All right. So let's let's try and unpack this.
We're looking at a figure today who feels like
she inhabits, I don't know, three or four different
worlds all at the same time. It's a lot to juggle.
I mean, think about it. Usually you have your,
you know, your high literature authors, the ones
who win the serious awards, get studied in universities.
They're sort of in one box. The serious reclusive
writer. Yeah. Then in a totally separate universe,
you have your pop culture icons. The people who
get sampled by Beyonce, who sit front row at
Dior shows in Paris. That's the celebrity box.
Totally different skill set, different audience.
And then maybe in a third corner, you've got
your political firebrands, the public intellectuals
who get into these really heated debates on cable
news or on Twitter. Right, the activist or the
provocateur. And the traditional wisdom is you
pick a lane. You can't be all three. But the
subject of our deep dive today. just refuses
to pick a lane. We are going into the life and
work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And for so
many people, that name immediately brings up
the TED Talks. Oh, absolutely. The danger of
a single story or we should all be feminists.
They're iconic. But when I started looking at
the just the stack of research for this, I realized.
Those talks are, I mean, they're just the tip
of the iceberg. They're the entry point, for
sure. A very powerful entry point. But if you
stop there, you miss the actual substance, the
complexity of her work. Adichie is what some
media scholars might call a transmedia phenomenon.
Transmedia phenomenon, I like that. Yeah, she's
a novelist, first and foremost. You can't forget
that. But her influence just... It bleeds into
everything, into fashion, into gender politics,
post -colonial theory, even into the way we talk
about cancel culture. And we have to address
the elephant in the room right at the start.
We're recording this in February of 2026. And
this is a very specific and a very, very heavy
moment in her timeline. It is. It's impossible
to ignore. She released a new novel, Dream Count,
just last year in 2025, which we will definitely
get to. But right now the headlines are, well,
they're just devastating. It's a tragedy that,
I mean, no parent should ever have to even imagine,
let alone endure. In January 2026, just last
month, She lost her son, her young son, her very
young son. It's a developing situation and it
involves these really serious allegations of
medical negligence in a hospital in Lagos. And
it has completely shaken not just her family,
but the entire nation of Nigeria and honestly,
the literary world at large. So as we go through
her career today, her incredible rise. We just
have to hold that context in our minds. We are
analyzing the life of a woman who is right now,
as we speak, navigating the absolute darkest
valley of her personal life. It casts a very
long shadow over everything. It adds such a layer
of poignancy to everything we're going to discuss.
So our mission today is to trace that arc. How
does a young girl growing up in a university
town in Nigeria, a girl who read British storybooks,
become what people call Africa's preeminent storyteller?
It's quite a journey. We need to look at the
books. I mean, really look at them, not just
the blurbs on the back. And we have to look at
the controversies. Because, and this is a key
point, she has never... ever shied away from
a fight. She really hasn't. And I think the best
place to start is with that very idea of the
storyteller, because her own origin story, it's
almost too perfect. If you put it in a novel,
an editor might send it back and say it's a little
too on the nose. I was reading about her childhood
housing situation, and you are absolutely right.
You really can't make this up. So she was born
in Enugu in 1977, but she grew up in Nasuka.
Right, in a university town. And the specific
house she lived in. Tell me about the previous
tenant of that house. It is the ultimate literary
coincidence, or maybe destiny, depending on how
you look at it. Her father, James Adichie, was
a professor of statistics at the University of
Nigeria. Her mother, Grace, was the first female
registrar there. An academic family through and
through. Absolutely. So they lived in university
housing. And the house they were assigned had
just before them been occupied by Chinua Achebe.
Wait, hold on. The Chinua Achebe. The man who
wrote Things Fall Apart. The very same. The grandfather
of modern African literature. The man who essentially
proved to the entire Western world that African
literature was a serious, profound art form.
So Adichie grew up, you know, running through
the same hallways, living in the same rooms where
he might have drafted some of his most important
work. That feels like Destiny. Like you just
breathe in the air in that house and you have
to become a writer. It's just in the walls. Mm
-hmm. Was she writing these incredible stories
about Igbo villages and yams from age five? See,
that's where you'd think the story goes. It's
the logical next step. But it's actually the
opposite. And this is so crucial to understanding
her entire worldview, especially that single
story idea. She was a voracious reader as a child,
just devoured books. But the books that were
available to her were almost exclusively British
children's books. Enid Blyton. Oh, like the famous
five. The Secret Seven, all that stuff. Exactly.
