Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was 26 when she published her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction and won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize. The books that followed, Half of a Yellow Sun - set during the Biafran conflict in Nigeria, a decade before she was born - and Americanah, a modern love story set between America and Nigeria, have also been garlanded with international prizes and critical praise. Salman Rushdie remembers meeting her at a PEN literary festival in New York, not long after Purple Hibiscus was published.
She is a renowned writer with diverse audience
her 2009 TED talk, "The Danger of a Single Story", has had - wait for - more than eight million views; it is a sophisticated yet charming and accessible essay on how we might see the world through another's eyes. But that viral explosion is nothing compared with what happened to the talk Adichie gave in 2013 at TEDxEuston, a series of talks in London focusing on African affairs. Entitled "We Should All Be Feminists", the speech, which addressed a feminism beyond race or class, took on a very different life. Before she had realised the impact her words were having, she got a call from Beyoncé, who eventually sampled the talk in "Flawless", a song on the eponymous album she released, to the world's surprise, on iTunes that December: it reached the top of the iTunes charts in 104 countries and sold nearly 850,000 copies in three days. Beyoncé first discovered Chimamanda when she came across her talk online. "I was immediately drawn to her," says Beyoncé. "She was elegant and her words were powerful and honest. Her definition of a feminist described my own feeling: equality of the sexes as it pertains to human rights, equal pay and sexuality. She called the men in her family feminists, too, because they acknowledged the need for equality."
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaking at the 2012 Hay Festival
Feminism - gender equality - is a cause she cares about passionately. You don't have to spend long in Nigeria to witness the deeply patriarchal nature of the culture, where men are always greeted as "sir" and women are lucky to be greeted at all. But Adichie was brought up in a progressive household. Born in 1977 in eastern Nigeria, she grew up in Nsukka, a university town.
The oppression of women, she says, "Makes me angry. I can't not be angry. I don't know how you can just be calm. My family says to me, 'Oh, you're such a man!'.
Talking about fashion
"I do all these drawings for my clothes," she says. "Really terrible drawings. But I love to do them, and I could add a little bit of colour with my crayons." It's clear that Adichie sees no contradiction in being a woman of fashion and a feminist. The dress she wears for the shoot is one she designed herself; she works with local tailors to bring her drawing to reality and no doubt she is a fashionista .
Picture credit: Akintunde Akinleye
Talking about race with Adichie is fascinating. "I only became black when I came to America," she writes in Americanah; her character Ifemelu's experience is drawn from her own. "In Nigeria I'm not black," she says simply. "We don't do race in Nigeria. We do ethnicity a lot, but not race. My friends here don't really get it. Some of them sound like white Southerners from 1940. They say, 'Why are black people complaining about race? Racism doesn't exist!' It's just not a part of their existence." But it has been part of hers in America, where her experience "is always shaped by race.
Credit: Vogue UK .
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