The Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian nonfiction writer, short story writer and novelist. A MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, Adichie has been called "the most prominent" of a "procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [that] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature".
Background
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma and James Nwoye Adichie. While the family's ancestral hometown is Abba in Anambra State, Chimamanda grew up in Nsukka, in the house formerly occupied by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Chimamanda's father, who is now retired, worked at the University of Nigeria, located in Nsukka. He was Nigeria's first professor of statistics, and later became Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University. Her mother was the first female registrar at the same institution.
Education
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie had all her early education both primary and secondary at Nsukka, after which she gained admission to study medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, which only happened within two years. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the University's Catholic medical students.
At the age of nineteen, Chimamanda left for the United States. She gained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two years, and she went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she also wrote articles for the university journal, the Campus Lantern. While in Connecticut, she stayed with her sister Ijeoma, who runs a medical practice close to the university.
She received a bachelor's degree from Eastern, with the distinction of summa cum laude in 2001, and then completed a master's degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore in 2003. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts degree in African studies from Yale University.
Adichie started working on her first novel, Purple Hibiscus during her senior year at Eastern, and it released in October 2003. The book has received wide critical acclaim: it was shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize (2004) and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book (2005).
Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (also the title of one of her short stories), is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published in August 2006 in the United Kingdom and in September 2006 in the United States. Like Purple Hibiscus, it has also been released in Nigeria.
Chimamanda was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005-2006 academic year, and earned an MA in African Studies from Yale University in 2008. In 2011-2012, she was awarded a fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, which allowed her to finalize her third novel, Americanah. The book was released to great critical acclaim in 2013.
This was the question thrown to Adichie in an interview:
You talk about Igbo beliefs – are you religious?
And this was her reply:
It is complicated. I grew up a Catholic. I read books about the pope. I respect religion. I could talk about it all day. In Nigeria, it is the biggest force in the country, with Islam and Christianity. My father is an observant Catholic – it is something I can't dismiss.
Politics
Her political view can be simply perceived from the answer she gave in an interview. The question asked was, do you think that, as a writer, you have a political role to play? This was her reply: "I don’t think that all writers should have political roles, but I do think that I, as a person who writes realist fiction set in Africa, almost automatically have a political role. In a place of scarce resources made scarcer by artificial means, life is always political. In writing about that life, you assume a political role.
Views
This is what Adichie feels about gender inequality: "When women do say something, not only is it more likely to be ignored, but the women themselves are accepting of it being ignored. So they're less likely to push back. That happens less often in Nigeria. Women in corporate settings are more likely to be vocal."
Why does she think that is? "Because although there's a lot of gender bullshit in Nigeria, I think women in the west have a lot more invested in being liked. And being liked if you're female means a certain thing. So in workplaces, women who are bosses in Nigeria are fierce. The people who work for them, men and women, respect them. But, these are women who very keenly perform gender stereotypes when they go back home. And if they give a public interview, they have to say, 'My husband supported me and allowed me to …'."
Quotations:
"I live half the year in Nigeria, the other half in the U.S. But home is Nigeria - it always will be. I consider myself a Nigerian who is comfortable in the world. I look at it through Nigerian eyes."
"Lasting love has to be built on mutual regard and respect. It is about seeing the other person. I am very interested in relationships and, when I watch couples, sometimes I can sense a blindness has set in. They have stopped seeing each other. It is not easy to see another person."
"I've always been curious about how much of our cultural baggage we bring to what and how we read. I suspect we bring a lot, although we like to think we don't."
"In primary school in south-eastern Nigeria, I was taught that Hosni Mubarak was the president of Egypt. I learned the same thing in secondary school. In university, Mubarak was still president of Egypt. I came to assume, subconsciously, that he - and others like Paul Biya in Cameroon and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - would never leave."
"If I were not African, I wonder whether it would be clear to me that Africa is a place where the people do not need limp gifts of fish but sturdy fishing rods and fair access to the pond. I wonder whether I would realize that while African nations have a failure of leadership, they also have dynamic people with agency and voices."
"I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable."
Interests
Writers
Chinua Cchebe
Connections
She is married, but simply likes to be referred to as Ms, not Mrs.