Very, very British. Very white. Very middle class,
mid -century stuff. So when Adichie started writing
her own little stories around age seven or so,
she wasn't writing about Nasuka. She wasn't writing
about the heat or eating mangoes off the tree.
What was she writing about? She was writing about
characters who were white, characters who had
blue eyes, who played in the snow and who ate
apples all the time. Wait, had she ever eaten
an apple at that point or seen snow? No. She
lived in Nigeria. She had never seen snow in
her life. She said in her TED Talk she didn't
know what ginger beer tasted like, but her characters
were constantly drinking it because that's what
the characters in her books did. Wow. That's
wild. It's like she didn't realize her own reality
was allowable in the world of fiction. That is
the psychological erasure of colonialism in a
nutshell. It's so powerful. It wasn't that she
didn't like her life or her world. It's that
she had... unconsciously internalized this idea
that books are foreign things. Books are places
where foreign people do foreign things. The people
who looked like her, who ate the food she ate.
People with skin the color of chocolate, as she
says. People whose kinky hair couldn't form a
ponytail. She just didn't think they could exist
inside the pages of a novel. That's actually
kind of heartbreaking when you think about it.
You're basically erasing yourself from your own
imagination before you even get started. What
broke the spell? When did she have that light
bulb moment of, oh, wait, I could be in a book?
It was when she was about 10 years old. She finally
stumbled upon African writers. She discovered
the literature of her own continent. She read
Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which is so fitting,
given the house. Right. And Kamarle from Guinea,
Bucci Amicheta. And she said it was a complete
shock to the system. It was a mental shift. Suddenly,
she was reading and seeing her own name or names
like hers. She was reading about the food she
ate. She realized that literature wasn't just
a window into England. It could be a mirror reflecting
her own world. And speaking of names, I found
it fascinating that Chimamanda wasn't actually
the name she used growing up. That came later.
No, she was born Grace Ngozi Adichie. Grace was
after her mother. So where does Chimamanda come
from? It was a choice she made. It was part of
her finding her own identity. which is a recurring
theme in her work. During her Catholic confirmation,
she was looking for a new name. And interestingly,
before she settled on Shemamanda, she went through
a phase where she wanted to be Amanda. Amanda.
That sounds very American. Very sweet valley
high. It does, doesn't it? It was very Western.
She even published a poetry collection in 1997,
a very early work called Decisions, under the
name Amanda N. Adichie. No way. Yes. But eventually
she realized that Amanda didn't really fit the
writer she was becoming. It felt like a costume.
So she embraced Chimamanda, which is a beautiful
Igbo name. It means my God will not fall or my
God will not fail. That's powerful. It was a
re - A conscious one. But she didn't go straight
from that realization into writing as a career,
did she? Because coming from that kind of Nigerian
academic family, I'm guessing novelist wasn't
at the top of the approved careers list? You
would be guessing right. The expectation was
for something stable, something prestigious.
Doctor, lawyer, engineer. The classic immigrant
parent dream. Exactly. So she did what was expected.
She started studying medicine and pharmacy at
the University of Nigeria. She did that for about
a year and a half. I just, I cannot picture her
in a lab coat. titrating chemicals. Apparently,
she was doing fine academically, but her heart
just wasn't in it. Her passion was elsewhere.
She was editing a campus magazine on the side.
It was called The Compass. And that's where she
was really alive. Eventually, at age 19, she
made the break. A huge decision. A life -changing
one. She left the medical path, left Nigeria,
and moved to the United States to study communications
and political science. First at Drexel in Philadelphia,
and then she transferred to Eastern Connecticut
State University. Wow, that must have been amazing.
Massive culture shock. I mean, going from Nisuka
to Connecticut. Massive. And this is really where
her deep understanding of race in America began
to form, which we'll see is the absolute bedrock
of Americana. But academically, she just, she
crushed it. She graduated summa cum laude. And
she didn't stop there. Oh no, she was just collecting
degrees. She then went to Johns Hopkins for a
master's in creative writing, and after that
to Yale for a master's in African studies. She
was building this incredible intellectual foundation.
