Dear Reader,

My inspiration for writing Onaedo -The Blacksmith’s Daughter came from research I was doing for another novel about the Biafran war (this other book will be published in 2011). I discovered that the government in Sao Tome had voluntarily received Biafran children at the height of the Nigerian civil war. I vaguely remembered back then that there had been talk of sending some more of us to this island.

Many years later, as an adult,  I heard from an uncle who knew about such things, that at one point at the height of the genocide, the people of Sao Tome had actually offered to resettle all the people of Biafra in a section of their island.

This fired up my imagination and I decided to follow the trail, to find out more about ancient Sao Tome, how had it come into being, the Portuguese who had colonized it over five-hundred-years ago and the Africans who had worked its plantations. Being an amateur history buff I was excited to unravel the story – going from the end to the beginning.

I also studied the genesis of the upheavals on the mainland of Africa during these troubling times. I have focused on the lives of ordinary men and women who were trying to live ordinary lives and instead found themselves swept into the vortex of events that was the 16^th century Portuguese slave trade. What a frightening time it must have been; both for those that were taken and those also left behind.

I aimed to highlight the coming of the Portuguese during their age of discovery in Renaissance Europe and their influence along the West African coast which had an earlier and probably as profound an impact as the British who followed them centuries later.  There are names of people and towns such as Forcardos and Escravos in Nigeria that bear witness to that history. Of course Lagos was named for a town with an identical name in Portugal. It was in that Portuguese town that a market for African slaves was created and the first sale was described in vivid detail by an observer in 1444.

I have also tried to delve a bit into the traditions of the Igbo people of West Africa. Some traditionalists might take issue with my portrayal of some customs but one must remember that Igbo culture is not homogenous and I have taken bits from different parts of the Igbo nation to make up what I hope is an entertaining story.

Having said all that, this work should not in any way be regarded as a historical document. Far from it! I have taken a tremendous amount of artistic license in writing this novel, for that is what it is. A novel. It is neither a historical document nor an accurate portrayal of what happened to any one person or people but a work of pure fiction. So although some events might be loosely based on history, or what might have been, all I can say to my dear reader is – buyer beware!

Anyway, I hope you have as much fun reading it as I have spent writing it.

See you in the next book in Brazil!

 

Ngozi