Chimamanda To The Fore, As Black Writers Look For Positives From Sales Rise

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Manny Jefferson)

BY ALEX CALL

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has just pipped children’s author Rachel Renée Russell to the top of the list of the UK’s bestselling Black authors, according to data from NielsenIQ BookScan’s Total Consumer Market (TCM). Ngozi Adichie’s books have earned £834,615 across the first 24 weeks of 2025 – largely thanks to her latest novel Dream Count, which was published at the beginning of March and accrued £648,011 across 43,823 copies.

Such is the dearth of Black authors at the top end of the TCM data that even stripping out Dream Count – which is the 109th bestselling book of the year so far – the Nigerian-born author would still be in seventh place in the Black authors Top 20, an increase on her ranking of 18th in the equivalent period in 2024.

A note about the data – NielsenIQ’s data does not include ethnicity data on the authors in its charts, so a manual sift-through has led to the compilation of this data. And while every care has been taken to compose an accurate list, we may be missing an author or two.

To give some context to the size of the task, in the Top 250 ranking of all writers, there are just four Black authors. We have had to look through the Top 1,000 authors to find the first 19 on our list, with Benjamin Zephaniah just outside that list of 1,000. Interrogating that statistic reveals that a mere fraction of the UK’s book sales are generated by Black authors: taking up 1.8% of the slots in the Top 1,000, this Top 20 only accounts for 1.6% of the money spent.

Meanwhile, the 2021 census estimates that 4% of the UK’s population is Black, with a further 1.3% describing themselves as Mixed White/Black African or Mixed White/Black Caribbean – suggesting that, with all things equal, we should be seeing at least another 30 Black authors in the Top 1,000.

Just under half of the £5m that has been spent on those authors comes from the top three alone, with Russell and Percival Everett appearing alongside Ngozi Adichie in the overall Top 100 bestsellers of the year thus far.

It is Everett who has the bestselling title from a Black author in 2025, setting aside Benjamin Dean’s World Book Day (WBD) title This Story Is a Lie for a moment. Everett’s James – which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2025 and last month, perhaps most prestigiously, was awarded the Nibbie for Fiction Book of the Year – has sold a total of 77,473 copies in mass-market paperback since its end-of-February launch and is one of only three Black-authored titles to appear in the overall UK Top 100.

The other two slots are taken up by the previously mentioned Dean and his WBD stable-mate Joseph Coelho whose All Poems Aloud (illustrated by Daniel Gray-Barnett) interested 20,000 fewer children than did Dean’s offering.

At this point in 2024 there were also three books from Black authors in the TCM Top 100, however in this instance they were all £1 WBD titles – given away by booksellers in exchange for the WBD voucher handed out to children across the country. It is not until position 126 on the chart that we find the first non-WBD Black-authored title – The List by Yomi Adegoke – which sold 40,465 copies, just over 37,000 units fewer than Everett’s James.

So far in 2025, £5.1m has been spent on the Top 20 Black authors – that is roughly the same amount of money earned by Sarah J Maas’ titles, significantly less than the amount spent on Dav Pilkey, Rebecca Yarros and Julia Donaldson, respectively, and roughly half the amount generated by revision guides from CGP.

Still, one glimmer of hope is that figure is up 11.9% on the bestselling Black authors in 2024, when the list could only take 1.4% of the total pie. At this rate of growth, the market sales will reflect the UK-wide demographics in just under two decades.

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Book Review: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Latest Novel Marks A Vibrant Return

BY HELEN WIEFFERING

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Dream Count” feels like a homecoming. The Nigerian author’s first work of longform fiction in over a decade reminds us of the sharp wisdom and sturdy empathy that have made her one of the most celebrated voices in fiction.

At its face, “Dream Count” is about the emotional lives of four women living between Nigeria and Washington, D.C., each grappling with a search for purpose, stability and love. Deep into its pages, the book turns to darker questions of justice and exploitation when one character’s life is irrevocably changed.

The novel begins with the perspective of Chiamaka, or Chia, a Nigerian-born woman who has spent her adulthood and career in America. Living alone amid lockdown in the pandemic, she begins to reflect on a cast of former romances — each one part of her “dream count,” a loose tally she keeps of her efforts to find a complete, all-knowing love. Her voice and memories connect the many threads of “Dream Count” that follow.

In turns, the book shifts its focus to three other women and their dreams. There is Chia’s friend Zikora, an ambitious lawyer who is desperate to be a mother, and Chia’s brazen cousin Omelogor, a banker in Nigeria who has a crisis of confidence upon coming to America.

The novel starts to crackle with urgency and outrage when we meet Kadiatou, Chia’s cook and housekeeper who also works as a maid in an upscale hotel. Far from the Guinean village of her youth, Kadiatou has finally found steady work and contentment in America when she is suddenly, horrifically assaulted by one of the hotel’s prominent guests.

Adichie renders the moment of her assault in quick, shuddering details. Though Kadiatou is surprised to find her bosses believe her account, she soon learns that the rest of the world wants a say, as well. Reporters and photographers stake out her apartment within hours of the assault. Her body and life history are dissected as evidence in the lead-up to an international trial.

Kadiatou’s tale isn’t born completely of imagination. Nearly 15 years ago, a New York hotel housekeeper named Nafissatou Diallo came forward to accuse the then-leader of the International Monetary Fund of sexually assaulting her when she arrived to clean his room. Adichie explains in the novel’s endnote how she was hooked and gutted by Diallo’s testimony. “Dream Count” is Adichie’s way, she writes, of dignifying her story. “Imaginative retellings matter,” she says. “Literature keeps the faith and tells the story as reminder, as witness, as testament.”

The novel’s undercurrent of politics hums louder in the aftermath of those scenes. This is, after all, a book by the same author of “We Should All Be Feminists.” We see Chia’s dream career as a travel writer hampered by American editors who would rather publish outdated stereotypes of Africans. The saucy, sharp Omelogor is willing to play in the corrupt games of powerful men to build her wealth, but feels ridiculed and dismissed in America for that same spirit.

One could question what purpose it serves for the novel to include Kadiatou’s wrenching survival story alongside the tales of well-to-do women. Though Chia and her friends root for and support Kadiatou, they’re ultimately embroiled in their own growing pains. At points, the novel’s sense of time speeds up too quickly or fails to fully develop a thread. (The character Zikora, especially, fades away from later parts of the book.)

But none of these weak points ever risks dampening the novel’s vibrant energy. “Dream Count” succeeds because every page is suffused with empathy, and because Adichie’s voice is as forthright and clarifying as ever. Reading about each woman, we begin to forget that we’re separate from these characters or that their lives belong to fiction.

AP book reviews: https://apnews.com/hub/book-reviews

20 years after the publication of ‘Purple Hibiscus,’ a generation of African writers have followed in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s footsteps

Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Torino, Italy, October 2021. Image: Leonardo Cendamo/Getty

BY SIMON LEWIS

Twenty years ago, in October 2003, 26-year-old Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie burst onto the North American publishing scene with her debut novel,“ Purple Hibiscus.”

Since then, Adichie’s literary fame has only grown: She’s published two more novels and a collection of short stories, while two of her TED talks have garnered tens of millions of views. In September 2023, she published her first children’s book – a joyful celebration of mother-daughter love – under the nom de plume Nwa Grace-James.

But the October 2003 publication of “Purple Hibiscus” didn’t just signal the start of a single author’s brilliant career. It also forged a path for a whole new generation of African novelists who had come to America as immigrants or students and who have been mining that experience in their writing.

