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This post focuses on the chapter 1 summary of Ukamaka Olisakwe’s Ogadinma, or Everything Will Be All Right. The chapter narrates Ogadinma’s encounter with Barrister Chima whose sexual predation impacts Ogadinma’s life in a way she wouldn’t have imagined when she walked up to his office for help.
Chapter 1 of Ogadinma begins with Ogadinma’s visit to Barrister Chima’s office. She has gone there on the recommendation of her father’s customer who had affected on her father to tell her to do so.
Ogadinma is seeking admission into University of Nigeria, Nsukka for a literature degree. Her 240 UTME score may not get her in, which is why she seeks the help of Barrister Chima, who instructs her to come back to his office by 3:00pm in the afternoon.
She returns home to brief her father while she waits for her appointment with the barrister.
Barrister Chima takes advantage of Ogadinma sexually
When Ogadinma returns to the office, she meets a Barrister Chima who wants to go and eat. He asks her to hop into his car and drives to his Nomansland home, instead of driving to a restaurant.
He later explains to Ogadinma his distaste for restaurant food and his preference for his home-cooked food. As it turns, this is a ploy to have sex with Ogadinma.
He overwhelms her with his questions and towering presence. From their conversations, Ogadinma comes across as a vast and avid reader, and a little bit of a writer.
Chima leads Ogadinma on to his bedroom where he deflowers the young girl who naively clings to the idea that she must not reject or fight his sexual moves for the fear that if she did, he wouldn’t help her process her admission.
The sexcapade becomes a routine in their subsequent meetings, when Ogadinma goes to his office to keep tabs on the progress of her admission status.
Circumstances behind Ogadinma’s university choice and predicament
With her 240 UTME score, Ogadinma could have gotten admitted into any northern university, but her father is having none of it because of the religious violence and crisis in the North.
She contextualises this volatility with the religious rioting in Sabon Gari which affected her family. The rioters had destroyed properties, burnt people, and caused uproar for the flimsy excuse that a church is being built near their mosque.
While Ogadinma and her father had hidden safely in their shop, her father’s Peugeot car was burnt by rioters.
This religious tension is the very reason her father does not want her to attend a northern university, and the choice of an eastern university.
About her mother leaving
Ogadinma reflects on the exit of her mother from their lives and the refusal of her father to take another wife. While her father has tried to erase any left memories of her mother and has not told her anything about her, she is able to surmise that her mother had left her a little after the Biafran war.
Ogadinma’s mother had dropped her with her paternal grandmother, refusing to pay heed to reason, while her husband was away in the war. Both father and daughter had not set eyes on her ever since.
Ogadinma becomes pregnant
Ogadinma becomes pregnant from her affair with Barrister Chima. She initially thinks it is malaria, but a knowing Chima gives her more money than she has ever received to take care of herself.
When it dawns on her that she is pregnant, she naively tries to eject it with squeezed lime and hot water. When all measures do not work out, she goes to a doctor who takes her to his private facility and aborts the pregnancy.
Even more painful is the fact that she does not get, in the end, the admission that landed her in trouble. The university’s UTME cutoff mark is 250. It appears that Chima and his contact in the university are not as influential as claimed. At the end, she is used only for Chima’s sexual satisfaction without achieving the intended result.
Aftermath of the abortion
She returns home in agony, shivering. She collapses into her bed in excruciating pain. The next time she wakes up, it is in a hospital bed under the watchful but disappointing eyes of her father.
Final Thoughts
The themes in chapter 1 of Ogadinma by Ukamaka Olisakwe are sexual predation, religious intolerance, family disintegration, failure, and teenage pregnancy.
The setting is primarily Sabon Gari and Nomansland, all in Kano in the eighties. It takes a detour in time to the sixties during the Biafran war, alternately the Nigerian civil war, to reveal the circumstance behind the disappearance of Ogadinma’s mother and the effect it has had and is having on her father in the present.
The narrative techniques employed in chapter 1 of Ogadinma are basically the third-person narrative technique and flashback.
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