Chima Uchendu
This collection of humorous stories will make you laugh and learn; they will make you smile with joy. They are clever hybrids of African and Western stories of adventure, of attempts at deception, of love and affection, and of family and friends; they are told in a unique writing style that elevates the writing itself to classic prose and poetry while the reader is always rewarded with surprise endings.
This is Uchendu's second book; his first book, The African Girl, a novel, was published in 1998 (Sungai Books, NJ).
Chima Uchendu practices law in Washington, D.C.. He is a former Symposium Editor of The Law Journal at Howard University School of Law where he was an AETNA scholar and received several American Jurisprudence Awards for academic excellence.
Uchendu has a unique style of writing, molded from his Nigerian and American experiences. He calls his narrative style Afrosuspense, which he defines as a focus on traditional African flavor and ethnic idioms, delivered through the popular story-telling tradition of engaging literary suspense, in order to arrest the reader's interest with a promise of a surprise ending.
This is Uchendu's second book; his first book, The African Girl, a novel, was published in 1998 (Sungai Books, NJ).
Amina was tall in a willowy but graceful way; her skin was brown like a fresh West African anthill, and she had the features of a typical Fulani girl; her hair was always in cornrows, but in burnished jet black that gave the impression of a girl who knew orderliness and personal grooming. She was perpetually wearing a shy smile, allowing you just a glimpse of her teeth as she said hello in Igbo.
Everybody on that street knew her and always watched her walk to the stall with the older man where they exchanged the local currency for foreign money. Without a doubt she was the star of Ama Hausa.
All the time that we watched her go back and forth to the stall, we did not once wonder why this girl was not in school until something seriously bad happened; well, bad in the eyes of my parents.
The bad thing that happened was that my younger brother, Ochinti, a graduate of the University of Maiduguri , came home one Christmas eve and told my older brother, in the presence of my parents, that he wanted to marry Amina. As he announced this disastrous news, Amina was standing right behind him. My father, who had also seen Amina walk past our house on previous occasions on her way to the money-exchange stalls, just sat there watching Ochinti as if he had just seen a ghost.
Convinced that okenye anaghi ano n'ulo umuaka ejide udene si na obu egbe (an elder does not sit passively and watch children mistake a vulture for a kite) my father was determined to stop this union.
He began by chasing the girl out of the house because it has been said in proverb that a wise man first chases the fox away from his stray chicken before chastising the chicken for wandering out.
He took my brother into the inner room and chastised him. But that did not work. He brought out my brother in the presence of my siblings and rebuked him. That too failed. He angrily told my brother that he would sit and wait for him to come to his senses. Days passed.
While he waited for the young man to come to his senses, the young man spent all his waking hours with the girl. My father decided that he could not just sit and wait any longer because it has been said that esiwe ofe na-eche ka anya nshiko ghee, mmiri tachaa, ite atapuo (if you should wait for the crab's eyes in the boiling soup to be tender, you will wait so long that the soup will dry and the fire will burn a hole in the pot). So my father got up from his figurative down-sitting and sought the assistance of my uncles, aunts, siblings, to talk some sense into Ochinti’s head. All these people talked but the head they were talking to had no ears attached to it.
