Book Review
Oseloka Obaze*
Saturday 24 November 2007
Hilda Ogbe
Silver in My Blood
(ISBN: 10: 978-029-752-9-X Spectrum Books Ltd., Ibadan, 2007, pp. 40; Price $10.99)
Available at: www.spectrumbooksonline.com
When Mrs. Victoria Gowon, wife of the then Head of State and
Mrs. Clara Ogbemudia, wife of the Governor of Midwest State wore
heavy sets of our silver jewelry, we could have wished for no better advertisement.
Serious hobbies like vocations, demand immense passion and lifetime commitment. In addition, those with sufficient foresight and deep passion, retain the capacity to leverage what started as a hobby, into full-scale enterprise. Nevertheless, transforming a germ of an idea into reality requires perseverance. That, clearly, was the case of Hilda Ogbe’s love, fixation and passion for silver, both as a metal and on jewelry form. Indeed, as the title of her book on the subject, Silver in My Blood suggests, she figuratively had silver streaming through her blood, but with her immersion into the craft, it is possibly that she also literarily had elements of silver in her blood stream.
This book combines as personal memoir and annals of an obscure cottage industry, at least in Nigeria. The author documents how she got into the business of making silver jewelry in Nigeria, without, capital, loan and overdrafts. However, she had perseverance and a set of likeminded local silversmiths, whose passion for the industry and perseverance matched and sometimes superseded hers.
Silver in My Blood opens with a poem of the same title, in which the author asks a rhetorical question; ‘Has it happened to you? You wake up on day with the germ of an idea. You dismiss it. Daily chores take over. But the germ comes back. It niggles….Yes you think it can work. … Now you get excited….The idea takes possession of you….You think of your project, you dream it, you breathe it, you eat it, you sleep with it.. Your project gets into your blood’. She ends the poem with an obvious line, which encapsulates her story ever before she dishes out the gist of it all; ‘That’s how it was with me.’
Before delving into how Ogbe’s preoccupation with silver began and how she became the doyen of the silver jewelry making industry in Nigeria, a cursory look at her background is useful. Hilda Ogbe arrived in Nigeria several years before the eve of her independence-- 1956 to be exact. A British national, she had journeyed to her adopted country with her husband Prince Tommy A. Ogbe, a lawyer. I963 found the Ogbes in Port Harcourt, where he husband had taken up a position with Shell, B.P. Oil, becoming as it were, the first Nigerian executive to be so appointed.
Ogbe’s love for jewelry worn by Nigerian women led her on a personal search into the deep recesses of dingy, local goldsmith shops in the back street of Port Harcourt. There, she found that she could not afford locally made gold jewelry. Moreover, as she disclosed, “I really preferred silver for myself, because gold was not enough contrast with my skin. Banana white, I used to call it’. Because she preferred bold jewelry, being herself a ‘big girl’ on who ‘small designs were lost’, she designed an earring for herself, and had it made by a reluctant local goldsmith at a reasonable cost. The product was instantly a big hit at the expatriate local tea, coffee and cocktail circuits within the suburbia Shell Camp in Umukoroshe.
Fortuitously, those who wanted similar earrings made, to whom she had availed the name and address of the goldsmith - who was about to turn popular silversmith - were reluctant to go there, for ‘they were nervous of driving into the small streets where children would run out from the houses about shouting “Bekeh, Bekeh!”’ – the generic name in the eastern parts of Nigeria for a white person. Soon, she was not just running errands for her friends, but acting as an intermediary. She soon began to design necklaces, bracelets, brooches, pendants, chains, etc. It was a win-win situation. She provided job for the locals while assisting her friends. A positive and unforeseen corollary of her new-found industry, was that ‘the silver jewelry for the women in the Shell Camp was going to be taken abroad to four corners of the world, thus projecting an image of Nigeria which spoke of dainty and beautiful craftsmanship.’
With her husband transferred to Enugu years later, she took her hobby along, but was unlucky to find takers for silver jewelry making. ‘The old established masters felt it was beneath them to make silver which was so much cheaper than gold’. That was until she met Charles Ezeana, ‘a resourceful and intelligent’ trainee, who offered to make her silver jewelry, once he had completed his apprenticeship. Ezeana soon brought along a colleague, Joseph Anyaonicha. In the two, Ogbe found great skills and intricate workmanship that belied their rudimentary workstation, which was not a well-equipped workroom, but ‘only a simply group of work tools’ mostly, pliers, tweezers, scissors and iron plates. Their furnace was simply, a charcoal fire with hand-pumped bellows. It was from her association with Ezeana and Anyaonicha that Hilda Ogbe gleaned the complexity and painful diligence required to make fine silver jewelry, absent sophisticated machinery. As she confessed; ‘my mind boggled at these work processes but they became more complex as I continued to watch.’
