Nigeria Revisited: My Life and Loves Abroad - Softcover

Onyemelukwe, Catherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935925474 ISBN 13: 9781935925477

Publisher: Peace Corps Writers, 2014

Synopsis

The Nigerian people hold strong ties to their families, clans, tribes, and country, and it doesn’t take long for foreign residents to feel the same bond. So in 1962, when twenty-one-year-old Catherine Onyemelukwe launches her two-year adventure with the brand-new Peace Corps, she has no idea what the African country has in store.

Catherine’s heartfelt memoir revisits her two years overseas that become twenty-four, during which her experiences brim with friendships, students, travels around the country, and love. It recalls how her future Nigerian husband contrives to meet her, their falling for each other, and their controversial wedding that becomes world news and a spread in Life Magazine.

It is also a deep look into the coups and wars that leave their family without electricity and running water, as they struggle to keep their children safe and healthy. When it becomes too much, they flee to the United States, only to be greeted with scorn for their mixed-race children.

This story of adapting to cultures, taking risks, surviving, and embracing differences will inspire the reader to venture beyond perceived horizons and see the world in a whole new light.

About this title

About the Author

Catherine Onyemelukwe grew up in Midwestern United States, where she gained an international perspective from her German immigrant father and a sense of compassion from her American mother. After graduating high school, she joined the newly formed Peace Corps, which assigned her to teach German at the Nigerian capital's Federal Emergency Science School and English and African history at a rural village's secondary school. This began a lifelong relationship and deep connection with the country, its culture, and its people.

Among her many advocacies, Catherine is cofounder of Nigerwives, an organization of foreign wives of Nigerians; a former member of the National Association of Returned Peace Corps Volunteers; and a founding member of Friends of Nigeria.

She holds a bachelor's degree from Mount Holyoke College, a master's degree in elementary education from California State University Sacramento, and an MBA in public and private management from the Yale School of Management.

Reviews

Editorial Review by KIRKUS

An American woman tells the story of living, loving, working, and raising children in Africa for more than 20 years in this memoir.

Onyemelukwe writes about the spell that the country of Nigeria cast on her, and of the joys and travails of her life among its people, in a book that features “sights, sounds, and smells unlike any I would ever see in the United States.” As an early Peace Corps volunteer, she arrived in Lagos in 1962. She was 21 years old, a teacher of German, and possessed a voracious appetite for experience. In short order, the author met the man she would marry; later, she bore him the first of three children (much to the delight of those in his home village of Nanka) and grew increasingly comfortable. Within a few years, she and her Igbo husband moved to Eastern Nigeria to escape the country’s chaos of hysteria against the Igbo people. But the eastern part of the country was also undergoing change: it briefly rebelled to become the Republic of Biafra. The resulting conflict felt like “a pretend war” to the author—at least before hostile planes filled the sky and bombs fell near her temporary home. In the midst of this chaos, Onyemelukwe confronted the challenge of raising her children in multiple societies. The author is an experienced speaker on topics related to Nigerian culture, and she proves a dab hand at it here, providing just enough detail to answer readers’ questions but not so much that they feel overwhelmed. Her prose is sturdy and workmanlike, and the pace of her book is stately—never rushing forward during scenes of crisis nor lollygagging when little is afoot. Overall, she’s an excellent steward of her past emotions, and readers will wish they were there at the Kakadu nightclub in Lagos, where she “danced with abandon to the sensual music,” or at a traditional Mmos masquerade, where she trembled at the spectacle.

An accomplished story of life overseas by a woman of the world.

Edition details

• Publisher: Peace Corps Writers
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1935925474
• ISBN 13: 9781935925477
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 314