4 Thursday April 28 2022 | the timestimes2
W
hen Zain
Ejiofor
Asher
opened the
letter
informing
her that she
had secured
a place at the University of Oxford,
the first thing she wanted to do was
tell her mother, who was the driving
force behind her academic success.
There was one small problem. As
part of her mum’s singular campaign
to prevent her daughter being
distracted from her schoolwork, she
had installed a payphone at home. To
begin with Asher hoarded coins so she
could call friends, but eventually, she
says, “I gave up and only called
anyone if it was an absolute
emergency. It worked, because I was
much better able to use the time that
I had in my day.”
With the acceptance letter in her
hand, she searched fruitlessly through
coat pockets for a 20p coin and
eventually made a reverse-charge call
to the small chemist shop her mother
owned. After she broke the news, there
was silence, then Obiajulu, a widow
who had survived war and famine in
Nigeria and built a new life in south
London, whispered that she would call
her daughter back. Fifteen minutes
later she had cleared the queue of
customers and called to make Asher
read every word of the letter while she
sniffled down the line.
Obiajulu is, by her daughter’s
account, a reserved woman. But her
shyness belies an iron will. Through
her personal sacrifices and
uncompromising parenting style, she
ensured that her four children excelled
despite their humble background.
Asher, 38, a CNN anchor based in
New York, is the sister of Chiwetel
Ejiofor, the Oscar-nominated actor.
Another brother, Obinze, is a
successful entrepreneur and her sister,
Kandibe, is a doctor.
Their father, Arinze, died in a car
crash in Nigeria that nearly killed an
11-year-old Chiwetel. Initially poleaxed
by grief, Obiajulu, who was pregnant,
forced herself to recover for the sake of
her children, contriving through long
hours in her Brixton pharmacy,
determination and ingenuity to put all
her children through top private
schools. Zain’s book about her mother
is a memoir, she says, not a manual,
but some of the parenting tips in
Where the Children Take Us: How One
Family Achieved the Unimaginable make
Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother look
like the Montessori parenting guide.
Obiajulu and her husband, Arinze,
came to London in the early 1970s
after surviving the pogroms and
famine of the Nigerian civil war.
Arinze was a trainee doctor and
Obiajulu passed her pharmacy exams
and they bought the chemist shop.Below: Zain
Asher. Right:
with her mother,
Obiajulu, and
brother
Chiwetel EjioforAsher was five when the family
attended a family wedding in Nigeria.
Afterwards Chiwetel and their father
stayed to take a road trip. Chiwetel
was being bullied at school and Arinze
thought discovering more about his
heritage would help him to stand up
for himself. Somewhere on the road to
Lagos a tractor trailer hit the car and
Arinze was killed. Chiwetel was
thought to have died, but when the
bodies were being unloaded from a
truck at the morgue he was discovered
to be breathing. He had a head injury
(he still has a large scar on his
forehead) and a badly broken arm and
spent weeks in hospital.
For a while Obiajulu was so grief-
stricken she could barely get out of
bed, but she was jolted into action
when her oldest boy, Obinze, 14, was
expelled from his private school for
missing lessons, getting into fights and
shouting at teachers. Fearful of losing
him to the streets, she persuaded
another private school to take him and
instituted curfews and chores for her
children. In a move that transformed
their lives, she also insisted each child
had to read a book a week and talk
about it at the dinner table — or
see their pocket money docked.
“After my father passed away,
she really did become a
completely different person,”
Asher says. “When your family
has been torn apart by this awful
tragedy, but your future and your
children’s future is on the line, it
completely changes how [you]
view life.”
Her mother’s resilience was
in part due to living
through the civil war.
‘There’s not a single thing
I can say to my mother
— I’m going through X,
Y, Z — where she hasn’t
gone through worse.
She’s very scrappy and
very determined.”
A few months after
the fatal car accident,
Asher’s sister,
Kandibe, was born.
Obiajulu went back
to work after two
weeks and toiled long
hours while
monitoring her
children’s progress,
even arranging to
send extra work to
teachers’ homes
for marking in
the holidays.
She worked
through the
school
curriculum
in advance with
her daughter,
sometimes until 1am.
Three years of her own
education had beenmakeshift lessons in the bush
during the civil war, so this
seemed like no hardship to her.
For Asher, school had been a
lonely place where she was the
only black girl, but it became
somewhere she shone.
Through assisted places
and scholarships the
children were sent to
private schools. In
winter they often went
without heat at home,
so the children did
their homework under
the covers in bed.
“Often the fees were
not paid on time,”
Asher says. Later,
when Chiwetel
started succeeding
as an actor, he
helped with the
fees.
Chiwetel went
to Dulwich
College, the
independent
school in south
London, where he
fell in love with
Shakespeare to the
extent that he
scribbled lines on his
bedroom wall and started
acting. Obiajulu borrowed
texts from the library to
keep up with his passion.Asher has only a handful of
memories of her father, an extrovert
who had released two albums as a solo
singer in Nigeria, was an exuberant
dancer and had been full of plans. “My
whole life I have been trying to get
closer to him, trying to get to know
him. Through this book I finally found
him,” she says.
An uncle described how Arinze
made everybody happy when he came
into a room. He was funny, charming,
smart, kind and giving. “He said, ‘The
closest person I’ve ever met to your
dad is Chiwetel.’ They were very close
and he did want to be like him in
every way. It has had an extraordinary
impact on him and it’s still obviously
very painful [for him] to talk about it
today. Him becoming an actor is
linked to going through something
that was really traumatic. To be an
actor you have to have an
extraordinary amount of empathy, to
be able to put yourself in somebody
else’s shoes entirely. You have to have
experienced life and he definitely has.”
Chiwetel was nominated for the best
actor Oscar for 12 Years a Slave in 2014.
Their mother was particularly
proud when she accompanied
Chiwetel to Buckingham Palace to
receive his OBE in 2008. “That was a
powerful moment for her to have my
brother honoured in that way.
Remember that initially they thought
he hadn’t made it from the accident.
It’s quite a remarkable journey.”No TV, no mirrors, only a payphone: the CNN
anchor Zain Asher, sister of the actor Chiwetel
Ejiofor, has written a memoir of her tough-love
London childhood. By Damian Whitworth
What our tiger mother did to
BEOWULF SHEEHANWhere the
Children
Take Us: How
One Family
Achieved the
Unimaginable by
Zain Asher is
published by
Fourth Estate
at £16.99