Ify Adenuga: A Mother of Successful Artists
This is the memoir of Ify Adenuga, whose name in Igbo means Endless Fortune and a cultural figure in the UK. She is the mother of award-winning British Grime artist Skepta and three other successful children in the creative industries. To tell the truth, I did not know anything about Skepta or Ify until I saw her memoir on Instagram.
I was intrigued by a woman who raised four successful artists in a harsh industry and a country like the UK. But that was not why this memoir fascinated me. It was because Ify had first-hand experience of the Biafran war and, having relocated to the UK in the 1980s, can give us an account of life in the UK in the 1980s. Her life as an illegal in Britain was also not easy, especially in the harsh realities of the 1980s.
Childhood in Lagos and the Biafran War
Ify spent her childhood in Lagos, where her parents emigrated to the busy city from Eastern Nigeria. In 1966, when civil war broke out between the East and West of Nigeria, her parents took the whole family back to the East, where they became part of the Biafra war.
Ify’s ebullient personality shone through this book, and I see her as a natural storyteller. Endless Fortune gave me first-hand insight into the war. In the war, she lost members of her family. She also lost her sister Harriet, to the dreaded malnutrition disease Kwashiorkor.
Life as an Illegal Immigrant in the UK during the 1980s
Due to the war, she was still in primary school at 14 but went on to an excellent secondary school, Queen’s College in Lagos. She relocated to the UK in the 1980s, and most of her accounts record her life during the Thatcher era.
Endless Fortune is a strong account of war-ridden Nigeria and the second-generation Nigerians settling in the UK in the 1980s. I recommend this book to anyone wanting to understand a first account of the Nigerian civil war that finished in 1970 and life in the UK from a Nigerian community point of view.
Raising Unconventional Children in the UK
Ify was proud that she raised her children unconventionally, going against the grain of most Nigerian parents, who prefer the security of their children getting into education and settling into professional middle-class British life. Ify was definitely upfront and unapologetic about who she was.
Recording the British Nigerian Immigrant Experience
It is important to note that many of these Nigerians are parents to the current British Nigerian millennials.
I have curated this under my British Nigerian Experience alongside Jendella Benson’s Hope and Glory. Ify did what the second-generation Nigerians who came to settle in Britain in the 1980s had yet to do: to record our British immigrant experience of that time.