But all the degrees in the world don't guarantee
you a book deal. I read about the rejection letter
she got for her first novel. And honestly, it
made my blood boil. It's the classic infuriating
gatekeeping of the publishing industry. This
is when she was shopping around the manuscript
for what would become Purple Hibiscus. And agents,
you know, they told her the writing was beautiful.
The prose was stunning. But there's always a
but. The but was the setting. They said, this
is great, but could you? Could you change it?
Could you make it America or maybe make the African
characters more familiar? Make them more familiar.
What does that even mean? It sounds like a coded
way of saying make them fit our stereotypes.
That's exactly what it means. It means make them
fit the single story. They didn't want a story
about a complex, middle class, psychologically
nuanced Nigerian family dealing with religious
fanaticism. They wanted the Africa they already
knew from the news. Poverty, war, AIDS. Maybe
a safari with a lion. That's the stuff that sold.
They basically told her that no one in the West
would buy a book about regular, complicated life
in Nigeria. My God, she didn't listen to them.
She refused to compromise. And that's a pattern
with her. She eventually found an agent, Jonna
Pearson Morris, who believed in the book as it
was. And Algonquin Books published Purple Hibiscus
in 2003. And that brings us to the first of what
I think of as her big three novels. The foundational
trilogy, in a way. Let's dive into these because
I feel like people know the titles, but I really
want to get into what makes them tick. So Purple
Hibiscus, it's her debut. It's a coming of age
story, right? It is, but it's a very dark and
claustrophobic one. It's narrated by a 15 -year
-old girl named Kambili. And on the surface,
her life looks perfect. Her father, Eugene, is
a wealthy factory owner. He's a devout Catholic,
a pillar of the community who wins human rights
awards for his newspaper. He's a big man. A respected
figure. But behind closed doors. Behind closed
doors, he is an absolute tyrant. He's violently
abusive to his wife and his two children. It's
this terrifying blend of religious piety and
domestic terror. If they sin, if they fail to
come first in their class, he punishes them physically
in the most horrific ways. So the whole book
is just. It's suffocatingly tense. Kambili, the
narrator, barely speaks above a whisper for the
first half of the book because she is so conditioned
by fear. She's terrified of stepping out of line.
It's interesting you mentioned the father's a
big man in the community, so he's not just a
one -dimensional cartoon villain. That's the
nuance Adichie brings, even in her debut. He
is a villain, 100%. But he is also presented
as a product, a victim even, of colonialism.
He has internalized the British colonial religion
so deeply that he rejects his own Igbo culture
completely. How does it manifest? Well, he speaks
English at home, not Igbo. He refers to his own
father as a pagan and refuses to let his children
visit him. He believes, with every fiber of his
being, that to be good is to be English and Catholic
and anything traditional, anything African, is
evil. His violence comes from this twisted, fanatical
desire to save his family from their own heritage.
That is so heavy. But there's a crack of light,
right? Yeah, yeah. Kambili and her brother get
an escape. They go to visit their aunt. They
do. They go to stay with their aunt, Ifeoma.
And Ifeoma is the absolute heart and soul of
that book. She's the counterpoint to Eugene in
every way. She's a university lecturer. She's
widowed. She's poor. She's constantly struggling
to buy gas for her beat -up car. But her tiny
apartment is full of laughter and debate and
loud music. It's freedom. It is total freedom.
And this is where that term womanism comes in,
which is often used to describe her work. How
is that different from feminism in this context?
Well, womanism, particularly in an African context,
is often seen as being more community and family
oriented. Auntie Efema isn't fighting against
men in the abstract. She's fighting for the survival
and dignity of her family unit. She runs a democratic
household where her children are encouraged to
argue with her. She teaches Kambili that you
can question authority that you're allowed to
have a voice. So it's this incredible contrast.
Kambidi's father has all the money and power,
but his house is a silent prison. Auntie Ifeoma
has no money, but her house is overflowing with
joy and life. Precisely. And that's where the
title comes from. The Purple Hibiscus itself.