Although she remained an intermediary, Enugu ‘a wonderful mix of affluent society’ yielded dividend for Ogbe and her collaborative work force, which had grown with four additional silversmiths. Ogbe, reveals the paradox of a local industry, whose products were most appealing expatriates, thus: ‘Our first and best customers were Europeans who for centuries had been used to wearing silver but had not found any such jewelry in Nigeria. They knew the value of handmade things and treasured them because machine made gold had become too common’. There was also another yield; ‘Nigerian ladies, who really preferred gold, accepted the silver because the designs were beautiful and so different form what they were used to’. It was in Enugu that she contracted to sell her locally made silver jewelries through the Kingsway Stores, which had outlets in Enugu, Lagos, Jos, Benin, Kaduna and Kano. She had pitched the sale to the store’s manger and its chief buyer, by noting that ‘the jewelry was a beautiful handmade Nigerian item. It was small and light to carry when traveling and every woman loved a gift of jewelry. It would become an established, prized art form in Nigeria’.
The Nigerian civil war truncated whatever plans Hilda Ogbe had for Enugu and her trade, but not for long. With her husband transferred to Benin City in 1966 and Biafra proclaimed in 1967, she had to rely on those silversmiths who were of mid-western origin, mainly from Ubulu-Uku to continue her industry. Starting with Dazumi Afaifo, she recruited more hands. As business boomed, at the behest of Ms. Ogbe, the silversmiths formed a union named Ogbecraft, mainly to protect themselves from ‘piracy’. The measure hardly stopped poorly made reproduction of the Ogbecraft designs; but ‘the satisfaction of having started a new industry in Nigeria and so having created employment for hundreds of craftsmen dulled the pain and brought to mind the saying, ‘imitation is the best form of flattery”’.
Hilda Ogbe devotes the rest of the book to recounting the challenges faced by anyone trying to set up an indigenous enterprise. As if piracy was not a sufficient challenge, she recalled that foreign currency restrictions gravely impeded sourcing of tools and raw materials. She got around many such challenges by improvising and by sheer perseverance. However, the availability of skilled artisans, an industrial imperative, for important chores, such as cutting cabochons and faceting gemstone, continually proved a problem. Ogbe says she got around such obstacles, by providing books about jewelry making to her artisans, who in turn, devised their own methods to produce attractive pieces. One challenge that decimated the fledgling cottage industry, was recession. It took its toll in terms of diminished demand for luxury products and the departure of skilled craftsmen, but the industry has, after forty years stayed alive.
Silver in My Blood, despite being thin, is a thoroughly motivational, encouraging and stimulating book. It is written form the heart and in very simple and conversational narrative. The illustrative photographs make up for details, assuming that are any, that may be absent in this slim volume. It is perhaps to Hilda Ogbe’s enduring credit, that a Russian travel brochure advises travelers to Nigeria, ‘When you get to Benin City, don’t forget to look for the famous silver jewelry’. Indeed, Ogbe noted that when ‘Mrs. Victoria Gowon, wife of the then Head of State and Mrs. Clara Ogbemudia, wife of the Governor of Midwest State wore heavy sets of our silver jewelry, we could have wished for no better advertisement.’ That in itself is an affirmation of her good work and the credibility of the industry she founded. It is also a worthy postscript, that in recognition of her entrepreneurial work in the silver jewelry making industry and in other areas such as health, the Edo State based University of Benin, awarded Ms. Hilda Ogbe an honorary degree in 2005. But her most abiding legacy, is perhaps, that she would have imbued in those with whom she interacted, the sense that it takes ‘imagination and perseverance more than money’ to excel in any business, big or small.
Victors write history. Ogbe has written her own victorious story and her contribution to the establishment of silver jewelry making industry in Nigeria. Also, when the broader history of the establishment of various cottage industries in Nigeria is written, her place will be guaranteed. As she surmised, ‘despite obstacles and recession, this cottage industry is here to stay’. That is a resounding point. Therefore, we cannot fail to fully share in Hilda Ogbe’s enthusiasm, or in her commitment to free enterprise. Accordingly, we second her closing line in the book: “Long Live Enterprise!’
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Mr. Oseloka Obaze, an aspiring writer, is a founding member of the Kwenu.com Book Review Forum, which is dedicated to the promotion of books with Igbo and Afrocentric themes. He is also a supporting Member of the African Writers Endowment (AWE). From 1999 to 2005 he served on the editorial board of INYEAKA, the journal of Songhai Charities, Inc., a New Jersey community-based charity founded and run by Nigerians based in New York Tri-state area in the United States, first as its founding Publisher and later as the Editor-At-Large. He is also on the editorial board of The Amaka Gazette, the journal of the Christ the King College, Onitsha Alumni Association in America. His collection of poems, “Regarscent Past: A Collection of Poems” was among the top three finalists in the poetry category in the African Writers Endowment Publishing Grant Program for 2004. His novel, “Happy Eulogy” will be published in 2007. He reviews books and arts strictly as a hobby. © Copyright 24 November 2007.