Multiple award-winning Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, feels “younger Nigerian women are actually less progressive than even my mother’s generation.”
The 38-year-old spoke at London’s Royal Festival Hall on Sunday, August 7 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun.
Known for her radical feminism, Chimamanda said, “It’s not a question of blaming them, I think it’s a product of the society we live in and the messages they’re getting. And so people who are 23 are just obsessed with marriage, as the end-all and be-all. It’s very interesting to me.”
“I also think there’s a kind of viciousness that underlies that obsession, and a kind of misogyny. I find that there’s actually a strong strain of misogyny in the young generation of Nigerian women. It’s very worrying. It’s the young women who police women, even more than men. It’s part of the same thing. In the end, for me, it’s ‘who does the system benefit?’ and it benefits men. Even if women are participating in it, it benefits men.”
Chimamanda, who revealed in a July 2, 2016 interview with the Financial Times that she had a baby daughter, told her London audience “I still look at her [daughter] in absolute wonder. And I think, you’re really here and you’re really mine. And she is just the most beautiful human being in the world.”
“Having her I’ve realised how love really can manifest as anxiety. So I just worry about my child. I want to make sure everything is fine with her.”
The wife of Dr Ivara Esege revealed why she kept her pregnancy secret in a recent interview with UK’s Channel 4 News.
“I wanted my pregnancy to be something I shared with the people I love, with the people who know me. There is a kind of pregnancy as a trendy thing that I find very uncomfortable with and I deeply dislike expressions like ‘baby bump’, she said to the amusement of many critics who have since taken her up online.
“I find it very irritating. It was a very deeply introspective time, thinking about (how) my life is going to change forever and the enormousness of bringing a baby into the world. It was a sacred time for me and I wanted to share it with the people I love.”
Parts of Chimamanda’s April 2013 TEDx talk on feminism were sampled in Beyoncé’s song ‘Flawless’ in December 2013.