The struggles to get published by prior generations of African authors are almost legendary. Thirty years apart, Chinua Achebe and Tsitsi Dangarembga have both described how close their manuscripts of “Things Fall Apart” (1958) and “Nervous Conditions” (1988) came to being lost. Achebe’s only copy of the manuscript was a handwritten draft. He sent it to a typing agency in London that nearly dismissed it as a joke. Dangarembga’s manuscript sat unread in the basement of a British publishing house for years. Only when the writer stopped by the offices during a work trip to London did the editors agree to read it.

Through attending American MFA programs, however, Adichie and her contemporaries were able to tap into the networks of agents and found their work snapped up by American publishers.

Writers born in Africa who studied at American universities – Teju Cole, Yaa Gyasi, Uzodinma Iweala, NoViolet Bulawayo and Akwaeke Emezi, to name just a few – have followed in Adichie’s footsteps.

“Purple Hibiscus” has been to these writers what Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967) was to aspiring Latin American writers during the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s, and what Salman Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children” (1981) was to the proliferation of Indian writers in English from the 1980s on.

While it would be reassuring to think that the current surge of African novelists represents a wider American interest in all things African, the success of these novels may also have to do with the fact that so many are actually set in the U.S.

The recurrent theme of immigration to the U.S. gives many of these works direct – and instructive – relevance to U.S. readers. As Black outsiders in the U.S., African immigrants have a particularly acute insight into the way race and racism affect daily life in this country. One of the common features of these novels is the way in which they explore the tension of racial solidarity and mutual misunderstanding between African immigrants and Black Americans.

When I first started teaching African literature, I often had difficulty finding books in print. Now my problem is deciding who to leave out of my syllabus. Here is a very brief list of some of the books that I would consider must-reads.

1. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Americanah” (2013)

As its title suggests, Adichie’s fourth novel, “Americanah,” is arguably the definitive novel of contemporary African immigration to America.

It tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman overstaying her student visa, and how she negotiates the new Black identity forced on her by the blunt instrument of American race-construction.

In a brilliant metafictional move, Adichie has Ifemelu achieve internet fame by writing a blog dedicated to non-American Blacks: “Dear Non-American Black,” Ifemelu writes, “when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I’m Jamaican or I’m Ghanaian. America doesn’t care. So what if you weren’t ‘black’ in your country? You’re in America now.”

Ifemelu’s experience of racism is simultaneously hurtful and baffling to her. On the one hand, her illegal status makes her both psychologically and physically vulnerable. But at times American racism is almost comical; Ifemelu doesn’t understand why an innocent reference to eating watermelon might be misconstrued, for instance, and she is totally bewildered by a shop assistant’s attempt to avoid distinguishing between two shoppers by reference to their skin color.

2. Yaa Gyasi, “Homegoing” (2016)

Ghanaian-born Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel takes the form of a series of skillfully interwoven stories set on either side of the Atlantic.

Beginning with two half sisters, Effia and Esi, in the Gold Coast in the middle of the 18th century, the stories trace the two sets of the sisters’ descendants through six subsequent generations in West Africa and the U.S. In the final two stories we meet the young teenager Marjorie, who, as the American-born daughter of Ghanaian parents, struggles to come to terms with her identity as one of Ifemelu’s “Non-American Blacks.” She finds herself ostracized by her Black classmates for “acting white” but is unable to enjoy a normal relationship with a white classmate. One of the only Black teachers at her high school tells her, “You’re here now, and here black is black is black.”

3. NoViolet Bulawayo, “We Need New Names” (2013)

When “We Need New Names” appeared, Nigerian novelist Helon Habila accused NoViolet Bulawayo of peddling “poverty-porn” by pandering to American stereotypes of Africa.

However, for Bulawayo’s teenage protagonist Darling, it’s American culture that is dangerously dysfunctional – and personally discombobulating. Darling finds American high school ridiculously easy, is horrified by the laxness of American parenting and is generally unimpressed by the urban blight she sees around her in the city she calls Destroyed, Michigan.

Late in the novel, her mentally ill countryman Tshaka Zulu is shot to death by police when off his meds and ranting in his home language. You might think that such a violent, tragic event would be a major plot driver. Sadly, it seems to exemplify just one more random peril – little different from being hit by a car or struck down by cancer – that many Africans coming to America have to endure.

4. Uzodinma Iweala, “Speak No Evil” (2018)

Even wealth and class status offer no protection from such perils.

In Uzodinma Iweala’s “Speak No Evil,” the main character, Niru, is the high-achieving son of high-achieving Nigerian parents in supposedly cosmopolitan Washington, D.C. The first three-quarters of the book appear to be exploring Niru’s dilemma: how to come out as gay to his conservative parents.

It turns out that Niru’s gayness – an invisible characteristic, after all – is not the problem; his Blackness is. When he gets in a row outside a bar with his best friend, Meredith – an equally well-off, well-connected, high-flying white female classmate – someone calls the cops. In the space of a paragraph the inevitable has happened: Shots are fired. “You’re safe,” someone says to Meredith. “He can’t hurt you.”

By extraordinary coincidence, Adichie grew up in the very house that Chinua Achebe had lived in on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka. She, and the other writers of her generation, grew up in the house of fiction that Achebe and his generation established. The writers of that older generation were concerned with the material and cultural despoliation of colonialism. In Achebe’s words, their task was to let their African readers know “where the rain began to beat” them.

Today’s African writers demand readers’ attention by letting them know that for African and African-descended people in the U.S., although the winds may have shifted, the storm is far from over.

Chimamanda’s Chieftaincy Title Signifies Cultural Revolution

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

BY CHIEDU OKOYE

The chieftaincy title conferred on Chimamanda Adichie by the traditional ruler of her hometown, Abba, is significant because women are rarely given chieftaincy titles by traditional rulers in our society. The conferring of the revered chieftaincy title on her is, therefore, akin to an execution of a cultural revolution in her town.

But what is culture? Culture is defined as the totality of a people’s way of life. Our mode of dressing, religious beliefs, marriage ceremonies, funeral rites, music, proverbs, folklores, dances, artworks, and others are parts of culture. And it is broadly divided into two; material aspect of culture and the non-material aspect of culture.

While food, artworks, mode of dressing, and others make up the material aspect of culture, the non-material aspect of culture includes but is not limited to, songs, folklores, proverbs, religious beliefs, marriage rites, and others. Culture, which is the identity of a people, ought to be dynamic, and not static. That is why culture is said to be in a constant state of flux. So, progressive-minded people, who are living in a cultural milieu, ought to tweak some outlandish, outdated, and obnoxious cultural practices to suit modern trends. We should not be slaves to egregious and antediluvian cultural practices that rob us of our humanity and demean us as human beings.

If we keep on upholding bad cultural practices on the grounds that they are passed down to us by our ancestors, and if we feel that obliterating them will amount to committing sacrilegious acts, then we will remain trapped in a time warp. For example, in the time past, the killing of newborn twins was normative in Igbo land, the South-East region of the country. That detestable practice of killing twins was rooted in the religious superstition that newborns who were twins were portents of doom for their families. Then, the custodians of our culture stoutly resisted moves and efforts made by other people for the abolition of that cultural practice.


However, the white people who came to Nigeria for imperialistic reasons uprooted the inhuman cultural practice of killing newborn twins. Until then, our ancestors felt that twins, triplets, and quadruplets, who were born to people in our land were bringers and harbingers of evil happenings to their respective families. But are twin children truly the forerunner and bringer of evil happenings to their immediate families, as they believed, then? The answer to the above question is a categorical no. Contrary to the beliefs of our ancestors that twins brought ill luck to their parents, most children, who are twins, are the pride of their parents. Peter and Paul Okoye, who are ace musicians, offer us a good example of twin children who have excelled in their chosen musical career.

