Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s words cleanse the mind. They are profound, creative and thought provoking.
Adichie is the fifth of six children born to high achieving parents. Her mother, Grace Ifeoma, was the first female registrar at the University of Nigeria and her father, James Nwoye Adichie, was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics. He later became Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the same institution.
With a power couple for parents, Adichie acquired a reading habit by the age of four.
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After secondary school, Adichie studied medicine at the University of Nigeria, switched to pharmacy, and then gave it up to go to the United States (US), when she was 19, a year and a half into her studies. She obtained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two years, and went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University.
Adichie graduated summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State University in 2001. She later completed a master’s degree in creative writing at John Hopkins University. In 2005, she was a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and earned a master’s degree in African studies from Yale University in 2008.It was while there that she began writing Purple Hibiscus, published when she was 26. Her work has been translated into 30 languages.
Walk along Fife Street in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, and you will see some of the country’s most expensive schools and scores of students sharing a laugh in the blistering sun. Look closely, and you will see many clutching Purple Hibiscus, a work studied in many high schools across Africa.
“Purple Hibiscus is one of the greatest books I have ever read. There is so much struggle and oppression in the book that I can relate to as an African. The ways she writes and describes things like heat in the book is intriguing and make it a good read. To see an African write like this is very inspiring because it shows that we can all tell our stories no matter where we come from. To think she was just 26 years old when she wrote it makes it even more intriguing,” says pupil, Charmaine Hlatshwayo, from Mzilikazi High School in Bulawayo.
Half of a Yellow Sun and the short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, were Adichie’s next great works.
She has won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, the Orange Prize, the New York Times Notable Book prize, a People and Black Issues Book Review Best Book of the Year prize and was a National Book Critics Circle finalist.
Adichie is often described as the successor of the late Chinua Achebe. It’s a fitting coincidence that she grew up in a house that once belonged to Achebe, Nigeria’s most celebrated writer.
“Because of writers like Chinua Achebe, I went through a mental shift in my perception of literature. I realized that people like me, girls with skin the color of chocolate whose kinky hair could not form ponytails, could also exist in literature. I started to write about things I recognized,” said Adichie at her TEDx 2009 talk, The Danger Of A Single Story.
The talk has drawn almost two million views online.
Born in Nsukka, Nigeria, on September 15, 1977, Adichie encountered injustice as she grew up. As a result, for years, the Nigerian author has inspired many with her written work and become part of pop culture. Her speeches are as powerful as her fiction.
“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful otherwise you will threaten the men.’ Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage; I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important… But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same…”says Adichie at the TEDx Euston talk titled We Should All Be Feminists, in 2012.
This talk made Adichie Beyoncé’s favorite feminist. Beyoncé sampled parts of this speech on her track, Flawless in 2014. The song reportedly topped iTunes charts in 104 countries and sold nearly 850,000 copies in three days.
“I think Chimamanda is the fearless woman’s voice that has become the drumbeat of feminism. She is intelligent, articulate and knows how to use her voice to speak for women on the international stage,” says Zimbabwean author Raisedon Baya.
But that’s not all.
Adichie’s latest book, Americanah, a best-selling novel, is being turned into a movie, with award-winning Kenyan actress Lupita Nyong’o as lead. Brad Pitt is the producer, through his Plan B production banner along with Nyong’o and Andrea Calderwood.
The founder and treasurer of the Academic and Non-Fiction Authors’ Association of South Africa (ANFASA), Monica Seeber, says “ANFASA is delighted that an author has been selected for the FORBES AFRICA [lifetime achievement award]. This is recognition that authors have the power to influence people, events and thinking far beyond their own personal spheres. The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Adichie is carrying a banner for every woman who has grown up in Africa. In a few years, she has placed African women’s literature on the world map which makes us wonder what she will achieve in the next 20 years.

Adichie Is Africa, Africa  Is Adichie

He pulled up to the entrance of the University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), in Durban, South Africa. He was ushered into the frenzy of orientation week, took tours of the campus, chose his subjects and made friends. He was just like any other first–year student, buzzing with the future. Previn Naicker was 14 years old.
“For me personally, my age wasn’t such a big deal. I knew what it meant, I knew that it was an achievement, everyone around me knew it was an achievement. At that point, I just thought it was cool.”
Naicker isn’t just a varsity anomaly. Born in Durban, he attended Durwest Primary School. After winning a Maths Olympiad in grade six, at the age of 12, he was offered a scholarship to Star College, a private college with a focus on maths, science and technology. Although the youngest, he was one of nine students who entered an accelerated program which gave him a triple promotion from Grade Eight to Grade 12. Apart from some harmless jokes, he hardly noticed that he was the youngest.
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“You always get jokes coming your way but it was never too bad, just poking fun at the situation. Going into university, I was obviously younger and I still managed to make friends and get along with people. There were no challenges. The only challenge at university is just focusing and getting your work done, but that’s the same challenge for everybody,” he says.
He did his undergraduate degree at UKZN in biomedical science and his honors in medical biochemistry. He took a gap year in 2010 to ponder deep questions related to his field. Like any scientist, he’s methodical and his gap year was spent carefully analyzing all his options. He began studying protein structure and function, analyzing diseases and how they relate to protein structure function. He applied for his master’s which he then converted to a PhD at the age of 21. In 2013, he began working at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).
“I still enjoyed myself being around friends. It’s an enjoyable time in life. I wasn’t really affected by what other people were doing and what I wasn’t doing.”
“I don’t know if people expect you to be a socially awkward person when you finish younger but that wasn’t the case,” he says.
By the age of 23, Naicker had earned his PhD degree in biochemistry from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, making him one of Africa’s youngest doctoral graduates, despite the delay of a gap year.
Naicker isn’t bursting with the tales of being a young prodigy; he’s unassuming and practical and broaches every aspect of life scientifically.
“It’s hard to have it all figured out, no matter where you are. There are people who have 15 years of experience in a field who want to change their path. Looking back, I’m happier than I was going through the academic process. In hindsight, things turned out better than I thought – I’ve learned so much.”
“I’m at a stage where I have as much experience in my field as my peers. It’s a competitive advantage. In five years, I’ll achieve what I want to and I’ll still have my youth. I’ll be more energetic – there are no challenges just advantages,” he says.
“You’ll never really know until you experience it. No matter how calculating you want to be, you have to experience. I always thought I was an old spirit in a young body.”
You can’t argue with that.

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Adichie Is Africa, Africa Is Adichie

University At 14 PhD At 23