Bianca Ojukwu, is the widow of the late former
Biafran leader, Dim Chukwuemeka Odumegwu
Ojukwu, and Nigeria Ambassador to Spain. In this
interview, she reveals why she would not remarry.
Given that you are still very young, beautiful and as
the famed American poet-Robert Frost said, you still
have a long road to travel. Do you plan to remarry?
People marry I think not just because they need to
come together, live together, raise family together,
it is a rite of passage and I think I have fulfilled my
part. Why I said that, is, I have gone through
marriage, lived with what I consider a wonderful man
who gave me 23 years of happiness, of fulfillment, I
literally felt I was the luckiest woman to have had a
man who gave me utter dedication and, above all,
wonderful children. So my pledge to him is that I will
devote my life to taking care of our children, raising
them properly, teaching them those ideals that he
cherished and held very dear and trying to carry on
his legacy. So I don’t have any compelling need to
remarry and, in any case, my time is very limited; so
I am trying to channel it properly towards raising my
children.
How do you contain advances from men, who may
nurse some romantic thoughts about you?
Nigerian men are not aggressive; they may be
aggressive in business, in their career pursuits, but in
that particular area of aggressively pursuing a
romantic interest, I have been very impressed by the
level of decency and decorum they project. I mean,
it might be just my own experience. They have
treated me with a lot of respect, deference-they
have been protective in a way as if to say this is a
treasure that we must protect. I get on flights, and I
see people stand up, take my luggage to my car, they
have been amazing. I haven’t encountered that sort
of pursuit and I have been very touched and
humbled by the way they have treated me.
My husband’s friends call me regularly to see how I
am doing- I mean a lot of widows complain that that
they have issues with people proposing to them. But
in my own case, I must say that I have been lucky to
have wonderful support system based on respect and
a sense of protection. If that is a function of the
respect they had for my husband, I don’t know.
When I travel abroad, I also meet Nigerian men who
are respectful. I also believe that it also depends on
the woman’s attitude-sometimes we lay blame at the
doorstep of the men— but the fact is that if you are
engaged in your work, if you are a woman who have a
sense of purpose, regardless of the fact that you
operate in a terrain that is dominated by men, once
you can hold your own, it will be difficult to fall into
that quagmire where you feel you are being
propositioned or your gender is playing a derogatory
role.
Once you are not making excuses for bad
performance, or once you are not looking for a man
to cover for you, for your inadequacies, once you are
able to let you work speak for you, it’s a lot easier to
survive and live a life of dignity, and once you don’t
present yourself as a weak and defenseless woman-
one to be pitied and really cuddled by a man just by
a virtue of being of a weaker sex – then it’s much
easier to live a life that is not being truncated by
those pressures
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