Peter and Paul used to have a musical group called P-Square. The twin brothers are renowned musicians, who sing soulfully and dance beautifully, treating us to lyrical songs and acrobatic dances. More so, the Aneke sisters, Chidimma and Chidiebere, who are renowned actresses, are twins, too. They have achieved renown through their acting prowess, which fascinates us to no end. There are other instances of twins who have pushed back the frontiers of their endeavours and careers.

But had we clung to the obnoxious cultural practice of killing twins, the Aneke twin sisters, and the P-Square musical duo would have died in their infancy, not to talk of them becoming musical superstars and ace actresses. So, as the killing of newborns who’re twins was abolished in Nigeria so shall we stamp out other cultural practices, which are obnoxious, inhuman, weird, wicked, and retrogressive. We should not forget that the bad aspects of our culture portray us as backward people and hinder our march to join the civilised world.

Regarding some of our egregious cultural practices which are in existence now, patriarchy readily comes to my mind. For example, in our traditional Igbo society, men and women are not considered equals. So marriage is not perceived as a partnership of equals in Nigeria. Here, women are seen, and not heard. Our African traditional culture and Christianity to which we proselytised give oxygen and leverage to the existence of patriarchy in Nigeria.

But nowadays, things are changing for the better for our women, culturally and otherwise. They are making their voices heard in many areas of human endeavours, being educated females. Nigerian women have broken the glass ceiling in diverse areas of human endeavours. Nowadays, we have female pilots, female vice-chancellors, and others in Nigeria. We have female lawmakers who can hold their own in the art and act of lawmaking. And have we forgotten that the Tolulope Arotile was the first female combat helicopter pilot in Nigeria? She died in 2020 at the age of 24.

And Nigerian female writers like Abimbola Adelakun, Nnedi Okoroafor, Akachi Adimora Ezigbo, Chimamanda, and others are reshaping our literary traditions and landscape through their qualitative, inspiring, and innovative creative works. They are using their art to fight for the obliteration of such bad cultural practices as inhuman widowhood rites, child marriages, female circumcision, and sexism. The aforementioned cultural practices harm and demean women.

Thankfully, today, Nigerian women have recorded tremendous success in bringing women problems to the front burner and addressing them. Those female champions of women rights, who assert that women rights are human rights, are being accorded honours in Nigeria and beyond. For example, the conferment of a chieftaincy title on Chimamanda by the traditional ruler of her hometown, Igwe L.N Ezeh, is the icing on the cake of feminists who want gender equality for women. The name of the chieftaincy title given to her is ‘Odeluwa Abba,’ which when translated to English means the writer of the world from Abba.

Chimamanda, a highly acclaimed global writer, said this about the award, “Custodians should honour men and women equally. I am the first woman in my town to be made a chief, and it makes me happy to know that more women will follow. Culture does not make people, people make culture. Cultures thrive when they reflect the people. Ours must be a culture that celebrates achievements, whether it comes from a man or woman.”

The conferment of the chieftaincy title on Chimamanda marks a significant milestone in the battle to dethrone patriarchy and achieve gender equality in our society. She is the first woman in her hometown, Abba, to be so honoured. And she believes that the conferment of the chieftaincy title, ‘Odeluwa Abba,’ on her will open the floodgates for the conferment of chieftaincy titles on other deserving women.

Our culture, no doubt, is undergoing positive transformation to reflect modern realities and transport us to the league of the civilised people of the world. Our abiding by obnoxious and retrogressive cultural practices demeans and portrays us as troglodytes, who are stuck in a time warp. So it is imperative for us to abide by Chimamanda’s timely and judicious admonition which states that “culture does not make people, people make culture.”

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Women Haters, Mediocre Men Dominate Nigeria’s Political Space — Chimamanda

VANGUARD INTERVIEW

BY EMMANUEL OKOGBA

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Image via Vanguard

World-renowned writer, Chimamanda Adichie, in this exclusive conversation with Sunday Vanguard, discusses politics, belief system, identity and, of course, her obsession with feminism. This chat, which also covers other subjects, is an informative exploration through the mind of one of Africa’s greatest writers.

Aside racism, if it counts in this case, what has been your greatest challenge as an internationally recognised, award-winning African creative writer based in the US?

When my first novel was published, American readers often said they were surprised by how relatable the Nigerian characters were. An early challenge for me was getting readers to see that African stories are valid as literature as any other stories. Not that Africa is the same as anywhere else, because obviously, every place is unique, but that African stories are human stories in the way that literature is about human stories. I grew up reading books from all over the world and I was able to identify with characters from Russia to India.

Globalisation fosters cultural imperialism such that Nigerian youths do not wish to be identified with their origins but would rather be associated with the trends of the Western nations. Your books portray strong ties to African culture especially Igbo, even, in Americanah where the protagonist grew up in the West. How do you think the love for African roots can be re-established or sustained among the youths? 

My protagonist in Americanah did not grow up in the West. I think parents and guardians have a major role to play. You can’t speak only English to your children, act as if everything traditional is evil, not teach them to be proud of their history, and then turn around and complain that they are now ‘globalized.’ By the way, there is no such thing as a globalised identity; even the most cosmopolitan people have a core sense of identity. I consider myself a person who is very comfortable in the world and I love many diverse places in the world but it is because of my sense of self. It is my comfort in my skin as an Igbo woman, a Nigerian, an African, that makes this possible. My daughter speaks Igbo and I find it curious how many fellow Igbo and fellow Nigerians are shocked by this. I want to raise her bilingual as I was also raised bilingual. To give a child the language of her people is a gift that will serve her for the rest of her life. It gives her a sense of who she is. And it’s doable because we all did it. Most Nigerians of my generation are bilingual, so why can’t our children be?

Females all over the world are beginning to speak, recognise and take a stance on their places in the society yet this is being abused by some. What are the core differences between feminism and misandry? 

 Every movement has its extremist side. Look at history, the fight for independence in different countries always had a militant side but we don’t usually say that the militant side represents the movement. I often feel that this question of feminism being misandry is a question of bad faith. It is also used as a way of closing down important conversations. Feminism is about justice. Any thinking person who observes the world and is honest knows that women have historically been excluded, reduced, oppressed in different ways. Feminism is about trying to right that wrong. If a person is pointing out ways in which men have benefited socially or politically in ways that women have not, it does not mean that person hates men. If a person talks about the alarming rate of male violence against women, it is not hating men; it is simply stating facts, facts that we should all want to change. Women may be speaking up more but that doesn’t mean that the cultural, systemic, religious and traditional norms that reduce women have changed. I believe men are part of the solution. Men have to be feminists as well. Men have to speak up about this injustice.

This is a follow-up. Can you also point out the differences between feminism and chivalry?

Chivalry is really a form of noblesse oblige. It is the idea that men treat women well, help them, etc, because men are more powerful. But the problem is that if you think of a group of people as people you help it means you will never think of them as your equals or even as people who can be in a position higher than you. Most men who think of themselves as chivalrous are the same who cannot imagine a female president or who don’t want a female boss or who believe that women become powerful only be sleeping with men. Of course, being protective of the women in your private life is perfectly fine and very different from viewing women in general as people you have to protect. We should protect people who need protection. Some women need protection. Some men also need protection. 

You are being featured in the National Geographic Magazine Landmark: Portraits of Power alongside other great women like Oprah Winfrey, and Melinda Gates among others. Is your being a symbol of power a result of the impact of your writing or feminism stance? 

It is everything I represent. My fiction writing gave me a platform that I chose to use to speak about what I care about. One of the things I care about is feminism. But it is not the only thing I care about. In my experience, my greatest fans are those who have read all my books and I deeply appreciate them. 

Buchi Emecheta, the most successful female black writer in the UK refused to be tagged a feminist even though the bulk of her works has the theme of woman, gender role-play and inequality. Being a feminist icon and an internationally recognised African female writer, what is your take on this? 