It's an experimental flower, right? Not a common
one. Exactly. It's a rare, special hybrid that
Auntie Efeoma's botanist friend created. It's
not supposed to exist, but it does. It's beautiful
and defiant, and it can grow even in difficult
soil. And that's the perfect metaphor for Kambili
finding her own voice, her own unique identity.
So the book ends on a note of hope, then. Cautious
hope. It's not a fairy tale ending. But there's
the possibility of a new life, symbolized by
this idea of the arrival of a king, which refers
to Palm Sunday, and the new rains that wash things
clean. So Purple Hibiscus puts her on the literary
map. It gets nominated for major prizes. Critics
loved it. But then came 2006, and she drops half
of a yellow sun. And this, this was the blockbuster.
This changed the game. This was the book that
proved she wasn't a one -hit wonder. This was
her epic. It's a massive, sweeping historical
novel set during the Biafran War. That was the
Nigerian Civil War, late 1960s. Right. And for
listeners who might not be familiar with the
history, it's essential context. In 1967, the
Igbo people of southeastern Nigeria, following
a series of massacres against them in other parts
of the country, seceded to form their own independent
nation, the Republic of Biafra. And the Nigerian
government did not accept that? Not at all. They
fought to take the territory back. It turned
into a brutal three -year war, largely defined
by the Nigerian government's blockade of Biafra,
which led to mass starvation. Hundreds of thousands,
maybe over a million civilians, died from hunger.
Adichie wasn't born yet when this happened, right?
No, she was born seven years after the war ended.
But the war is the defining trauma of her people,
the Igbo people. It's in the soil. She lost both
of her grandfathers in that war. She grew up
hearing the stories, living in the shadow of
it. Writing this book was her way of excavating
her parents' trauma, of bearing witness. The
thing that struck me so forcefully about this
book, and I think is her superpower as a writer,
is the sensory detail. It doesn't read like a
dry history lesson at all. It reads like you
can smell it. You can taste the food or the lack
of it. That is Adichie's genius. She grounds
the horror of history in the mundane, in the
details of daily life. In the first part of the
book, Before the War, you're introduced to these
characters, Oda Nikbo, the radical university
professor, and Alana, his glamorous lover. And
their life is good. Their life is fantastic.
They're part of this new post -independence intellectual
elite. And Adichie gives you these incredible
details, like a description of their fridge being
full of cold beer and oranges and... roasted
shimmering chicken they sit around debating politics
over glasses of brandy it's a life of abundance
and ideas and then the war starts and the shimmering
chicken disappears slowly and then all at once
the fridge empties out the brandy is gone the
shimmering chicken is replaced by Well, nothing.
And then eventually they're eating lizards to
survive. They're eating powdered egg yolks that
come from humanitarian aid drops. She shows you
the degradation of war, not just through battles
and bombs, but through the quiet horror of your
hair starting to fall out from malnutrition,
of your ribs starting to show through your skin.
There's a character in the book, the houseboy,
Ugu. He's probably my favorite character. He's
this young boy from a poor village who comes
to work for Odenigbo. And he's the moral center
of the book in many ways. His journey is incredible.
And there's a scene, a small moment, where Odenigbo
is teaching him about history that I feel is
crucial to understanding Adichie's entire philosophy.
The Mungo Park lesson. Yes. It's so important.
Tell us about it. Odenigbo sees Ugu reading a
colonial textbook, and he asks him what he's
learning. Ugu tells him that the book says the
Scottish explorer Mungo Park discovered the Niger
River. And Odenigbo just scoffs. He asks Ugu,
how can a white man discover a river that our
people have been fishing in for centuries? It's
just absurd when you say it out loud like that.
Like all the people fishing didn't know where
they were until a white guy showed up with a
map and a flag. Precisely. It exposes the arrogance
of the colonial narrative. But then Odenigbo
tells Ugu something very pragmatic, and this
is the key part. He says, of course that's rubbish,
but you must write it on your exam so you can
pass. Wow. It perfectly captures the double consciousness
of the colonized subject. You have to know the
truth, that your history is valid, that your
people were there first. But you also have to
learn to parrot the colonizers' lies just to
survive and succeed within their system. That
book won everything, didn't it? The Orange Prize.
