Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977- ), Nigerian-American author. Adichie was born in the southeastern Nigeria city of Enugu and grew up in nearby Nsukka, home to the University of Nigeria, where her father was a statistics professor and her mother was the first female registrar. Both of her grandfathers had died in the late 1960s during the Biafran War, when her Igbo people seceded from Nigeria and briefly formed an independent nation. This chaos and bloodshed was followed by a military dictatorship that ended when she was two, only to be followed by another one that lasted from 1983 to 1999. Adichie was first inspired to become a writer by Things Fall Apart, the classic novel by fellow Nigerian Chinua Achebe, and as a child she loved to write in her father’s study, later recalling “I didn’t choose writing, writing chose me.” Her feminist worldview was shaped in part by her great-grandmother, who in her words “may never have used that word [feminist] – obviously, that word doesn’t exist in Igbo – but she was because she pushed back against all of these sort of cultural ideas that held her back because she was a woman.” At age nineteen she came to the United States to attend college, graduating from Eastern Connecticut State University with highest honors in 2001. She and her sister were among the more than 277,000 Nigeria natives living in the U.S., with another 100,000 reporting Nigerian ancestry. The connection between the U.S. and Africa’s most populous nation began in the 1600s when thousands of Igbo, Yoruba, Hausa, Fulani, and others were brought to America as slaves; in the 1700s, for instance, 30,000 Igbo were brought to Virginia alone. Ironically, Nigerians and other Africans could enter the U.S. as slaves but not as free immigrants until the Civil Rights Movement ended racial restrictions on immigration. Since then, more black people have voluntarily entered the U.S. from Africa, the Caribbean, and Europe than the total number that were brought as slaves from 1620 to 1865, and Nigerian Americans ranked highest among all U.S. ethnic groups in formal education.

While still a student, Adichie began publishing poems, plays, and short stories such as “You in America” and “The American Embassy.” In 2003 she published her first novel Purple Hibiscus, whose main character is a Nigerian teenaged girl living under the oppression of the dictatorship and of her own father, who is financially successful and publicly pious but in private physically and psychologically terrorizes his family. The book reflected her views as a person of Christian faith who also argues that religion often oppresses women and divides people. Purple Hibiscus won several awards for best first novel and was nominated for the Best Books for Young Adults Award. Her second book, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), is set during the Biafran War and focuses on two sisters, their love interests, and the poor child who works for them until he is forced into the war. Adichie said of this novel that “The need to write about it came from growing up in its shadow. This thing that I didn’t quite understand was my legacy. It hovered over everything.” It received the 2007 Orange Prize for Fiction, given to the best English-language novel written by a woman, and was named to the New York Times “100 Most Notable Books of the Year” list. In 2013 it was made into a feature film directed by fellow Nigerian Biyi Bandele, filmed in Nigeria (at the insistence of Adichie), and starring Chiwetel Ejiofor, Thandie Newton, Anika Noni Rose, and John Boyega. Six years later, the novel was named the tenth best book published since 2000 by The Guardian and to the BBC’s list of “100 most inspiring novels” by the British Broadcasting Company. Her 2009 collection of short stories The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), like her earlier writing, focuses on characters are of Nigerian origin, but some of them are immigrants living in the U.S., making this Adichie’s first writing outside of her native country. This trend continued with her third novel Americanah (2013), in which the main character is a young Nigerian who comes to America to attend college and is forced to engage with American racism and black identity. It was named one of the ten best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and was the March 2017 selection for the “One Book, One New York” program, which encouraged all New York residents to read the same book in a single month. HBO is currently developing it as a miniseries starring Lupita Nyongo’o and Danai Gurira.

In addition to her novels, Adichie has also received wide acclaim for other works. Her 2009 TED Talk “The Danger of a Single Story” emphasized the importance of diverse narratives and of understanding others beyond outward appearances. This is expressed through her experiences as a child reading books without black characters, a college student in America stereotyped by her roommate, and as a Nigerian from a prosperous background who was surprised to learn that the brother of her family’s servant had made a basket because “It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them.” This became one of the most widely viewed TED Talks of all time. Even more successful was her 2012 TED Talk “We should all be feminists,” which explores the ways that gender construction shapes and limits people. Beyoncé later sampled part of this talk in her song “Flawless.” Adichie’s academic accomplishments include two master’s degrees, fellowships at Princeton and Harvard, a 2008 “Genius Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation, and being elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017 she published Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, an extended version of an email that she had originally written to a friend who asked for advice on how to raise her daughter as a feminist and which begins with “Your feminist premise should be: I matter. I matter equally. Not ‘if only. Not ‘as long as.’ I matter equally. Full stop.” In one of her numerous interviews and lectures on current events, she commented on the election and presidency of Donald Trump, who in 2020 banned further immigration from Nigeria, by stating that “I remember saying this fairly early on when he became president. That it felt like Americans…had given a toddler the keys to a very expensive and complicated car, and said to the toddler, ‘Okay, you drive.’…While I mourn all the ways in which I think America has failed and disappointed me, there’s a sense in me in which I don’t despair, because I’ve seen enough of how this has also propelled people to do things that can remake the world.”

©David Brodnax, Sr.