Ms. Emecheta was an icon and a great inspiration for me. The Joys of Motherhood is a novel everyone should read. She rejected the word feminist because at the time it was a politically loaded word that often referred to the concerns of middle-class white women and excluded many black women. I have chosen to use the word feminist based on the dictionary definition, because we need to reclaim that word and because we need a word to rally around in order to address sexism. By those standards, Ms. Emecheta was definitely a feminist. She stood for equality for women. 

What is your view on the portrayal of women in Nigerian politics and what are your suggestions as regards this?

 It is important for women to be seen as equally capable and as equal actors in the political space. Nigerian politics is about access, patronage and money. Unfortunately, because women have traditionally not been allowed into these spaces, it is hard for women to compete, hard for them to get ‘godfathers’ and hard for them to be taken seriously. Which is why the few women who actually run for powerful offices have to be exceptional, have to work much harder, and have to deal with a lot more backlash, while mediocre men can sail through on the wings of a godfather and on the assumption that being male means you should be a leader. I do not support the idea of a ‘women’s wing’ of political parties because it suggests that women are slightly lower on the totem pole of ability, and it casts women as people who occupy supportive roles rather than those who should compete for real power. Political parties have to support women more in real positions of power, not token positions. But the fundamental problem is how we think of women in this culture. There are still too many men and women who do not believe that women are capable of being good political leaders. So women are not groomed or encouraged to become politicians. A relative once told me that a woman cannot be governor in Nigeria. I asked why and he simply said, ‘because she’s a woman.’ But we should be asking: who is qualified? Who will not steal state money? Who will use security vote wisely? Who will care about education and healthcare? Whose policies will focus on human beings rather than the personal egos of the politician? We need to be more open-minded in our conception of political leadership. 

Women who seek power

 Studies have shown that people, both men and women, do not like women who seek power. If you observe carefully, women who seek power are scrutinized more, criticized more and their ability is doubted more. They are also often assumed not to be competent. Somebody told me some time ago that Bianca Ojukwu was not ‘qualified’ to run for Senate because she was merely the wife of a leader. Mrs. Ojukwu is an intelligent lawyer. I asked this person what qualification the men he supported had. Many of those men were barely literate. The point is that we as citizens have to constantly question our assumptions and identify our blind spots and the places where we do not think critically. 

You are an avid supporter of LGBTQ which is a practice that is being frowned upon in Africa. How do you still maintain your African/homophobic audience? 

I believe in ‘live and let live.’ I also know that not all Africans are homophobic. African societies have had gay people for centuries. If we look back at our childhoods, there was always the girl or boy who we knew was ‘different’ but we took it in stride. The problem now is that it has become politicised. We have decided to fight political battles invented by western evangelicals. Ask yourself when exactly homophobia became such a big issue in Africa. Gay people cause no harm and Nigerians say they should be killed. But we have leaders who steal and lie, who do not pay elderly pensioners, and we don’t say they should be killed, even though these leaders are responsible for the deaths of fellow citizens. To be clear I don’t support violence and don’t think anybody should be killed but I am making a point about our prejudice and misplaced priorities. How exactly does our society benefit from harassing and attacking gay people? How can we say that a fellow citizen should be killed when that citizen has equal rights as we do and has done nothing to harm anyone? If your religion says you should avoid something then please avoid it for yourself, and do not force others to live by your faith. I am sure Christians don’t want to be made to abide by Sharia and Muslims don’t want to say the Lord’s Prayer. Ancient African societies were accepting of diversity. Let’s live and let live. 

Are you considering depicting LGBTQ in any of your upcoming books? 

People are people. Gay people are people. Please read my short story ‘Apollo’ in the New Yorker. Also, read ‘The Shivering’ in my collection The Thing Around Your Neck. 

With your busy schedule, how do you balance living in two countries? 

I feel very grateful that I can live in both Nigeria and the US and so I don’t mind the challenges involved in achieving a balance. I don’t think I would be fully happy if I had to live exclusively in either place. I am private about my private life, especially because my work as a writer requires being so public. At home, I love to spend time with family and friends. I love quality time with loved ones. I love laughter, conversation and healthy food. I am not very keen on going out. My life in the US and Nigeria is focused on that.

The Many Urgent Voices Of Women Writers From Africa

BY ANNE MAXWELL

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Image: AP via The Sydney Morning Herald

ANTHOLOGY

New Daughters Of Africa

Ed. Margaret Busby

Myriad Editions, $37.99

Both books are anthologies containing writings by women of African descent from more than 50 countries as diverse as Antigua, Zimbabwe, Angola, Britain, the US and Australia. As such, they are testimony to the talent and creativity of women belonging to Africa and the African diaspora. Diversity also characterises the genres to be found among the book’s pages – they include extracts from novels as well as short stories, memoir, essays, journalism, columns, blogs, poetry, speeches, plays, film scripts, and other experimental forms.

The second volume differs from the first in not doubling up on the 210 African women writers whose works appeared in the first volume, and by presenting works by a small number of important 19th-century African women writers. As Busby herself declares, ‘‘these few names serve as a reminder of the indisputable fact that later generations stand tall because of those who have gone before’’. In publishing the two anthologies, Busby’s primary aim, as she herself states it, is to underscore the links between African women writers of different generations and to help create an ‘‘inspiring legacy for years to come’’.

The links she refers to are traced in multiple ways; sometimes through styles of writing and genres, at other times through themes such as immigration, at other times still through highlighting genealogical or family ties. An unforgettable example of the first is the poignant account of arriving in England from Jamaica as a child that is given by Yvonne Bailey-Smith, the mother who raised and empowered the award-winning British novelist Zadie Smith.

‘‘The Room where I waited for the immigration lady to complete the pages of different-coloured forms for my entry into the UK was dank and cold. My blue and white cotton dress offered little protection against the bitter winter chill. My knees shook and my teeth chattered as my skinny body struggled to cope with the cold that invaded every inch of it. I tilted my head back as far as I could in a determined effort to stem further tears, but came they did, accompanied by loud uncontrollable sobbing. I felt as though I had fallen off my island with no way of ever getting back.’’

That legacy of empowerment is evident in the speech on identity that Zadie Smith delivered upon receiving the Langston Hughes medal for writing in 2017: ‘‘Receiving this prize makes me want to laugh-cry with pride and amazement. I don’t know what I am doing on a list of names that includes James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott and Octavia Butler, but I am so grateful to find myself in their company.

‘‘Growing up in England, in the '80s, these were some of the writers my mother gave me, to remind me that no country has the power to decide whether or not it will tolerate a black child or decide on her true identity, for the black child’s inheritance is borderless and enormous and needs no such external authentication.’’

An equally large number of writings deal with the mother-daughter relationship, and a particularly fine example of this is the poem Mama by Akosua Busia from Ghana, the first verse of which reads:

‘‘She is the centre of my earth/ The fire from which I warm my soul/ The spark that kindles my heart./ The Sustenance I feed my daughter/ Is the nourishment I sucked from her once-succulent flesh/ Turned brittle-boned, held together by will power/ Mama feeds me still –/ She lives –/ For us –/ She lives.’’

The legacy that Busby celebrates and aims to foster is evident from the sheer numbers of women writers of African descent that she has collected. These are women whose works literary history has largely ignored. As she observes, in bringing together all these women writers her goal has been to ‘‘shine a light on as many as possible of the deserving, whether or not they are acknowledged or lauded by the gatekeepers, who traditionally single out a privileged few, seemingly never too many to rock the boat’’.

Rocking the boat is of course an allusion to yet another powerful theme running through the anthology – that of feminism both explicit and implicit. This is evident from the large number of writings that deal with African women’s experiences of violence and trauma, whether at the hands of white people or others, and whether committed by men or women.

