[1] She served as the Senior Special Adviser (SSA) to President Olusegun Obasanjo on Arts and Culture and was a founder-member of the Association of Nigerian Authors (ANA).

[6] She completed her primary and secondary education in The Holy Rosary School, before being married off at the age of 17 to Brendan Douglas Acholonu, a surgeon from the same clan, who was then-settled in Germany.

[4] In 1986 she was the only Nigerian, and one of the two Africans to participate in the United Nations Expert Group Meeting on "Women, Population and Sustainable Development: the Road to Rio, Cairo and Beijing”.

[4] In 1990, she was selected as a Fulbright Scholar by the US government (as a result of her documenting the Igbo roots of Olaudah Equiano, a famed abolitionist and slave autobiographer) and served as a visiting faculty to several private colleges.

[7][8] From 1999, she served as the Senior Special Adviser (SSA) to President Olusegun Obasanjo on Arts and Culture before resigning in 2002, to contest for the Orlu senatorial district seat of Imo State as a National Democratic Party candidate and re-enter active electoral politics.

[5][15][16] In a review in The Journal of African History, Elizabeth Isichei noted of Acholonu's book to be an enthusiastic venture in pseudo-history, with a genealogy that allotted ridiculous life-spans to many members of Equiano's family.

[18] Ode Ogede penned a scathing critique of the work and noted of it to be an express example about how oral history can be abused to fulfill preset goals, without any veneer of scholarly rigor and objectivity; he also deemed her to be ignorant about recent studies concerning Olaudah Equiano's autobiography.

[20] Erving Beauregard of the University of Dayton deemed it as an interesting work, that made a plausible case for its central assertion despite her accepting oral testimonies from persons claiming to be 200 years old.

[23][6] Originating as her Fulbright Scholar Project, it has been since regarded as a pioneering work in the domain of African Gender Studies and has heavily influenced the development of maternal theory in Western nations.

[31][32] Acholonu viewed the introduction of Islam into Africa as a form of colonialism, which subverted indigenous African systems and reduced the quality of life for native women.