Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of Half of a Yellow Sun. Her new novel, Americanah, will be published next April.
Nigeria, at independence from British rule in 1960, was called the Giant of Africa. With a large population, an educated elite and many natural resources, especially oil, Nigeria was supposed to fly the flag of democratic success. It did not, and it is clear now, in retrospect, that it could not possibly have done so. Colonial rule, as a government model, was closer to a dictatorship than a...
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s first novel, Purple Hibiscus (2004), was ostensibly a coming of age story. A teenage girl is abused by her repressive Catholic father and, following a political...
Hawa, the bar girl to be, was born in a village in Ghana in the early 1950s. Her family were emigrants from Upper Volta, which is now called Burkina Faso. When she was three her mother died, and...
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