One of the most astute voices in this respect is that of the Nigerian feminist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who writes, ‘‘My own definition of a feminist is a man or a woman who says, ‘Yes there is a problem with gender as it is today and we must fix it, we must do better’. All of us, women and men, must do better.’’

One of the strengths of this second anthology is that it has introduced me to an enormously compelling body of works and writers that I had never heard of but are all worth reading. The arrangement is chronological. Starting with only seven writers prior to 1900, the book extends through each decade of the 20th century up to the end of the 1990s, each time gathering more and more women’s works, with the largest number coming in the 1960s – proof that it was a truly a golden age for African women’s writing.

I have never really thought of literature anthologies as encouraging the immersive kind of reading that is done for escape or pleasure, so I was surprised when picking up New Daughters of Africathat I found myself immediately engrossed in each woman’s ‘‘story’’, as Busby calls each of the extracts. This is because they each have something profound to say and many pieces, albeit fragments of a larger piece, are also immensely moving.

The fact that there are 212 voices in the book did not prove to make the works less interesting. Rather, each extract serves as an enticement to look further into many of the writers’ lives and works. One can ask for little more from an anthology so spilling over with such a wealth of history, hope, wisdom and talent.

Anne Maxwell teaches postcolonial and global literature at the University of Melbourne.

Of Course We Have Bookshops In Nigeria. But They’re For The Lucky Few

A silly question put to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie caused outrage. A little reflection on priorities might also be in order

BY SEDE ALONGE

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Image JB Reed/Associated Press Via The Guardian.

LAGOS, NIGERIA (THE GUARDIAN) -- When the French journalist Caroline Broué asked the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie during a recent interview whether there were any bookstores in Nigeria, she could not have envisaged the uproar it would generate. Most Nigerians considered the question outrageous, condescending and generally ignorant.

Hardly surprising, bearing in mind that Nigeria has produced a healthy number of great writers over the years, including not just Adichie but the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Flora Nwapa, and Buchi Emecheta, to name a few. Most of these acclaimed writers were homegrown, are well-known and widely read in their home country, with a readership that extends well beyond Nigeria. One would have thought it quite obvious their books weren’t distributed locally via pigeon post.

Broué’s tactless question suggested lax research prior to the interview. It was as if this Nigerian literary tradition had simply never existed – as if Adichie was the only well-known Nigerian writer. Her subsequent explanation that the question was intended as ironical and for the benefit of the audience seem desperate.

Understandably, Nigerian social media did not take well to any insinuation of backwardness and instinctively responded with outrage and mass condemnation. Journalists often seek to provoke some form of reaction with their questions, but the tactlessness of this one clearly backfired.

It should be pointed out, though, that one reason for the mass negative reactions by Nigerians is that such questions serve to remind them of their own nation’s failings, which they experience daily. To have an outsider draw attention to that before an international audience is considered an unpardonable embarrassment. But, outrage aside, the question offers an opportunity to raise the wider issue of what the situation really looks like when it comes to the accessibility of books for millions of children growing up in Africa’s most populous country.

I have witnessed first-hand the demise of accessibility to books for children today compared with my experience as a child growing up in 1980s Nigeria, when there were far more functioning public libraries where children could access books for free. Those days hold a lot of positive and vibrant literary memories for me. Back then, in the pre-cable TV era in Nigeria, books were the main form of entertainment for me and my friends. My state-run primary school had a rich library, and there was also a well-stocked public library as well as subsidised bookstores where my mum often purchased cheap books for me and my siblings on weekends out.

Today, my nieces and nephews who live in the same state do not have the same experience I did. Their school libraries are sparse, and the public library in the state is a shadow of what it used to be. In a country where roughly two-thirds of the population live in poverty, most parents struggle to feed their children, let alone buy them books. Basic textbooks for learning are not supplied by the government, or even in a majority of private schools, and have to be purchased by often cash-strapped parents.

The Nigerian government, in its classic manner, does the minimum possible in terms of the education sector rather than actively investing to provide its growing youth population with a rich literary culture. Poor implementation of copyright laws is also a deterrent for writers, with potential incomes constantly drained by prolific pirating and a weak publishing industry. This discourages potential writers from a literary career and creates an unattractive business environment for bookstores and other book-related businesses.

Thus, while I understand the emotional response to what was perceived as an insult to Nigerians from Broué, I also see that the education sector in Nigeria is far from great. As in most sectors, things continue to dip because of poor leadership, missed opportunities and misaligned priorities. Yes, we do have bookstores in Nigeria and growing online access to books as well. How accessible books are to the majority of the poor population, particularly to those in rural areas who desperately need educational propping up, is another issue entirely.

Perhaps it would be more constructive to be outraged at the lack of investment in our children, the future of Nigeria, and at the failings of successive governments who have reduced the country to an easy target for ridicule, rather than at a tactless French journalist who asked a very silly question.

• Sede Alonge is a writer and lawyer based in Lagos

10 Questions With Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

BY SARAH BEGLEY

MOTTO-TIME

IMAGE: DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS/GETTY

TIME: This is a book about how to raise a feminist. Now that you’re a mother of a girl yourself, what has surprised you?

Adichie: How different and encompassing my love for her is, how I’ve never loved like this, and how fiercely protective I am — sometimes I think unreasonably so. It’s also made me see clearly how life is messy, how ideology doesn’t neatly match real life. There’s a certain amount of flexibility that’s important to have. Here’s an example: I don’t particularly like the idea of girls wearing pink, and I don’t find pink very attractive. When my child is old enough to negotiate with me, if she wants everything in pink, I will let her have it — but I’ll have conversations with her about why the pink/blue binary is a problem.

What has been your biggest pet peeve about parenting advice?

Probably my family and Nigerian friends making comments about my daughter’s hair. ‘Oh, it’s tangled,’ ‘Oh, she’s getting dreadlocks.’ My daughter has a head full of very beautiful curly hair, and she hates to have her hair touched — she cries. She’s so young, I just don’t think it’s worth it to have her go through the pain of combing her hair. I wash her hair and I use a natural conditioner, I put some natural oils in it and I let it be. She’s going to be old enough at some point to decide what she wants to do.

Why did you decide to keep you pregnancy quiet?

I wanted it to be something I shared with people who actually knew me, people who I love and people who love me. In the past 10, 15 years, I think maybe with the rise of social media, there’s a kind of performance of pregnancy that women are expected to engage in. Particularly if you’re in the public eye. And I want to say that women who make the choice to do that, that’s fine. But I find it problematic because it trivializes the complexity of pregnancy.

Why do you think it’s good for a mother to have a job, even if it isn’t a job she loves?

Because one of my favorite sayings in Igbo translates very loosely to ‘A woman must have her own.’ And that’s why. I think of course the ideal is you love your job, but the reality is that many people don’t. But I also don’t think that that’s a reason not to have a job, particularly if you’re a woman. I think to be female is often to be encouraged to measure your worth based on how much of yourself you’re able to sacrifice. A woman having a job is kind a pushback to that idea. It’s the idea of a woman being her full, separate self.

You write that you are angrier about sexism than racism. Why?

It’s not a suggestion somehow that sexism is worse than racism, because I don’t think so. But I have often felt lonely in my anger about sexism. I felt lonely because the people I love, the people I spend time with, are mostly — and these are people who are not just black, so people from different parts of the world, different races — people who get anti-black racism. People who just never ask me to prove that anti-black racism exists. But when it comes to sexism, I find that kind, intelligent, loving people often want me to prove that gender injustice exists.

You had a showdown with a Donald Trump supporter on BBC Newsnight over race in the election. How should people engage with those who don’t share their views?

