Onyeka Onwenu

Onyekachukwu Mary Onwenu was born on the thirty-first of January 1952 at Obosi in the Onitsha North District of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, the youngest of eight children of Chief Dickson Kanu Onwenu — a senator of the Eastern Region of the Federal Republic of Nigeria — and Mrs. Hope Onwenu, a primary-school teacher. The family was a substantial Igbo professional household. Her father was killed in 1956 when she was four in a plane crash; she was raised by her mother through the following years and through the Nigerian Civil War of 1967 to 1970 — during which she and her family endured the Biafran famine and the eventual reconstruction.

She was educated at the Holy Rosary Secondary School at Onitsha and at the Wesley Girls' High School at the Aba district through her fifteenth year. She emigrated to the United States in 1970 in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War and completed the bachelor's degree at Wellesley College in 1976 and the master's at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1980.

She joined the Nigerian Television Authority as a documentary producer and correspondent on returning to Lagos in 1980. Her 1984 documentary Nigeria: A Squandering of Riches — a hour-and-a-half film documenting the post-oil-boom economic mismanagement of the Federal Government — was banned within hours of its first broadcast and produced her resignation from the NTA.

She recorded her first commercial popular-music album For the Love of You for the Polygram label in 1981 and over the following thirty years a substantial recording career. She produced thirteen studio albums across the late 1980s and the 1990s; the 1989 album One Love and the 1992 album Sweet Cassava Whistle established her as the principal Igbo female popular-music voice of the post-civil-war generation. Her duet recordings with the Yoruba juju musician King Sunny Adé — particularly the 1985 album Wait for Me — produced the principal cross-ethnic Nigerian musical collaboration of the period.

She served as Director-General of the Nigerian National Centre for Women Development from 2013 to 2017.

She died of a cardiac arrest at Lagos on the thirtieth of July 2024, at seventy-two.

She is honored here as the senior Igbo female popular-music voice.