Cheluchi Onyemelukwe, Nigerian Writing and Integrity

I love stories, in every form, but especially in book form. I am passionate about these hand-held opportunities to travel out into the world; to visit places and meet people, and to get to know those people in a more satisfying way than you can ever know anyone in real life. But the true magic of stories for me lies with the occasion to journey inward, the chance to get to know myself. As a Black woman born outside Africa, I especially treasure every opportunity to learn about my people, my history as well as African spiritual and cultural values.

Cheluchi and Donna at Luminato 2022

How excited I become when I encounter novels from superb African writers such as Cheluchi Onyemelukwe author of The Son of the House! Cheluchi and I have had a few conversations, most recently at Beloved, Luminato’s Celebration of Black Women Writers.  While interviewing her on stage something thrilling occurred to me. I had been asking about how she managed to write a spellbinding novel without ever taking a creative writing class. “I come from a family of storytellers,” she explained.

Cheluchi Onyemelukwe, who was born and raised in Nigeria, was not just a natural novelist, but descended from a tradition of African storytellers tasked with passing down a people’s history and wisdom. This made me wonder about my own strange obsession with stories. Might I be descended from a family of African story tellers? The idea took my breath away.

But that’s not all I derived from Cheluchi and her novel. For decades now, I have been curious about Nigerian writers and their preoccupation with the theme of corruption- with bribery, scams, violent bullying, and political misconduct. Surely, it is too simple to take their literary concern as a straightforward rendering of the trials facing Nigerian society.

Son of the House by Cheluchi Onyemelukwe-Onuobia
Dundurn Press
288 pages

Re-reading The Son of the House deepened my understanding: Nwabulu and Julie – the two women at the heart of the story- are each told by their fathers to never tell a lie. When they succumb to dishonesty crises loom – ones of their own making. Onyemelukwe demonstrates that Nigerian writers are not preoccupied with corruption, so much as they are preoccupied with integrity, and the loss of it - the abandonment of a value once considered essential to their culture.