CELEBRITY PROFILE Chimamanda Adichie

CHIMAMANDA NGOZI: A feminist larger than life

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the most famous African women alive today. Not arguably, not maybe: the 43-year-old is nothing short of a phenomenon. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, born 15th September 1977, is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors (which) is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”, particularly in her second home, the United States.

A reknowned feminist, she has written several international bestseller novels, most notably Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), Americanah (2013), the short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and Dear Ijeawele (2017). Her latest feminist manual, We Should All Be Feminists: The Desk Diary 2021, will inspire women to aim for the sky.

Adichie was born in Enugu, Nigeria, into an Igbo family. She grew up on the campus of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where her father, James Nwoye Adichie, was a professor of Statistics. Her mother, Grace Ifeoma, was the university’s first female Registrar. Her family’s ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State.

The fifth of six children, she was a voracious reader from a young age, and found Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe transformative. Adichie completed her secondary education at the University of Nigeria Secondary School, Nsukka, where she received several academic prizes. She studied

medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the university’s Catholic medical students.

In 1997, aged 19, she left for the U.S. to continue her education at Drexel University in Philadelphia. She soon transferred to Eastern Connecticut State University to be near her sister Uche, who had a medical practice in Coventry. Growing up in Nigeria, she was not used to being identified by the colour of her skin, but this suddenly changed. As a black African in America, Adichie was suddenly confronted with what it meant to be a person of colour. She writes about this in her novel Americanah, for which she won the 2013 U.S. National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.

Once settled in at University, she started writing her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which garnered the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2005 for Best First Book (Africa) and that year’s Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book. She also wrote several short stories about the Nigerian Biafra conflict, which would become the subject of her highly successful novel Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), which was adapted for film and starred Chiwetel Ejiofor and Thandie Newton. In November 2020, Half of a Yellow Sun was voted by the public to be the best book to have won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in its 25-year history.

Adichie was named one of TIME Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2015, and in 2017, Fortune Magazine named her one of the World’s 50 Greatest Leaders. Her essay, We Should All Be Feminists, adapted from her 2013 TEDx talk, has remained on the bestseller lists, particularly in Sweden, where in 2015 it was distributed to every 16-year-old highschool student in the land.

Dear Ijeawele, published in March 2017, is a 9,000-word manifesto that features fifteen invaluable suggestions - direct, wryly funny, and perceptive - for how to empower a daughter to become a strong, independent woman. The book had its origins in a personal email Adichie wrote to a friend who had asked for advice about how to raise her daughter as a feminist.

Adichie divides her time between the U.S. and Nigeria, where she leads an annual creative writing workshop. Much of the year, she lives in Baltimore with her Nigerian-American husband, Dr Ivara Esege. In 2016, they had a daughter, whose pregnancy, birthdate and name Adichie refused to reveal, citing the scrutiny that comes with celebrity pregnancy. After their baby was born, it was Dr Ivara who stayed home to look after the child for the first six months. Afterward, the two shared a fifty-fifty responsibility in raising their daughter, in a typical show of gender equality. Having a baby made her think differently about her own parents, particularly her mother. Grace Adichie, who had six children and worked her way up from being a university administrator to the registrar, taught her daughter to love fashion as well as books, and was a “very cool mum” whom she idolised as a child. However, like most cheeky young adults, Adichie went through a rebellious phase with her mother. Now, she looks at her daughter and is awed at Mrs Adichie’s mothering prowess.

Sadly, in June 2020, Adichie’s world stopped when she lost her beloved father and rock. Professor Adichie passed on at the age of 88.

“Because I loved my father so much, so fiercely, so tenderly, I always at the back of my mind feared this day. But he was in good health. I thought we had time. I thought it wasn’t yet time. I have come undone. I have screamed, shouted, rolled on the floor, pounded things. I have shut down parts of myself,” she wrote in one of her tributes to him.

Her father was Nigeria’s first professor of Statistics. He studied Mathematics at Ibadan and got his PhD in Statistics from the University of Carlifornia - Berkeley, returning to Nigeria shortly before the Biafran War. He was a titled Igbo man – Odelu Ora Abba – deeply committed to his hometown.

On February 12th, 2021, Adichie announced her new powerful essay on loss and grief. ‘Notes on Grief’ is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter’s fierce love for a parent, and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.”

She is one of the most defining and stirring voices of our time - a beacon of hope, who maintains that women can prevail against all odds and will go to any lengths to prove this. And as her motto says: ‘It’s not your job to be likeable. It’s your job to be yourself.’

DEGREES AND HONOURS

Aside from bestselling books, Adichie is a very high achiever. She has a Bachelor’s degree from Eastern Connecticut State University with the distinction of summa cum laude in 2001; a Master’s Degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University; a Master of Arts degree in African History from Yale University; a Hodder fellowship at Princeton University for the 2005-2006 academic year; a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University 2011-2012; a MacArthur Fellowship n 2008; an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa, by Johns Hopkins University in 2016; a Doctorate of Humane Letters, honoris causa, by Haverford College and The University of Edinburgh in 2017; an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Amherst College in 2018; and an honorary Doctorate honoris causa, from the Université de Fribourg, Switzerland, in 2019.