life: He kept me by his side, inseparable from him until his last breath.