BY FAROOK KPEROGI
February is Black History Month in the United States and Canada. As is my custom, I’ll devote most of this month to highlight the enduring but often ignored trans-continental affinities between Black America and Africa and to celebrate known and unknown people who are central to the sustenance of the sometimes strained but nonetheless abiding kinship between Black Africa and its historic diaspora in the Americas.
Permit me to start the series with a tribute to my father-in-law by the name of Engr. Edwin Chukwumezie Erinne who has been married to a charming, good-natured, and kind-hearted Black American woman for nearly 44 years—and who also celebrated his 78th birthday on Friday. He is by far one of the brightest, kindest, pleasantest, least prejudiced, and most principled people anyone can ever wish to know.
He met his Black American wife by the name of Mrs. Cecilia Crump Erinne in 1975 when he came to Utah State University to study for a master’s degree in engineering where she was also studying for a master’s degree in mathematics. They fell in love and decided to get married in 1977 after completing their degrees.
Mrs. Erinne’s father wasn’t opposed to her getting married to a Nigerian, but he insisted that she first visit Mr. Erinne’s home in Nigeria and determine if she could live there. So, she visited New Bussa, the headquarters of Borgu Local Government Area in former Kwara State before it was ceded to Niger State in the 1990s, where Mr. Erinne worked as an agricultural engineer at the National Institute for Freshwater Fisheries Research.
She loved the serenity of the town and the easy disposition of its people. And, of course, the fact that her future husband was the same people in his home as he was in America convinced her she was making the right choice. They got married in 1978 in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and she relocated to Nigeria thereafter.
She taught mathematics at Borgu Secondary School, rose to become the school’s first (and only) female principal, and retired in 2004 as a director at the Niger State Ministry of Education. She trained generations of doctors, engineers, scientists, professors, and other professionals some of whom have become senators, members of the House of Representatives, and permanent secretaries.
She is now so Nigerian that even Black Americans in her home state of Mississippi who didn’t know her when she grew up there call her “that African woman”!
I’m from the Kwara State side of Borgu, and several people from my hometown and social circles who attended Borgu Secondary School used to talk about an exemplary Igbo-Black American couple in New Bussa whom I did not in my wildest dream think I would ever meet. But by a quirk of circumstances, they are now my parents-in-law!
I first met Mr. Erinne and his wife in 2012, one year after dating their daughter, Maureen, a former PhD student at the university I teach who was introduced to me by her former elementary school classmate in New Bussa by the name of Mohammed Dahiru Aminu.
Mr. Erinne took a liking to me the very first day he met me. He said he knew me in New Bussa (it turned out he was mistaking me for a cousin of mine) even though I’ve never visited the town. Out of politeness—and, frankly, intimidation—I didn’t dispute what he said. We now laugh over it.
The more I interact with Mr. Erinne, the more I understand why my mother-in-law would leave her comfort zone in America and relocate to a sleepy, mid-sized Nigerian town to live with him and give birth to all six of her children, except the last one, in Nigeria.
Mr. Erinne was born in Okija in what is now Anambra State around February 1944. His family name, Erinne, is the corruption of the Igbo word Ehilinne (which translates as contentment) by Christian missionaries with whom his father worked.
The Erinne family’s relatively early exposure to western education has earned them several claims to fame in Anambra and Igbo land. For instance, the late Chief Phoebe Chiadi Ajayi-Obe (nee Erinne), Nigeria’s second female Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and Eastern Nigeria’s first female SAN, is Mr. Erinne’s older sister. His late older brother, Dan Erinne, is Nnewi South’s first graduate, and another older brother, Ben Erinne, is the first lawyer in Ihiala local government, which was carved out of Nnewi South.
He is also one of the first sets of engineers to be trained at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and was commissioner of agriculture in Anambra State after retiring as Deputy Director from the Federal Civil Service.
