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By Onyeka Nwelue
There are moments in life when reputation becomes fragile, institutions become indifferent, and the world seems determined to reduce a complicated human being to a single newspaper headline. In such moments, one discovers an old African truth: when the world turns its back on you, family remembers your face. My family has always been my first institution.
My parents told me that I was born with pubic hair, a family joke that has accompanied me throughout my life. By the age of nine, I was already making money from drawing portraits of wealthy people in my village. They would sit for hours while I sketched them; afterwards, they paid me, and I took the money home to my mother. We were not a family struggling for survival. My father was a prominent politician, Treasurer to the Archbishop of our Province, Head of our clan, and proprietor of the popular Nsu Motel, which eventually became his sobriquet. He belonged to the PDP.
My wider family was similarly accomplished. An uncle served as Chief Press Secretary to successive military and civilian governors of our state. An aunt became Nigeria’s Minister of Mines and Steel Development and is a professor of law in the United States. My maternal grandaunt, Flora Nwapa, occupies an important place in African literary history as one of the pioneering Nigerian women writers published internationally by Heinemann.
Perhaps this explains something fundamental about me: I was raised to regard possibility as normal. At twelve, I entered the seminary and published The Talkative Monkey and the Rabbit. At eighteen, I travelled to India to write The Abyssinian Boy, which was published when I was twenty-one. I later entered university but chose not to pursue a conventional degree for personal reasons. I made films, received awards and eventually published more than fifty books. My life has never followed the prescribed road.
Then came Oxford and Cambridge. I became, as I understand it, the first person to hold Academic Visitor status at both institutions simultaneously. What followed was an extraordinary period of scrutiny. My public statements were dissected; my mistakes were magnified; and sections of the British media became fascinated with my controversies, but when the noise became unbearable, my family did not read the newspapers to discover who I was. They already knew.
I resonate strongly with the maladies that plagued Jason Arday, because I knew him briefly, and when he was made a Professor at Cambridge, I tried to reach out to him to warn him of the possibility of danger. I had been where he was, and I knew how Cambridge could pull a man from riches to rags within the twinkling of an eye; besides, I practice African traditional religion and voodoo; it is quite easy to sense doom.
When British reporting became particularly hostile, relatives called and said, in essence: “We know you from home. Do not bother yourself.”
My mother, recently widowed, flew to Britain. My siblings and cousins came from different parts of the United Kingdom and filled my home in Oxford. At one point, I could barely eat. After medical examinations, I was diagnosed with diabetes.
My mother went to work not in a hospital, but in the ancient profession of motherhood. She would quietly enter my room, ask me to rest my head on her lap, and tell me that everything would be all right. That was my medicine before medicine.
People tried to shame my friends and relatives with material circulating online. My mother’s response was simple; “Only us know the truth.” There is profound wisdom in that sentence.
Institutions can give you titles; newspapers can give you notoriety; universities can give you appointments and withdraw them. But family can give you something no institution can confer: belonging without examination or scrutiny.
Whatever happened in Oxford and Cambridge, whatever judgments were passed upon me, I was not alone. The people who had benefited from my presence, my generosity and my friendship remembered me. Those whom I had helped did not suddenly become strangers because the British press had found a new narrative.
The African proverb says that a child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. I was fortunate to have a village that embraced me. That, more than any academic title, protected me.
Family is not merely blood. It is the community that refuses to abandon you when the applause disappears. When the world forgets your name, family remembers your childhood. When institutions close their doors, family opens the door of home. And when reputation becomes a battlefield, family reminds you that you are more than the allegations made about you.
That is why, for me, family is everything.
