When Nwando Achebe went to get her medical checkup before doing fieldwork in Nigeria, she was given a 20-page report warning her about all the dangers she would face. Among the "many don'ts," she says, was a warning not to eat any food bought from street hawkers.

Another student might have found the message a bit daunting. However, as she read, Nwando remembered the wonderful aromas of roasting corn and other food prepared on the street. She had smelled them as a child, and no U.S. warning would prevent her from enjoying them during her homecoming to Nigeria.

Now 29 years old, Nwando has spent more than half of her life in the United States, but Igboland in the southeast of Nigeria remains her heart's home. "Igbo is who I am," she says. "It is my culture and my worldview."

Nwando began her international studies at the age of 2, when she was placed in preschool in Amherst, Massachusetts, where her mother was completing work on a PhD. In a flash, Nwando was transported from a homeland where everyone was black to a classroom where everyone else was white. In keeping with the racially charged atmosphere of early 1970s New England, her teachers stood by and watched as Nwando took abuse from her small colleagues.

"My parents didn't realize what I was going through," she says. "All they knew is that I didn't want to go to school." Raised speaking two languages, Nwando stopped speaking English at school, responding only when she was spoken to in her Igbo mother tongue. The teachers complained. Soon, her parents understood her plight and moved her to another school.

Some 20 years later, when Nwando began looking for a place to do graduate studies, UCLA was appealing in part because of its faculty and student diversity. But the principal attraction was the late B. I. Obichere, a longtime family friend who was then a pillar of the History Department at UCLA. Nwando had thought she was coming here to study film, but then, as a courtesy, she took a class with Obichere.

"Professor Obichere was an African griot," she says, "he was a man of dignity-a storyteller, who would recite the history of the African people, without consulting any notes. Students would listen to him and get inspired." In Nwando's case, Obichere "made me want to study more about the history of my people." Thus, she eventually got a master's degree in African studies and is now completing work on a PhD in history. Her dissertation work, funded by the Ford Foundation and later a Fulbright fellowship, returned her to Igboland. Its title: "Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Wives: Female Power and Authority in Northern Igboland: 1900 to 1960."

Her adviser, Edward A. Alpers, calls the research "an unusually promising study" and points out that Nwando was the number one Fulbright candidate in the country, "ample tribute to the remarkable quality of both the candidate and her proposal." When her dissertation is completed, Alpers says, "she will become one of the most sought after young historians of Africa in the United States."

Nwando says her interest in history "came out of a desire to see myself in history." But when she read prescribed texts, "written by Western historians on African women, I'd be pretty incensed by their negative portrayals. African women were not 'beasts of burden' nor were they women who were sold for the reproductive labor!" Now, she hopes to present another voice to the discourse.

Her dissertation draws on archival materials in England and Nigeria, but like most archival documents, these included few women's realities. So Nwando returned to northern Igboland, where she went into the villages and interviewed hundreds of women and men, in conversations that "empowered them to talk about their own histories in their own words." The process was "time-consuming but very rewarding," she says.

Women in Igboland are not subordinated to men; instead they are highly respected, Nwando says, and share power in complementary roles with men. Women occupy prominent roles in religion as goddesses and priestesses. They also direct markets and serve as the Supreme Court, raising their voices in negotiation and peacemaking. One particular woman, Ahebi Ugbabe, was an important leader in colonial Igboland. "She was a female husband who transformed herself into a 'man' in order to assume the positions of King and Warrant Chief." Her story makes Nwando think that documentary filmmaking might be one direction for her future.

However, her main plan is to follow in the footsteps of her father and mother, scholars who have migrated back and forth from Nigeria to the United States, as the political climate has evolved in Nigeria. Her father, Chinua Achebe, is considered the father of the African novel.

Nwando is married to Chukwuma Ekwueme, also a Nigerian Igbo, whom she met her first day at UCLA. He has a PhD in engineering from UCLA and works for a small engineering firm in Santa Monica. A big part of their future plans revolves around their daughter, Chino, now one and a half.

Giving her daughter an opportunity to know Igboland "matters a lot to me," Nwando says. The youngster traveled with Nwando on her Fulbright year, and so she has already seen and experienced her motherland. They also speak to Chino in both Igbo and English, as Nwando's parents did with her.

Nwando's feet are firmly planted in two countries. When she is in Los Angeles, she misses the hospitality and humanity of her people. When she was home in Igboland, she missed being able to climb into her own bed at night, since she was moving around so much.

"I live at the crossroads," she says. "The crossroads of two distinct cultures, one African and the other American. I am therefore neither one nor the other exclusively, but both. This positionality has enabled me to discern and pick the best of both cultures. And this is what I want for my daughter."

Published in Spring 1999, Graduate Quarterly