I’m interested in people who don’t share my political opinions, because I want to understand their thinking, and also obviously because I want to change their opinions, I want to convince. So even before Donald Trump I subscribed to right-wing publications. And I don’t consider myself right-wing, I consider myself left-leaning. I also don’t really consider myself ultra-left. It’s hard to be raised in an Igbo household and be extremely left in the Western sense. But anyway, if I had been told that I would be having a conversation with a Trump supporter, I would not have come. But, if I had been told that a conservative Republican was coming on to debate, I probably would have gone, because I’m quite willing to debate competing ideas about how the government should function — should we have a welfare state? Should education be for profit? But I’m just unwilling to debate the humanity of groups of people. And that for me is what Donald Trump represents.

You write, “In teaching [girls] about oppression, be careful not to turn the oppressed into saints.” What do you mean by that?

I think sometimes in discourse around people who have been oppressed, there’s a need to put this halo around their heads and make them seem perfect, because then they’re more deserving of our sympathy or empathy. I think it happens a lot with black people in this country. So if a black person has experienced racism, God save that black person if that black person has also done something not-so-great in their past, because somehow it then becomes a reason why they deserve the racist act. Perfection shouldn’t be a condition for justice, or even for empathy and sympathy.

How did it feel to have your book We Should All Be Feminists given to every 16-year-old in Sweden?

I felt bad for the poor kids! No, I was pleasantly surprised. I got a report recently with feedback after the kids had read it, and I was really pleased at some of the letters — boys who said, ‘Now I know that a feminist isn’t somebody who hates men, and now I’m going to call myself a feminist and I’m going to try to change my society.’

Is it overall a good thing or a bad thing for feminism to have pop culture prominence?

I think it’s a good thing. I want a world in which we no longer need feminism, because men and women will be equal. And if we’re going to get that world, we need to have as many people as possible on board.

What turns do you think literature will take in the next four years?

What I would like to see is more politically present writing, if that makes sense. I remember thinking, for example, that the U.S. was at war in Iraq and Afghanistan for quite a while, and it just felt to me odd that a lot of the literature didn’t reflect that. There’s a sense in which literature in the U.S. has always sort of prided itself on being quite apart form political realities.

You famously grew up in a house where Chinua Achebe once lived. What are the odds that some future great novelist is growing up there now?

Who knows? I know there’s a family there, although I was heartbroken that they cut down the beautiful frangipani trees. Chinua Achebe’s spirit is, I’m sure, still hovering around.

A version of this article appeared in the Mar. 13, 2017 issue of TIME Magazine.

Nobel Prize In Literature: Oh Really? Or Finally?

Peter Englund, permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy, arrives to announce the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, in Stockholm. Thursday Oct. 9, 2014 is the festive day of the year for highbrow culture when the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature is revealed. The secretive academy drops no hints on who they consider, but Permanent Secretary Peter Englund has said this year’s long-list started with 210 nominees, including 36 first-timers.

STOCKHOLM (ASSOCIATED PRESS) — It's soon time for the highbrow culture event of the year: the Nobel Prize in literature. But don't worry if you are left scratching your head when the winner is announced.

While the Swedish Academy sometimes picks well-known authors long lauded by critics, just as frequently it surprises the world with unknowns plucked from obscurity. The secretive academy drops no hints on who they are considering but Permanent Secretary Peter Englund said this year's long-list started with 210 nominees, including 36 first-timers.

The academy is expected to announce the winner on Thursday, but has not yet confirmed the date. Here's a look at the potential surprises and the old-time favorites:

POTENTIAL SURPRISES

Even literary critics were taken aback by announcements of winners such as Austria's Elfriede Jelinek in 2004, who was largely unknown outside the German-speaking world at the time, French writer Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio in 2008 and Chinese novelist Mo Yan in 2012.

Part of the reason for this is that the academy aims to include literature from all the world's corners in their considerations, even those not widely translated into English. They also seek to award poets, playwrights and other types of writers. Who could surprise this year? Check out: Norwegian playwright Jon Fosse, Belarusian investigative journalist and author Svetlana Alexievich or Croatian novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugresic. Other writers that may have caught the attention of the academy are Finnish author Sofi Oksanen, Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Jamaica Kincaid of Antigua, according to Maria Schottenius, a critic at Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter.

ESTABLISHED AUTHORS

The academy works off of a constantly evolving list of candidates, and sometimes a big name resurfaces again and again. While some may have been overlooked early in their careers, widely known authors such as Britain's Doris Lessing, Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa and Canada's Alice Munro eventually did walk off with the coveted prize. Among the frequently mentioned candidates who are still waiting are: Czech author Milan Kundera, Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, Algerian novelist Assia Djebar and South Korean poet Ko Un. Swedish literature critics have also suggested Israeli writers Amos Oz and David Grossman, as well as Americans Richard Ford and Philip Roth.

BETTORS' FAVORITES

Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Japanese author Haruki Murakami frequently top bettors' lists ahead of the announcement. While Thiong'o may indeed be a strong candidate, Murakami's position in the rankings is probably more a reflection of the fact that he is widely read, says Elise Karlsson, a critic at Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet. Although the academy has stepped up efforts to prevent leaks before the announcement, the winner is still sometimes among those getting the most attention by bettors.

On Saturday, Murakami was the favorite to win at betting firm Ladbrokes, followed by Djebar, Kadare and Syrian-born poet Adonis, pen name for Ali Ahmed Said.

Follow Malin Rising on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/malinrising

'Half Of A Yellow Sun' Starring Chiwetel Ejiofor & Thandie Newton

By Kevin Jaggernauth

Indie Wire, July 23, 2013

There's going to be a lot of Chiwetel Ejiofor coming your way by the end of the year. Next month he'll star in the drama "Savannah" opposite Jim Caviezel, which opens in limited release, and of course he's the lead in the Oscar touted "12 Years A Slave"  headed to TIFF.  But the actor has another film coming to Toronto as well, and instead of more images, a full length trailer [Half Of A Yellow Sun]  has arrived. 

"Half Of A Yellow Sun" finds Ejiofor co-starring opposite Thandie Newton in the adaptation of the bestselling (and Orange Prize for Fiction-winning) novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, set against the backdrop of the 1967-1970 Nigerian-Biafran war. Here's the official synopsis: 

An epic love story: Olanna and Kainene are glamorous twins, living a privileged city life in newly independent 1960s Nigeria. The two women make very different choices of lovers, but rivalry and betrayal must be set aside as their lives are swept up in the turbulence of war.

The cast is rounded out by Dominic Cooper, “Game of Thrones” star Joseph Mawle and “Attack the Block” breakout actor John Boyega with Biyi Bandele at the helm. All the awards for Ejiofor? Either way, we're just happy to get this much of him all at once. Watch below. 

Adichie's Love Tales And The Push Factor

Ambrose Ehirim/The Ambrose Ehirim Files

Americanah

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Random House, 477 pages; $26.95

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie poses for a photograph after a reading of her new book 'Americanah' in Lagos April 27, 2013. Image: Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters

Around October 2011, on the course of my ongoing interviews series, I had called Charles "Young Dick Tiger" Nwokolo at his Hollywood business office, Tiger's Boxing Gym, for chit-chats on what had persuaded him to choose boxing as a career and why he had decided to live in Los Angeles after the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in which he was a contingent representing Nigeria alongside his teammates - Jerry "Loud-mouth" Okorodudu and Peter Konyegwachi who won a silver medal at the games.