And then years later, it was named the winner
of winners from 25 years of that prize. It was
made into a movie with Thandie Mee Newton and
Chiwetel Ejiofor. It just felt like the African
novel of the decade. It absolutely was. It took
a very specific, very painful local history and
made it universal. But then, true to form, she
pivoted again. In 2013, she released Americana.
And this felt completely different. Yeah, this
wasn't historical fiction. This was bitingly
contemporary. It was sharp. It was funny. And
it was about something incredibly messy, race
in America. And race in Nigeria and the space
between the two. This is the book that introduces
that concept of the global black experience.
The main character, Ifemelu, she moves from Nigeria
to the U .S. for university. And she has this
profound realization. She says she didn't know
she was black. until she came to America. That
is the core thesis of the novel. In Nigeria,
Ifemelu isn't black. Nobody is black because
everybody is black. It's not an identity marker.
She is Igbo. She's a woman. She's middle class.
Her identity is defined by ethnicity, by class,
by region. But then she lands at JFK Airport.
And suddenly she is assigned this monolithic
label, black. And with that label, she inherits
all the historical baggage of American slavery
and Jim Crow and the civil rights struggle, a
history that she personally has no direct connection
to. She has to learn how to be black in America.
She starts a blog in the book to process all
of this, right? The title is amazing. It's brilliant.
Race teens or various observations about American
blacks, those formerly known as Negroes by a
non -American black. That blog was such a clever
literary device. It allowed Adichie to basically
break the fourth wall and just drop these sharp,
insightful essays right into the middle of the
novel. It did. She uses it to critique everything.
She critiques the oppression Olympics where different
minority groups argue over who has it worse.
She critiques the way well -meaning white liberals
tiptoe around race with this awkward, pained
politeness. And we have to talk about the hair.
My God, there is so much about hair in this book.
Hair is central. It's a whole political battlefield.
There's a heartbreaking scene early on where
a Femalu is trying to get a corporate job, and
she's told by an African -American woman that
she needs to relax her hair, to chemically straighten
it, to look professional. A process which involves
putting caustic chemicals on your head that literally
burn your scalp. It physically hurts. It's painful.
But the societal message is crystal clear. Your
natural self is unprofessional. Your natural
self is messy, unruly. To be successful, to assimilate.
You must mimic whiteness. And the scene where
she finally cuts off all the relaxed hair and
goes natural is this huge moment of liberation.
It is a massive moment of claiming agency. It's
not just about a hairstyle. It's about refusing
to apologize for your own genetics. It's a political
act. Americana felt like it captured the Obama
era perfectly. That weird mix of hope and progress,
but also the dawning realization that actually,
no, we are not a post -racial society at all.
It was a monster hit. It was. It won the National
Book Critics Circle Award. It was on every best
of the year list. But here's the thing. While
she was writing these dense, brilliant, prize
-winning novels, she was also simultaneously
blowing up on a totally different platform. The
TED stage. This is where the transmedia aspect
really kicks into high gear. In 2009, she gave
the talk, The Danger of a Single Story. Which
I think is now required viewing for basically
every high school student in the English -speaking
world. It has over 27 million views on the TED
website alone. It's one of the most viewed talks
of all time. And it's so effective because the
concept is so simple, so powerful. If you only
ever hear one story about a people, that they
are poor or that they are criminals or that they
are terrorists, that becomes the only reality
in your mind. It robs people of their complexity,
their humanity. But then came the 2012 talk.
We should all be feminists. And that talk changed
everything. Because a year later, in December
2013, Beyonce dropped her surprise self -titled
visual album. And right in the middle of the
song, Flawless, suddenly there is Chimamanda's
voice, clear as a bell. We teach girls to shrink
themselves, to make themselves smaller. It was
a cultural earthquake. You had the biggest pop
star on the planet sampling a Nigerian novelist
talking about feminist theory. But it wasn't
without its controversy. You had some academic
purists who said Beyonce wasn't a real feminist
because, you know, she performs for the male
gaze. She dances in revealing outfits. Did Adichie
care about any of that? Not in the slightest.
