Where the Children Take Us

In this spellbinding memoir, popular CNN anchor Zain Asher pays tribute to her mother's strength and her determination—grounded in the traditions of Nigerian parenting—to raise four successful children in the shadow of tragedy.

Living in Brixton and awaiting the return of her husband and young son from Nigeria, Obiajulu Ejiofor received shattering news. There had been a fatal car crash, and one of them was dead.

In Where the Children Take Us, Obiajulu's daughter, Zain Asher, tells the story of her family and her mother's deeply personal fight to protect her children from the daily pressures of poverty, crime, and racism in 1980s and '90s South London as a widowed emigrant. Young Arinze and Obiajulu meet as teens in war-stricken Nigeria. Together, they emigrate to London in the 1960s to escape civil war and make a better life for themselves and their family. While seeking to achieve as much as they could, Obiajulu and Arinze experience prejudice and racism that overshadows their dreams and makes it difficult for them to make connections in a white Western society.

When grief threatens to engulf her family, the academic futures of her mourning children are put in jeopardy, but Obiajulu, refuses to accept defeat. She buys the Western literary classics and instills a nightly book club, testing her children on their literacy and challenging their deeper understanding. When they gravitate toward distractions, she eliminates the television, instead running theatre lines with her son and finishing homework into the early morning with Zain. Drawing on Nigerian parenting strategies encompassing adaptability, language, and foresight, Obiajulu enables her children to succeed under any and all conditions—a drive firmly instilled in her sons and daughters, who grow up to become an international journalist, an Oscar-nominated actor—Asher's older brother Chiwetel Ejiofor—a medical doctor, and a thriving entrepreneur.

The story of a woman who survived genocide, famine, poverty, and crushing grief to rise from war torn Africa to the streets of Brixton and eventually to Buckingham Palace, this is an unforgettable portrait of strength, tenacity, love, and perseverance embodied in one towering woman.