Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on September 15th, 1977, in Enugu, Nigeria. She grew up in a home that had previously been inhabited by fellow writer Chinua Achebe. Her parents both worked at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka; her father was a professor and her mother was a registrar. After spending a year at Nsukka studying medicine, Adichie moved to the United States when she was nineteen in order to continue her education. Rather than continue to pursue medicine, Adichie studied communication, political science, and creative writing.

Adichie is now a novelist; her debut novel, Purple Hibiscus, was published in 2003. She has also written several other critically acclaimed novels, short story collections, and non-fiction essays, including the novel Half of a Yellow Sun. Her work has received significant attention and many literary awards. Adichie now splits her time between the United States and Nigeria.

The Danger of a Single Story

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie started reading books at an early age of four and started writing stories with crayon illustrations at the age of seven. She read mostly American and British children’s books, which created a single story in her mind about books. She believed that books by their nature should have foreign characters in them and the books should deal with subject matters with which the writer should not have a personal relation. But she realised the mistake when she could read books by African writers like Chinua Achebe and Camara Laye.  When she read African books, she realized that girls like her with kinky hair and chocolate coloured skin could also be characters in books.

  She had a single story about Fide, their house boy. She believed that he and his family had only poverty in life and did not have any other abilities. Once she visited his house and found beautifully patterned baskets of dyed raffia made by his brother. Then she realised that her single story about Fide and his family was wrong. When she was 19, she went to America to continue her university studies. Her American roommate had a single story about Africa.  She believed Africa was only a land of beautiful landscape and all Africans were poor and uneducated tribal people.  The roommate did not know English was Nigeria’s official language, and she was shocked to hear Adichie’s excellent English.  

 Adichie’s American professor also had a single story about Africa. He believed that Adichie’s characters were not authentically African. In his single story, African authors’ characters should be uneducated and starving; they should not be educated and rich enough to drive cars.  Though Adichie had a happy childhood in a close-knit family, she had also some painful life experiences.  Her grandfathers died in refugee camps. Her cousin Polle died due to lack of enough medical care. Her closest friend Okoloma died in a plane crash.  

 Finally Adichie says in her speech that single stories create stereotypes, and the stereotypes are not untrue, but they are incomplete. They make a single story the only story. 

We Should all be feminist

We teach girls that they can have ambition, but not too much to be successful, but not too successful, or they'll threaten men, says author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In this classic talk that started a worldwide conversation about feminism, Adichie asks that we begin to dream about and plan for a different, fairer world of happier men and women who are truer to themselves.

If one had ability and interest than gender doesn't matter. If it is our culture than culture doesn't make people but people make culture and every tradition changes with the passing of time. And for a change we must raise a voice against it and then and we can survive and make our position.Chimamanda gives the definition for feminist which is "A feminist is a man or woman who says, yes there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it and we must do better."

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  Harvard University

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie  

was invited at Harvard   University in 2018 as guest lecturer .

She shared an anecdote about an English woman who, despite her best intentions, somehow mauled her name in front of an audience, calling her “chimichanga.” 

I told this story at a dinner party shortly afterwards and one of the guests seemed very annoyed that I was laughing about it, ‘that was so insulting’ he said ‘that English woman could have tried harder.’ But the truth is she did try very hard, in fact she ended up calling me a fried burrito because she had tried very hard and then ended up with an utterly human mistake. That was the result of anxiety.

So, the point of this story is not to say that you can call me chimichanga.The point is that intent matters, that context matters. Somebody might very well call me chimichanga out of a malicious desire to mock my name and that I would certainly not laugh about, for there is a difference between malice mistake and a mistake.She discussed the outrage and “cancelling” culture, urging the graduates to take note of context and intent.

She also asked that the graduates always speak the truth, valuing it above lies.