After a couple of meets and interviews, Young Dick Tiger consulted with his fiance, Elizabeth Wilson, told her about my trips to the gym and questions I had asked during sessions of the interview. On my third stop to continue and wrap up with the interview, Wilson and Young Dick Tiger were waiting, and, upon my arrival, Wilson raised a bunch of issues after having gone through my Facebook pages, my blogs and related websites and, having taken bit of lessons regarding the pogrom and the Civil War in Nigeria, in which I have presented in a variety of ways, and her acknowledging reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel "Half of a Yellow Sun," admiring the flavor of the novel, admitting Adichie was her first African read and, sharing a resemblance of the Holocaust of her Jewish heritage, Wilson recollects knowing about the Biafran story when she was little. Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun," the stories of the war had been the most blood soaked event in the history of Africa;  a novel by way of normal scholarship, and a work of fiction adapted from real life events - the Nigeria-Biafra war.

We talked in detail about Adichie and what had inspired the book. We talked about what had also gotten me into writing about Igbo people and Biafra which she read from my blogs, related syndicated columns, Facebook and elsewhere on the web. And, of course, we had talked about the welcome home party for the boxing team at Festival Town (FESTAC) hosted by then Minister of Sports, the late Emeka Omeruah and, Konyegwachi's future engagements. Konyegwachi had declared to pursue academics on government sponsored programs rather than going pro., like his colleagues - Young Dick Tiger and Loud-mouth Okorodudu who pursued the American dream when boxing had standards and stood out - ending any prospects of becoming one of boxing greats in an era boxing was a finest sport; when folks fought for passion of the sport with dignity and respect, and not the commercial preferences and purposes it had become.

Wilson and I, spent time digesting Adichie's Yelow Sun from her perspective and mine; mine on the grounds of personally being my tribe that was talked about and the ugly engagement involved. When "Half of a Yellow Sun" arrived the bookshelves with prospects of breakthrough in 2006, I was not wholly sure until it occurred to me the love tales were fictional characters of the Biafran conflict, which she adapted. Lecturers, their households and the goings on in campus at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, was the location of the characters and shots that now has been developed into film.

Adichie's "Half of a Yellow Sun" stands out in all her stables as the biggest score in marketing and popularity, including positioning in literature which most prizes had gone to, giving her the brand name to sell any novel with her signature attached to it, whether the book was well written and made sense or not, which seems to be the case in her newest entry "Americanah."

Americanah"  is not a great tale considering the expectations and the following that shot her second novel to the top. Nigerian authors - home and Diaspora - always have the pleasure to begin the enterprise of their books on the home turf where the turnouts in book launchings are huge, graced by festivities and merry-making, big volume sales and sometimes, ridiculously bankrolled when details of the book has not been known or reviewed.

Reuters photo-journalist Akintunde Akinleye, Associated Press' Sunday Alamba, host of related international press and local Nigerian journalists were handy during Adichie's book launch and signing ceremony Saturday, April 27, 2013, in Lagos. The lukewarm photogenic author sat and stood in front of the cameras posing with her new book, signing autographs along the novel and answering questions from curious readers and the press on the thoughts and writing of "Americanah." Adichie had a new hair do and fascinated about it all drawing from the book's Ifemelu character, multicolored dress and classically figured, except for the not needed heavy make-ups she was wearing obviously displaying she wasn't much comfortable with the excessiveness of the painting on her face.

Most folks who explored the United States and elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere during the push factor years, the economic, social, religious and reasons of things like that to why one was compelled to relocate and the aspirations for further academic pursuits is what Adichie is now telling us in the "Americanah" saga, from around which some lost hope but kept sticking around, keeping body and soul one, for opportunities that may knock on their doors as sighs of relief in what had been a stretch, to survive, doing whatever it took out of the very worst situations to overcome their predicaments.

When you browse the book before going into details, you will get a glimpse of tales of the set up of a situation where empire and anarchy instituted by the military juntas made life miserable which leaves one with the option to seek life elsewhere in an environment only the fittest survives in a dictatorship, in a country run by tyrants and full of injustice, cruelty and sufferings with an end never in sight, and a hopeless situation continuing apace.

And while the escape eventually took place, the struggle to continue to fulfill a purpose, the need to accomplish what one had desired and the time and pain it had to take in order to reach said anticipated goal which Adichie recollects writing about her personal experiences on arrival  to the shores of America and what she had earlier gone through by way of people from all walks of life she had encountered, differing significantly when stationed in her native land, and what had identified her in a multitude of races she had to deal with. The culture shock, normal of any new comer to a strange land was her first run in, but the hope and purpose it gave her was what encouraged her to hold on. In the London Guardian, Adichie writes;

I lived in Philadelphia when I first went to the US to attend university. I was fresh from Nigeria. I did not consciously think of myself as black because race was not a way of self-identification. I remember clearly when I began to think of myself as black, in a gathering of friends, in an apartment, sitting around a wooden table, listening to a joke-filled conversation about race, with my Nigerian friend and her Chinese friend and her Jewish friend and her African-American friend and her Irish-American friend. I realised that I had taken on this new, odd identity in America. It has stayed with me ever since, that scene.

It was common. But, though, some had no difficulties from the goodwill that came from either generated government welfare programs or their respective families who had adequate cash possessions.

Stories so similar and told over and over the years, Adichie goes on to tell us the uncertainties that had clouded the survival instincts and the determination to fulfill what had been ambitiously waited for before departure only to be confronted with what had been totally strange, taking culture into account, and the social aspect of the new world they had come to adopt and call home. The similarities of the long hurdle to adapt to the situations and, be normal, and being used to what goes, surviving all odds, fulfilling what had been the dream and, realizing what it had taken and the time spent to be accomplished, which had been desired through diligence, patience, commitment and, eventually, hard work in which there was no substitute, ultimately becoming the pursued ideal, is nothing new to the push factor most Nigerians encountered over the years in their quest for a better life Adichie had brought up in her new entry.

And the adventure had popped up with the zeal not to fail when caught up in crossroads in between having to make decisions on two choices as option; the consequences of having made the wrong choice which could turn out disastrous by its nature and what the future might hold; the pains after all attempts with nothing seemingly working out; the high expectations from native-land where all eyes watched for prospects of a promising future, and, what the consequences could be for a life time, if all had failed, including the expectations from a relationship elsewhere on the globe, in the United Kingdom; had not been clear and in limbo  with immigration problems which surely wasn't promising until that stroke of luck unshackled what had been a barrier and an emerged breakthrough that changed everything, and fortune coming his way though not what had been planned and anticipated.

Adichie, born in Enugu in 1977, studied medicine at the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus, and while exploring America, becoming a theme to the framework of her ongoing stories of love and the drama that comes along with it, received the McArthur Grant for $500,000 in 2008 which enabled her to write full time and a book of short stories "The Things Around Your Neck" published after the grant which also gave her adequate time to complete her MA in Africana Studies at Yale University. Graduating from Eastern Connecticut State University in Communications and Political Science, she was shortlisted for the Caine Prize for "You In America" in 2002.

No question, Adichie has catapulted herself to the top, in the ranks of respected Nigerian novelists and inventing "Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie" as a public intellectual on the parallel with most, and somewhere in between Flora Nwapa, Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe. In her apparent tribute to the latter who passed March 21, 2013 in Boston, Adichie showed appreciation and acknowledgement to the man who had driven the force and how she trooped on from a mark that is now defining her, and owing much to the man's work, and also, much to her own efforts as to how far she came even though in reviewing the man's "There Was A Country", and despite giving credits to the points made in the book as far as the story goes on the said war, she derided the publication as carelessly done with repetitions, wordiness and avoidable mistakes.

"Americanah" is unnecessarily wordy, too. The events that unfolded from the native-land in preparedness to relocate from an unstable country that was full of uncertainties was retold in many instances. The cities - New Haven, Baltimore, Brooklyn, Princeton and Trenton; the Gothic structures; the motorists while she poked around; the niteclubs; visit to her aunt Uju at the Flatlands and several other encounters with people of race, culture - and what that meant to Ifemelu, describing them the way she thought desirable for each like the cities with its distinct kind of smell except Princeton being smell free is pretty much close Adichie was telling her own story and life experiences in a typical relationship with partners attached to each other and denied access to be together in the United States by the unfortunate events of 9/11 and the restrictions on immigration.

