Sophia Michaels
Nigerian-born award-winning writer Chimamanda Adichie has said that anger and disappointment at how Nigeria conducted the 2023 elections made her write US President Joe Biden.
Adichie revealed this while delivering the Inaugural Africa World Lecture at Princeton University in the United States.
“I wanted to tell the story of what happened,” she said. “And telling a story of what happened has become important in a world so eager to deny and distort even recent history.”
Following the February and March 2023 elections in Nigeria and the accompanying disputes, Adichie wrote an open letter to President Biden, pointing out the polls’ anomalies.
“I wrote it to bear witness,” said the author of ‘Half of A Yellow Sun.’
In the audience at Adichie’s lecture was Mr. Peter Obi, the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the election. Adichie introduced him to the audience as the man who won the presidential election.
In the lecture that delved into her writing career, the motivations behind her works, and the reception they have received around the globe, Adichie talked about how the church, especially the Catholic Church, influenced her work, especially her first novel, “Purple Hibiscus.”
She chronicled her long-running issues with the church.
On the source of her inspiration, she noted that her family believed she was the incarnate of her great-grandmother, who was fierce and called a troublemaker in her time.
The author of the award-winning novel, “Americanah’ delivered the inaugural lecture at Richardson Auditorium.
Prof. Chika Okeke-Agulu-led Africa World Initiative and Program in African Studies at Princeton instituted the annual lecture series to project prominent African voices to the world. Abdulrazak Gurnah, Africa’s 2021 Nobel Prize in Literature winner, will deliver next year’s lecture.
