The Headstrong Historian

In the last segment of the story, when Afamefuna returns to her grandmother’s side to be with her as she dies, the author throws the story into the future and formats her sentences to start with the same words: “It was Grace who” (216-18). This anaphora creates two effects. First, since this segment depicts Grace’s—or Afamefuna’s—future struggles with her education, her family, and her career over her Nigerian identity, and the repetition of her non-Nigerian name emphasizes the moment she decides to legally change it to Afamefuna. The change indicates a resolution in her feelings of distorted identity and rootlessness, as she fully accepts the name “who will not be lost” and proves its meaning to be true. Second, the anaphora underlines how troubling and isolating reclaiming that identity can be because no other person in her family sought to do so themselves—it is only Grace. While Afamefuna questions her upbringing, her father, brother, and mother presumably do not.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie uses the Nigerian slave trade to allude to a greater evil, that of the white men’s slave trade, also known as the Transatlantic slave trade. For Ayaju and her children, her father’s enslavement leaves a marker on their social status in the community, but when Iroegbunam is abducted to be sold into slavery, there are greater horrors than restricted social mobility. As a child, he hears a fellow abductee cry out about how “she knew she was to be sold to the white man, and did they not know that the white man’s slavery was very different, that people were treated like goats, taken on large ships a long way and away and eventually eaten?” (206). Here, the author alludes to the way people who wish to downplay chattel slavery’s catastrophic consequences often reference the existing slavery in Africa. While acknowledging that reality, Adichie also underlines that Nigerians are not to be judged on the same standards as white colonizers, who used any opportunity to exploit and render Nigerians to their service in horrible ways.