305 Marguerite Avenue – A modern sanctuary?
#305 Marguerite Cartwright Avenue, University of Nigeria, Nsukka Campus for many University of Nigeria staff and students and others across planet Earth may just be another home in the residential quarters of University of Nigeria staff, campus of Nsukka and for probably. The house in question is quite historic. Why do you ask? It has housed at one time or another two heavyweights of literature; the foremost novelist and acclaimed father of modern African literature, Chinua Achebe, and Chimamanda Adichie described by Nigerian Femi Osofisan as “a new voice breaking out…”.
I was interested in this and that is why I decided to locate the house. Along with two young men, Osondu Awaraka and Onyeka Nwelue who were just as interested in the place as I was. Of the three, I was the only one who knew the address because I had seen it in one of the newspapers and had embarked on a fruitless search for the house. Now I know I couldn’t find it because when I went looking for #306 there was nothing special, a pointer or a statue or whatever to indicate that two more than mere mortals had ever lived in it and the house number was almost inconspicuous as it was slowly fading.
The sun was a little far from handing over the duty to the early darkness that the sunset and the sleeping moon would bring that afternoon. It was 4:08 pm or something close to that Tuesday that we went there.
The motorcycles that took us there stopped around 205 Marguerite Cartwright Street. We went down and our wandering eyes traveled up and down, looking for details that would identify our destination. Soon, it seemed like we would be stranded because the house numbers were slowly fading away. But fate smiled at us when we saw house #306, which we thought was our destination, and we unanimously headed towards it. Green flowers (I honestly don’t know their names) that looked like nature had been playing with paintbrushes. The driveway was royalty and a rather old dark blue Peugeot 504 saloon was parked in a small garage attached to the house painted a white I couldn’t quite put an adjective to describe it, with a balcony behind it.
The young lady who answered the door of number 306 chuckled after we told her our mission and pointed out that Chimamanda’s house was across the street. She was probably amused to see some idle adventurers or treasure hunters stopping at her door. We went to #305.
Like all the other residential houses in the staff quarters, #305 was a white-painted apartment building that I couldn’t decide on an adjective to describe, with a balcony behind and a bare driveway devoid of flowers at the entrance. , like those of #306. Instead, there were rows of ixora (as tall as a ten year old), as green as the proverbial green snake beneath the green grass forming a fence around it. When one walks in, a driveway stars unflinchingly in a staring contest you know you can never win. The house sits in a central position in the courtyard like the nose in the face.
Something about the stillness of the whole scene caught my attention. It seemed that the house and the adjoining street were being tended by a male spirit, the one that the Igbos call “mmuo”. Everything, even the plants and birdsong in the gmelina trees in the neighborhood seemed to be afraid. I thought to myself that it was probably Achebe’s Okonkwo (in Things Fall Apart) or Adichie’s Eugene (in Purple Hibiscus). His presence seemed so real that I have begun to imagine that the parents of these two writers were very strict. What do you think?
There were a couple of guys tearing down a telephone pole and a pile of asbestos on the ground. It was obvious that the latter would be used for the renovations that were taking place in the complex because there were sheets of asbestos hanging against which I was constantly speaking prayer requests.
Osondu knocked on the door while Onyeka and I waited, my heart pounding so hard with excitement that I thought those inside the house would hear the sound. A chubby-faced boy who looked to be ten years old answered the door. At that moment, I remembered that a friend lived in this house, thanks to the similar features that I observed in the boy. I wondered why he had forgotten that in a magazine he had read a few months ago, this address was published under his name. Before Chinaza Madukwe appeared, my classmates were excitedly talking about something I couldn’t decipher because my blood was dancing wildly. Well, Chinaza came out, shook hands with all of us, and said that we couldn’t come in because her parents weren’t there. Although we were really disappointed by that and our spirits were lowered, immediately lifted, she said that she was fine if we just had a look at the yard.
We proceeded to look around. The grass was pretty neat with a small circular patch and there was a rusty rectangular tank with a square hole in the top right hand corner of one of the sides. A blue tank churned slowly flowing droplets of water from its position on top of a small brick podium covered in green algae that was a few feet from a faucet with buckets around it. A small garden that Onyeka said was probably Aunt Ifeoma’s in Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus was behind the house near the children’s rooms who backed us with cowardly shame.
We have a bit of information about your family gleaned from your guide. They had moved into the house a little over a year ago, and his father was Professor Michael C. Madukwe, the current Dean of the College of Agriculture. She is, as she already knew, a 300 level Electronic Engineering student of this very University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
We asked our guide if there was a studio. Oh yes, he stated and proceeded to say that the studio was quite small with two doors, one leading to the balcony and the other to the house. Surely Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie must have used that study many times, either for writing or for some other academic exercise.
Although Chinaza told us that we would not be able to take snapshots of the building, we were quite satisfied that we had been visitors to the peaceful environment that Chinua Achebe and Chimamanda Adichie once inhabited and were inspired to produce good literary works.
Osondu’s face turned white as death when Chinaza told us that he hadn’t read Purple Hibiscus and had barely read Half of a Yellow Sun. It was more than a surprise. I wasn’t too surprised because earlier this year when I went to the University of Nigeria bookstore to buy the latest novel, the assistant said they weren’t selling any of Adichie’s books because he hadn’t brought them to the bookstore.
As night was approaching, we decided to leave and promised to come back later after getting official permission from Chinaza’s father to take pictures of the house. She in turn promised that we would get to see the inside of the house.
We walk back to the lodge, tired but satisfied. In particular, I felt as triumphant as a sailor returning from a successful expedition after visiting the house that had housed two of Africa’s best writers. So we started listing the similarities between the two and the list seemed inexhaustible. Aside from the fact that they both resided at 305 Marguerite Cartwright Ave., UNN, I’ll list a few here.
First of all, both Achebe and Adichie are from the same ethnic group, the Igbo, and hail respectively from Ogidi and Abba, two towns a twenty-minute drive from each other in Anambra State in Nigeria. Conceived!
Next on the match list is the same educational background that they both share. They both read medicine (although Adichie dropped out early) but later switched to the arts. While Achebe was a professor in the Department of English and Literary Studies, Adichie, whose father was the first Nigerian professor of statistics and whose mother was the first UNN registrar, attended the University Staff Secondary School, Nsukka and attended the of pre-med here. at UNN too.
Their names also have some amazing similarities that never cease to amaze me. His first names begin with the prefix “Chi-” which means God. Also, his last name starts with an “A” and ends with an “e”. Onyeka was quick to point out that Chinaza also began with “Chi-” and that his last name also ended with “e.” What string of matches?
Currently, both of them reside in the United States of America and yet, both of them recently won literary awards. While Achebe won the International Man Booker Prize, Adichie won the Orange Prize for Fiction. There are so many other similarities that we may not know and probably never will know.
I commented that I expected a crowd of devotees to pour down to see and worship 305 Marguerite Cartwright Avenue and also that the Authors’ Association of Nigeria (ANA) should have included a visit to such a historic place among the events scheduled for the celebration. 50th Anniversary of Things Fall Apart which is celebrated between April 12 and 24 in various cities in Nigeria. We all would have expected that so many Nigerians would want to explore this home that would have been a literary sanctuary and tourist destination had it existed off the shores of this country that Achebe chooses not to call great.
Sometimes we always dwell on the fact that ‘a prophet has no honor in his own land’. But suppose that over time, things will happen. Maybe now. Maybe later.