She defended Beyonce completely. She famously
said in an interview, whoever says they're feminist
is bloody feminist. She understood that Beyonce
could reach millions and millions of young girls
that a literary novel never, ever would. She
refused to be a gatekeeper for feminism. And
she also took that message into the world of
high fashion, which, again, feels like a contradiction
to some people. You know, the stereotype of the
serious female intellectual is that she's supposed
to be frumpy. Right. Above it all. Like if you
care about lipstick and a nice dress, you can't
possibly care about postcolonial politics. That
is precisely the stereotype Adichie despises.
She loves fashion. She's been very vocal about
it. She views it as a form of armor, of agency,
of self -expression. And she made a huge splash
when she sat front row at the Dior show when
the new creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri,
sent a model down the runway wearing a simple
white T -shirt that just said, we should all
be feminists. I remember that shirt. It cost
something like $800. It did, which sparked a
whole other debate about capitalism and co -opting
activism. But Adichie took the idea and made
it her own in a much more grassroots way. She
launched the Wear Nigerian campaign on her Instagram.
This was managed. by her two nieces, right? Yes.
Chisholm and Amaka. The rule was simple for all
her public appearances. She would only wear clothing
made by Nigerian designers. And this wasn't just
about vanity or looking good. It was a form of
economic activism. Right. She wanted to boost
the local industry. She wanted to pump money
and more importantly, global attention into the
local textile and design industry. She wanted
to show the world that Nigerian design was high
fashion, that it deserved a place on the world
stage. It was putting her money. And her platform,
where her mouth is, it even won a Shorty Award
in 2018. So she is just... Yeah. Everywhere.
She's a literary bestseller. She's a fashion
icon. She's a global feminist hero. But when
you get that big and when you speak your mind
that freely on so many topics, you're going to
make enemies. And Adichie has found herself right
in the middle of some of the most intense culture
wars of the last decade. She has. And I think
this is where her complexity really, really shows.
Because she does not just tow the party line
of Western progressivism. She thinks for herself.
Let's maybe start with the media interactions,
because she had a very famous, very tense run
in with the BBC about Donald Trump back in 2016.
Oh, this was a classic ambush interview. She
went on the BBC's flagship news program, Newsnight,
thinking she was doing a standard one -on -one
interview about her work in American politics.
But that's not what happened. No. The BBC had
also booked R. Emmett Terrell Jr., who was the
editor of a very conservative magazine, The American
Spectator, and a hardcore Trump supporter. And
they didn't really warn her that she was being
set up for a debate. So they just pitted her
against him live on air. Exactly. And Terrell
was on there making the argument that Donald
Trump wasn't racist. Adichie very calmly pushed
back. She cited Trump's comments about Judge
Gonzalo Curiel. Remember, Trump said the judge
couldn't do his job fairly because of his Mexican
heritage. Which is, I mean, that's pretty much
the textbook definition of racism. It is. But
when Adichie pointed this out, Terrell looked
at her very condescendingly and said, I do not
respond emotionally like this lady. Oh, emotionally.
Oh. The oldest, most tired trick in the book
to discredit a woman. A woman has a fact based
opinion. No, she's just being emotional. Adichie's
facial expression in that moment was priceless.
It went viral. She very calmly and coolly dismantled
his argument. But that specific moment highlighted
exactly the kind of casual sexism that powerful,
intellectual women face all the time. But she
doesn't just fight with the state. Right? She
famously challenged Hillary Clinton, too. This
was the Twitter bio thing. I remember this. It
was in 2018 during a PN World Voices event. She
was on stage interviewing Clinton, and she asked
her a very direct question. She said, why does
your Twitter bio start with the word wife? Oh?
She pointed out that Bill Clinton's bio didn't
start with husband. She asked why a woman of
Hillary Clinton's incredible stature still felt
the need to define herself by her marriage first
and foremost. That takes some serious guts. To
sit next to Hillary Clinton and tell her to fix
her Twitter bio. It really does. And the amazing
thing is Clinton actually changes. She took the
note. But those, you could say, were the safe
controversies. The one that really caused a massive
fracture in her progressive fan base was the
issue of transgender rights. Yeah, this is the
big one. And it's complicated. It started around
2017 in an interview she did with Channel 4 in
the UK. What exactly did she say? Because it
gets misquoted and simplified all the time. It
does. So the interviewer asked her if... Trans
women are women. And Adichie's initial answer
was, yes, trans women are women. But then she
added a distinction, a piece of nuance. She said
that a trans woman's experience of womanhood
is not the same as the experience of a woman
who was born and raised female from birth. And
what was her reasoning for that? Her argument
was that a trans woman prior to transitioning.