There are no expectations of something significantly different from the "Americanah" adventure begun by Ifemelu, from the usual concept of bad regimes typical of Nigeria's dominance by military juntas and situations in that regard which compels one to seek decent life elsewhere that we haven't known or seen practically like the case of Ifemelu who had moved to the shores of the United States commencing an entirely new life with aspirations in a world totally different from where she had escaped.

Enter Obinze, Ifemelu's sweetheart originally established as first lovers from what the story tells us, back in Nigeria as students in a military regime that is not encouraging for one to keep staying in the country which had both lovers become desperate to leave the country. Obinze had problems with the restrictions imposed by the United States on the effects of 9/11 which denied him access, leaving him with an option to go elsewhere besides America. He founds himself in the United Kingdom where the going got tougher, unlike Ifemelu in the US, though tough but better overall, Obinze did what he had to do.  He had cash while Ifemelu blogged successfully. Both made it back home missing each other for 15 years and unsure of how to continue and get along.

"Americanah"  is a typical story told from an immigrant's perspective coupled by the encounters and revelations and the blogging of events as it unfolded in contrast to Obinze's unfavorable engagements in the United Kingdom, though eventually wealthy and all in all, in a journey that had taken 15 years to decide if both were still meant for each other remains a puzzle the author intends to unveil elsewhere, or probably bent on tales of love, distant relationship, misfortunes and both finally accomplished on different platforms and, now hard to reach decisions on whether to continue with a relationship that had been marred by circumstances beyond their control.

Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie sits in a salon for her hair-do in Victoria Island district in Lagos May 2, 2013. Image: Akintunde Akinleye/Reuters

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Facts Are Stranger Than Fiction

The parts of my work people tell me are 'unbelievable' are those that are most closely based on real events, says Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The Guardian, Friday, April 19,2013

It was Christmas in Abba, my ancestral hometown. I was walking to my uncle's house on a road baked and cracked by the harmattan. Ahead of me were two girls, perhaps 15, talking loudly. They were local; I could tell from their clothes, their rural Igbo dialect, their gait. Then one of them slipped and fell down. "Fuck!" she said, in English. "Fuck!" I almost stopped to ask if I had heard her correctly, it was the last exclamation I would have imagined coming out of her mouth. I expected "Ewo!" or "Jesus!" or, more fancifully, something else in Igbo, exotic and delicious to my city ears. But she said 'Fuck.' I promptly pulled out the notebook I carry for striking and unexpected moments such as this. Moments I might later mould into fiction. I am yet to use this incident in a story but I can already imagine a potential reader saying, "I don't believe an Igbo village girl would say 'Fuck!" – a reasonable protest. But this particular village girl did say "Fuck". And it was its singularity that made it interesting.

I am drawn, as a reader, to detail-drenched stories about human lives affected as much by the internal as by the external, the kind of fiction that Jane Smiley nicely describes as "first and foremost about how individuals fit, or don't fit, into their social worlds". This kind of fiction is interested in the general as well as the particular, but it is often judged only by the conventions of the general. Readers know, for example, that the carefully observed novels of Ama Ata Aidoo, Graham Greene and Honoré de Balzac are not the real world, yet we often apply a generalised "real world" logic to characters – no woman, we say, would behave like Philip Roth writes women. (Though one wants to ask: surely there must be ONE woman who does?) I, too, often read fiction in this way. I decide what is believable and not, and I tell myself that this comes from what is in the "text", but it might more truthfully be less about the text and more about the expectations I bring to my reading.

Somerset Maugham, in Points of View, writes that Henry James never knew how ordinary people behaved. "His characters have neither bowels nor sexual organs. He wrote a number of stories about men of letters, and it is told that when someone protested that literary men were not like that, he retorted: 'So much the worse for them.' If someone had ventured to suggest that a story of James's was not like life, he would have replied: "It isn't life, it's a story." Still, James's fiction tells us something about particular literary men of letters, and something about the general world in which they lived.

I write from real life. I am an unrepentant eavesdropper and a collector of stories. I record bits of overheard dialogue. I ask questions. I watch the world. And what I have discovered is that the parts of my fiction that people most tell me are "unbelievable" are those that are most closely based on the real, those least diluted by my imagination. Perhaps it is because of the relatively recent convention we bring to reading stories, where stories come labelled either as fiction or as non-fiction.

I lived in Philadelphia when I first went to the US to attend university. I was fresh from Nigeria. I did not consciously think of myself as black because race was not a way of self-identification. I remember clearly when I began to think of myself as black, in a gathering of friends, in an apartment, sitting around a wooden table, listening to a joke-filled conversation about race, with my Nigerian friend and her Chinese friend and her Jewish friend and her African-American friend and her Irish-American friend. I realised that I had taken on this new, odd identity in America. It has stayed with me ever since, that scene.

I don't often do this – transplant a scene from my life into my fiction without first twisting and tweaking – but I did with this particular scene, of course changing the names of my characters. An early reader said it was unbelievable, a forced scene, too obvious, staged just so I could say something about race. It wouldn't happen like that in real life, she said. I wanted to tell her – it did happen exactly like that! But I didn't. Because when I teach creative writing I tell my students: you cannot use real life to defend your fiction. If a reader tells you a character or scene is not believable, you cannot say – well, it actually happened like that. Because if it is unbelievable to the reader, then you, the writer, have failed at your art, which is to use language to achieve the suspension of belief.

I used to firmly believe this. I was once a dutiful daughter, an upholder of the contemporary conventions of literary fiction. But, increasingly, I question it. If I had written that scene in a memoir, would that first reader have said it was unbelievable? I think not. But I would not have written it in a memoir because some of the people are friends and I would want to protect them, and I would also have to ask whether I have the moral right to tell their story, especially to portray them saying what they said in a closed room, words they did not intend to have the world hear.

Non-fiction, and in particular the literary memoir, the stylised recollection of personal experience, is often as much about character and story and emotion as fiction is. Binyavanga Wainaina's recently published memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, has complex characters, wonderful dialogue that advances the story, beautiful imagery and interesting insights. If you tore off the covers and gave it to somebody who had never heard of it, they might very well think it was a novel.

The difference is often not how books are written but how we read them. We read memoir and fiction with different eyes. The appeal of the memoir is in the authority it has, not from its contents but from its label. To label something a memoir is, in effect, to tell a reader that they cannot doubt it. You cannot question. It comes with a prepaid label of truth.

But, as a writer, I consider fiction more honest than memoir. I trust fiction more than I trust memoir. Not that ALL fiction is honest or that memoir writers are dishonest but that, by its very form, memoir is as much about what the writer puts in the book as it is about what the writer leaves out. In writing memoir, I am very aware of my own self-censorship, very aware of the "I" as a character, very aware of protecting people I love. Of course, not all fiction is honest, but fiction, by its very nature, creates the possibility of a certain kind of radical honesty that memoir does not. When I write fiction, I am free. I am free of thinking of an audience, free of self-censorship. Even when I base a character on a "real" person, the character is never quite that real person and so I don't feel that obligation of protection, and this leads, I think, to the possibility of a greater honesty. There are fiction writers I admire, whose work tends to the essayistic, who take on positions – George Eliot, Balzac, Fielding – and the strength of their work is in the freedom, the unshackling, that fiction affords.
I long for a new form, a cross between fiction and memoir, or a new way of reading, where we read fiction with the eyes of memoir and read memoir with the eyes of fiction.

• Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by Fourth Estate.