The Headstrong Historian

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Headstrong Historian” is a narrative that seeks to revise Nigerian history and provide an alternative account that considers the impact of both women and colonialism in 19th-century Southern Nigeria. Inspired by other writers of African and African diasporic fiction such as Chinua Achebe, Adichie’s work dismantles the distorted view of a so-called primitive Nigeria that would have the world believe the presence of colonial powers like missionaries purely benefitted its people. Her narrative demonstrates a more nuanced depiction of events through the lives of an ordinary Nigerian woman, Nwamgba, her family, and her fellow community members. While colonial institutions do assist Nwamgba in certain cases, Adichie reveals the dark underbelly of this assistance in her biographical narrative: the dispossession of Nigerian cultural identity through the missionaries’ education system, the fracturing of families, and the loss of family legacies.

Education in “The Headstrong Historian” is initially presented as a useful tool and a benevolent gesture made by a Christian congregation to Nwamgba and her clan. But while the education missionaries offer does lead to legal opportunities for Nwamgba and Anikwenwa, taking classes and learning from their institution is not without cost; it becomes a trap that removes native cultural identities and instead promotes European ones within an African community. Done under the guise of saving “black heathen[s]” (209), missionaries in Onicha actively criticize and curb all signs, rites, and conduct that are not in line with or go against Western—and specifically Christian—values through the children they educate. This is an example of Colonialism Through Education. As Anikwenwa learns these values in school, he treats his culture with growing disdain. He no longer eats the food his mother provides him; he believes his community’s dressing style—specifically his mother’s—is sinful for its nakedness; and as an adult, he clashes with the clan elders because tradition dictates that his wife be naked when fetching water at the Oyi river. This creates a tense atmosphere between Christians and non-Christians in his community.

Discord continues to foment between Anikwenwa and his family, and tellingly, he gives his children English names, Peter and Grace, while his mother insists on giving them Nigerian names—Nnamdi and Afamefuna, respectively. As the flashforward portion of the narrative notes, this division in cultural identities—one Christian and Western, the other Nigerian—bleeds into the third generation of Nwamgba’s family and is only partly resolved by Afamefuna as an adult. Nevertheless, through his actions and beliefs, Anikwenwa splinters the cultural unity of his family by endorsing the missionaries’ “redemption of black heathens” rhetoric (209), leading his mother to be “ashamed of her son, irritated with his wife, [and] upset by their rarefied life in which they treated non-Christians as if they had smallpox” (213). The family is a microcosm of the Corruption of Cultural Identity and indoctrination into white European culture; Afamefuna’s journey as an adult alludes to postcolonial reclamations of culture in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Anikwenwa’s perspective wasn’t uncommon, nor was it the most extreme. Adichie implies that the full adoption of the missionaries’ teachings and the ways of white men creates a disjunct identity, as evidenced by the story of Mr. Gboyega, a Nigerian man and British Empire history expert who staunchly believes that African history shouldn’t be considered a valid subject in school curricula. According to the story Afamefuna hears, his belief is so strong that he quits his job when the West African Examination Council entertains the idea. His allegiances, however, leave him culturally stranded and historically confused; the British Empire he so reveres presumably would not respect him for being from Nigeria, but likewise, Mr. Gboyega no longer fits the Nigerian cultural identity for forsaking his roots. Adichie also undermines his expertise, revealing it as received wisdom from a subjugating force; if he were truly an expert in the history of the British Empire, then he would recognize that the reason African history is not respected is due to colonial powers—like the British Empire—discrediting and misrepresenting it as the history of “savage[s]” with “curious and meaningless customs” (216). This cultural identity dilemma is self-perpetuating; Afamefuna, for instance, is taught to discredit her culture when “her teacher, Sister Maureen, told her she could not refer to the call-and-response her grandmother had taught her as poetry because primitive tribes did not have poetry” (216). Generations learn the same distorted history until it becomes socially pervasive.