lived in the world being perceived as male and
therefore for a portion of her life benefited
from male privilege. She argued that that socialization
matters, that it shapes your experience, and
to pretend it doesn't exist is to erase a significant
part of the story. And the backlash was immediate
and intense. It was fierce. Critics argued that
she was creating a hierarchy of womanhood, that
she was basically saying trans women were lesser
women or women with an asterisk. One of her own
former students from her writing workshop, the
celebrated non -binary writer Akwaeke Emezi,
publicly and very strongly called her out. Adichie
was almost instantly labeled a TERF, a trans
exclusionary radical feminist by a large part
of the online community. So what did she do?
Did she apologize? Walk it back. Because the
standard PR move in that situation. is to issue
a statement saying, I'm listening and learning
and I'm sorry for the harm I caused. She did
not do the standard PR move at all. She doubled
down on her belief in nuance. In 2020, when J
.K. Rowling published her now infamous very long
essay on sex and gender, Adichie publicly called
it a perfectly reasonable piece. And then in
2021, Adichie published a massive three -part
essay on her own website titled It Is Obscene.
I read that essay. It was. It was scorching.
It was a declaration of war. It was a scorched
earth critique of what she sees as the tactics
of cancel culture. She didn't really relitigate
the specific trans debate in the essay. Instead,
she attacked the behavior of her critics, particularly
the former students she felt had betrayed her.
She argued that social media has created a generation
that demands ideological purity that is choking
on sanctimony and that uses abstract academic
words like. violence to describe mere disagreement.
So her core argument became less about gender
theory and more about freedom of speech. It was
you can disagree with me, but trying to destroy
my reputation and career because I acknowledge
biological sex is toxic and obscene. Exactly.
And what's so important to add here is the geographical
context. While she was being painted as this
conservative, transphobic villain in the U .S.
and the U .K. for these comments back in her
home country of Nigeria, she's considered a radical
progressive on these very issues. Right, because
Nigeria passed a really harsh anti -gay law in
2014. A truly draconian law. the Same -Sex Marriage
Prohibition Act. It criminalizes gay relationships
with up to 14 years in prison. And Chimamanda
was one of the loudest, most prominent Nigerian
voices opposing that law. She wrote essays calling
it unjust and un -African. She was best friends
with Binyavongo Wainaina, a prominent Kenyan
writer who was openly gay. She eulogized him
beautifully when he died. So the narrative that
she is... broadly anti -LGBT's just. It's too
simple. That doesn't hold up. It's a single story.
She supports gay rights legally and vocally in
a place where it is genuinely dangerous to do
so. But she refuses to align perfectly with the
very latest Western academic theories on gender
identity. She's ideologically independent. It
goes right back to that core idea. You can't
just put her in the liberal hero box or the conservative
villain box. She simply will not fit. She navigates
by her own compass, for better or for worse.
Now, we have to move to the most recent chapter
of her life. And this is by far the hardest part
to talk about. The last few years, really from
2020 leading up to today in 2026, have been defined
by just wave after wave of unimaginable grief
for her. It really started with the pandemic.
In June of 2020, her beloved father died suddenly
of complications from kidney failure. And because
of all the COVID lockdowns and travel restrictions,
she was stuck in the U .S. She couldn't get back
to Nigeria to be with him or to bury him immediately.
For someone from a culture where those funeral
rites are so important, it was a special kind
of torture for her. And then before she could
even begin to process that loss. Her mother died.
