The first time Nnenna saw Tade was in the heart of Enugu, at the traditional wedding of her cousin, Kamsi. The compound was buzzing with music, colours, and the scent of jollof rice and suya thick in the air. Tade wasn’t supposed to be there—he had come as a plus-one to his friend, Dapo, who had begged him last minute to escort him to the "Igbo party of the year."
She noticed him not because he was the most handsome man in the crowd, though striking, but because he looked so out of place, yet deeply curious. Yoruba, by his features and mannerisms. Tall, with warm brown eyes that didn’t wander but lingered. He stared at the kola nut ritual like it was a spiritual ceremony. Nnenna liked that. Most Lagos boys she’d met would have been fiddling with their phones or scoffing at what they didn’t understand.
“Your friend looks like he’s about to marry my cousin,” she said to Dapo, nodding toward Tade.
“Don’t mind him,” Dapo laughed. “He’s a history freak. Yoruba but obsessed with Igbo culture. He even speaks the small language.”
She smiled. “Oh? I’d like to test that.”
And so began a conversation with Tade that would stretch late into the evening, into the next morning, and weeks after. Nnenna, the daughter of a respected Igbo chief and retired army colonel, and Tade, the son of a prominent Yoruba pastor and businessman in Ibadan.
They were from two different worlds, yet they found solace in their shared love for poetry, old highlife songs, and books that whispered of ancestors and new beginnings. He spoke Igbo with a funny accent that made her laugh, and she would read Yoruba proverbs out loud, letting the rhythm dance off her tongue.
But as their love bloomed, so did the shadows of their pasts.
Tade’s family had a long-standing belief—almost a superstition—that no male child in their lineage should marry an Igbo woman. It was a story born from the betrayal of his great-uncle during the Biafran war, a story told in hushed tones at family gatherings. His father, Pastor Adebanjo, held onto the bloodlines like sacred scripture. "We don’t mix," he said flatly when Tade first mentioned Nnenna.
Nnenna’s father, Chief Okafor, was no different. “Yoruba men are slippery,” he warned her. “They will love you today and abandon you tomorrow. My daughter, your blood is pure. Don’t taint it.”
But love, real love, doesn’t recognize the borders that men draw in the sand.
They kept seeing each other in secret. In Ibadan, Tade would sneak Nnenna into a small apartment he rented for writing; in Enugu, they’d meet at a hidden garden behind her university campus. Every moment together felt like stolen sunlight.
Until Nnenna discovered she was pregnant.
Fear gripped her like a storm. Not just the fear of motherhood, but the reality of their divided worlds. Tade wanted to do the right thing. He proposed with a simple ring, on one knee, under the flame tree in Nsukka, where they first kissed.
“I will fight them all,” he said. “Bloodline or not, you are my heartline.”
But the war had only just begun.
Chief Okafor declared her dead to him. Pastor Adebanjo threatened to disown Tade and strip him of the family inheritance and ministry. Both families dragged their names in cultural mud, calling on ancestors, prayer warriors, and age-old curses.
Tade and Nnenna disappeared.
For nine months, they hid in Ilorin, living off savings, writing letters to their unborn daughter about a world where love was louder than hate. They named her Chimamanda—"My God will never fail me." She was born during a thunderstorm, as if nature itself roared in agreement.
Years passed. They built a small life, quiet but beautiful. Tade became a history lecturer. Nnenna opened a community library and arts centre. Chimamanda grew up surrounded by books, love, and a tapestry of cultures woven into her lullabies.
But fate has a way of calling us back to the roots we tried to escape.
At Chimamanda’s fifth birthday party, a stranger showed up at the gate. It was Chief Okafor. His face was older, weathered by time and regret. He didn’t say a word. He only knelt before his daughter and cried, pressing his head to her feet. Behind him stood Pastor Adebanjo, equally broken, holding a carved Bible with Tade’s name etched in gold.
“I have learned,” he said quietly, “that there are things more sacred than blood.”
That day, they didn’t speak of curses, lineages, or the ghosts of the past. They ate rice and peppered chicken, danced to Sunny Ade and Osita Osadebe, and held Chimamanda up as a symbol—not of compromise, but of possibility.
Bloodlines divide, but heartlines connect. And sometimes, love writes a story bold enough to rewrite tradition.