While Adichie accounts for the spread of this erroneous historical rendition in her work, she responds to its inaccuracies by fashioning a female-led and revisionist biography to provide a nuanced account of events, contributing to the theme of Matrilineal Family Legacy. “The Headstrong Historian” focuses on two lives in chronological order: Nwamgba’s and, for a shorter textual span in a flashforward, her granddaughter Afamefuna’s life as a fully grown woman. Both women experience the encroachment of colonialist powers on their lives at different stages. Nwamgba sees her people fall for the allure of missionaries and foreign traders with their courts and guns, as well as the slow changes made to her culture. While she seeks to take advantage of the white men for their power herself—specifically to take back her son’s inheritance from her husband’s cousins—she also witnesses the dire consequences of allowing these men into her and her son’s lives. Ironically, in regaining his legal inheritance, he loses his cultural inheritance. Nwamgba’s initial maternal instinct to keep Anikwenwa away from them is correct. “It was unthinkable,” she had believed, “that her only son, her single eye, should be given to the white men” (205-6), but the fear of his death hung too heavy for her to bear. When he became an adult, Nwamgba would look upon her son “wearing trousers and a rosary around his neck” and “wonder whether she had meddled with his destiny” by forcing his association with the missionaries (212). Nwamgba believes herself responsible for turning her son into “a person diligently acting a bizarre pantomime” (212) instead of the heir to Obierika’s legacy as he was meant to be. The biographical rendition of her life thus exposes the shifting power dynamics, the progressive cultural erosion, and the nefarious effects of colonialism on an often-overlooked part of the affected population: women.

Afamefuna, on the other hand, sees the widespread application of colonial education and struggles against its reductive misrepresentation of her people. Throughout both her early education days and the peak of her career, Afamefuna is constantly told that her people’s history, culture, and personhood are substandard compared to those of Western countries, specifically the United Kingdom. As a child, she isn’t immune to this indoctrination; she notes, “how lustily she had sung, on Empire Day, ‘God bless our Gracious King, Send him victorious, happy, and glorious. Long to Reign over us’” (216-17). But rather than be discouraged or fully conform to these beliefs like her father, Afamefuna questions her schooling and finds fault in its teachings. Effectively and much like her “sharp-tongued, head-strong” grandmother (199), Afamefuna becomes the titular “headstrong historian,” who seeks to record a true history. Adichie hammers home this notion by using an anaphoric phrase, “It was Grace who” (216-18), in the last segment of her narrative, because it is indeed Grace (or Afamefuna), and no one else in her family, who seeks to dismantle the hurtful and incorrect representation of her people. In the end, she purposefully dedicates her academic work to exposing the true history of the Ijaw, Ibibio, Igbo, and Efik peoples of Southern Nigeria through her book Pacifying with Bullets: A Reclaimed History of Southern Nigeria. This book title is an antithetical echo of a textbook she is given as a child, “The Pacification of Primitive Tribes in Southern Nigeria” (215).

Though Afamefuna provides a way to reinstate the history of the Nigerian people without the biased perspective of her own education, the author insists that the impact of colonial powers is neither so easy to dispel nor always so easy to denounce. In Afamefuna’s immediate family, estrangement reigns between her and her father for much of her life. Resolving the tension between family members is only made possible when she realizes he is a product of his schooling. Though she recognizes what missionary schools have done to her people, she still chooses to compromise for the love of family, and she says “amen when he pray[s]” (217). Outside of family affairs, vestiges of the missionaries’ education remain steadfast, and Afamefuna continues to struggle against them throughout her life, “as she [writes] reports for international organizations about common-sense things for which she nevertheless receive[s] generous pay” (218). Despite her success and accolades, she feels “an odd rootlessness in the later years of her life” until she changes her name to the one her grandmother gave her (218). Afamefuna’s successful career signals just how far-reaching the colonial depiction of Nigerian history is since she can spend her entire life’s work dispelling its notions. Through the small, biographic rendition of Afamefuna’s life, Adichie implies how delicate and arduous the task of reclaiming one’s history can be, and how much work is yet to be done to nuance the world’s view of late 19th-century Southern Nigerian history.