In March of 2021, on her late husband's birthday
of all days, so within the space of about nine
months, she lost both anchors of her life. The
two people who raised her in that Chinua Achebe
house. She wrote a beautiful, gut -wrenching
memoir about this called Notes on Grief. I took
a look at that. She talks about the madness of
grief. How it's not just sadness. It's a physical
unraveling. It's a rage. She describes it as
a cruel kind of education. She writes about how
the actual sides of her ribs hurt from the force
of her crying. It also changed her relationship
with religion. She was raised Catholic, as we
said, but drifted away because she felt the Nigerian
church was too focused on money and guilt. But
in her grief, she found herself drawn back to
the rituals, to the comfort of the familiar prayers,
though she describes herself now as fundamentally
agnostic and questioning. And during all this
time, she was also raising her own family. She
has a daughter who was born in 2016. And then
very privately, she had twin boys in 2024 who
were born via a surrogate. She kept the birth
of the twins very quiet. She's fiercely protective
of her children's privacy. She even wrote a wonderful
children's book last year, Mama's Sleeping Scarf,
but she published it under a pseudonym. Nua Grace
James. Which means? Child of Grace and James.
It was a tribute to her late parents. It was
the sweet, gentle period of new motherhood after
so much loss. But then, then we arrive at January
7th, 2026. This is the news that is still breaking
as we record this. Her son, Nkanu. Yes. Nkanu
Nandamdi. One of the twins. He was only 21 months
old. And the details that Adichie and her family
have released are just. they make you sick with
anger this wasn't a tragic illness or an accident
she alleges it was pure Medical negligence. She
has been very, very specific in her allegations.
He was admitted to your care hospital in Lagos,
which is meant to be a high end top tier facility.
She alleges that when he went into respiratory
distress, he was denied oxygen because the staff
couldn't find the key to the supply room or didn't
have the supply ready. She also claims they sedated
him excessively, which she believes led to a
heart attack. A heart attack in a toddler. That
is her allegation. The hospital, as you'd expect,
has denied it. They've cited patient confidentiality
and insisted they followed standard procedures.
But Adichie is furious. And her public fury has
ignited this massive, painful conversation in
Nigeria. Because the question everyone is asking
is, if Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a woman with
money, with global fame, with powerful connections,
if she can't get safe, basic medical care for
her child in the best hospital in Lagos, then
who can? What hope is there for anyone else?
Precisely. It exposes the utter systemic collapse
of the healthcare infrastructure in the country.
And it's a tragedy that has become a national
rallying cry. We're seeing protests, op -eds,
but for her personally, it is a devastation that
we can't even begin to comprehend. And this happened
right after she released her first novel in over
a decade. Dreamcount in 2025. The timing is just
another layer of cruelty. Dreamcount is getting
incredible reviews. It deals with many of her
classic themes, the grit of womanhood, the physical
realities of the female body. And now she is
living through the ultimate. brutal physical
reality of loss. It puts her entire career, her
entire public life in this state of suspended
animation. How do you go on a book tour when
you have just buried your child? You don't. You
just survive. You survive. So as we look at this
entire arc, from the little girl in Nasuka writing
stories about snow, to the global literary titan,
to this grieving mother demanding justice, what
is the legacy she's building? I know she received
a very special title recently, her hometown.
She did. In December of 2022, she was given a
chieftaincy title in her ancestral town of Aba.
The title is Odolua. And what does that translate
to? The one who writes for the world. Wow. That
is... That's perfect. It really is. And she was
the first woman in the history of her town to
receive that specific title. And I think that
just sums it all up. She writes for the world,
but she writes from Africa. She didn't have to
shed her identity, her Nigerian -ness to become
a global star. She forced the world to come to
her, to meet her on her own terms. And she forced
us and continues to force us to deal with complexity.
That, I think, is the final most important takeaway.
In one of her recent BBC Reith lectures, she
said something that really stuck with me. She
said that literature is in peril. She warned
that if we as a culture demand ideological purity,
if we demand that our writers never offend us,
never challenge our dogmas, never have bad or
complicated opinions, we will kill storytelling
itself. She insists on friction. She insists
on friction. She insists that people are messy
and flawed. Her work and her life is a testament
to the fact that there is danger, profound danger,
in ever settling for a single story about anyone,
including herself. She's not a single story.
And brilliant, and controversial, and human.
And that is why she matters so much. That feels
like a powerful place to leave it. This has been
a heavy one, but an important one. I feel like
I understand the stakes of her work and her life
so much better now. It's a necessary conversation
to have. To everyone listening, take care of
yourselves. We'll be back with another Deep Dog
soon.