21/05/2025
When Ijeoma Met Obama”
In the bustling heart of Abuja, where the sun often lingered just a moment longer to kiss the horizon, Ijeoma worked as a curator at the National Arts Gallery. She lived for color, texture, and history—her world was a canvas, and she painted it with grace and strength.
Obama, on the other hand, was a visiting professor from the University of Nairobi, in Nigeria for a year to conduct research on African political transitions. Charismatic, brilliant, and grounded, he had a voice like aged mahogany and a mind that carried stories from across the continent.
They met during a symposium on Pan-African identity. Ijeoma was presenting a collection of indigenous art as a form of resistance during colonial times. Obama was captivated—not just by the artifacts, but by the passion in her voice, the way her eyes danced when she spoke of history and culture.
After the presentation, he introduced himself.
“You speak like your ancestors are whispering through you,” he said.
“And you listen like you’re meant to carry their words,” she replied, a half-smile tugging at her lips.
That night, they walked through the city, from the glowing streets of Wuse to the quiet calm of Jabi Lake. They spoke of everything: war and peace, heartbreak and hope, Africa’s wounds and dreams. In the spaces between their words, something tender grew—quietly, like a melody one only hears at dawn.
Days turned into weeks. He brought her rare books and she shared with him the backstreets of Abuja where the best suya was made. He taught her Kiswahili, she taught him Igbo proverbs. With every laugh, every debate, they wrote their own kind of story—one that didn’t need to shout to be heard.
But love, like all things, was tested.
His research grant was ending. The world he came from called him back. She had her life, her work, her roots.
“Ijeoma,” he said one evening, holding her hand beneath a neem tree, “what do we do with a love that has no border?”
She smiled through tears. “We don’t cage it. We let it fly—and if it finds its way home, we know it was never lost.”
He left, but letters followed. Then voice notes. Then flights back and forth. And two years later, on the steps of the same gallery where they first met, he returned—not as a visitor, but as a man who had chosen a new home.
And there, under the same sun that had once watched their beginning, Obama knelt with a ring carved from Kenyan ebony and inlaid with Nigerian coral.
“Ijeoma, shall we write this love into history?”
And she, with a smile that could light the whole of Abuja, said, “Only if we make it a masterpiece.”
