Chimamanda, like Achebe and Fawehinmi, rejects Buhari’s national award

Chimamanda, like Achebe and Fawehinmi, rejects Buhari’s national award

Prominent Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, had rejected President Muhammadu Buhari’s offer to confer her with national honours which took place last Tuesday.

The author, however, decided to be modest about her rejection of the award, as she did it quietly.

This was revealed by Omawumi Ogbe, a member of Chimamanda’s communications team.

According to Omawunmi, Chimamanda did not accept the award and, as such, did not attend the ceremony. “She (Chimamanda) however, did not want to create undue publicity around it, so her non-acceptance was conveyed privately.”

President Buhari had offered the national honours to Chimamanda, alongside other female recepients like Dr. Ngozi Okonjo Iweala and Ms. Amina J. Mohammed, whom he had described as “doing our country proud on the international scene…

“Our dear sisters are a source of inspiration to our young women that through the dint of hard work and dedication, they can achieve greatness,” President Buhari said.

The writer’s disposition was a replica of her kinsman’s in 2004 and 2011.

Fellow writer, late Prof. Chinua Achebe had on two occasions also rejected the national honours awards in 2004 and 2011, citing his dissatisfaction with the way things were being handled by the administrations of presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan respectively.

Renowned human rights activist and lawyer, late Chief Gani Fawehinmi, had also rejected the national honour conferred on him in 2008 by the Umaru Yar’Adua administration.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s biography
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma and James Nwoye Adichie.

While the family’s ancestral hometown is Abba in Anambra State, Chimamanda grew up in Nsukka, in the house formerly occupied by Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe. Chimamanda’s father, who is now retired, worked at the University of Nigeria, located in Nsukka. He was Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, and later became Deputy Vice-Chancellor of the University. Her mother was the first female registrar at the same institution.

Chimamanda completed her secondary education at the University’s school, receiving several academic prizes. She went on to study medicine and pharmacy at the University of Nigeria for a year and a half. During this period, she edited The Compass, a magazine run by the University’s Catholic medical students.

At the age of nineteen, Chimamanda left for the United States. She gained a scholarship to study communication at Drexel University in Philadelphia for two years, and she went on to pursue a degree in communication and political science at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she also wrote articles for the university journal, the Campus Lantern. While in Connecticut, she stayed with her sister Ijeoma, who runs a medical practice close to the university.

Chimamanda graduated summa cum laude from Eastern in 2001, and then completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

It is during her senior year at Eastern that she started working on her first novel, Purple Hibiscus, which was released in October 2003. The book has received wide critical acclaim: it was shortlisted for the Orange Fiction Prize (2004) and was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book (2005).

Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun (also the title of one of her short stories), is set before and during the Biafran War. It was published in August 2006 in the United Kingdom and in September 2006 in the United States. Like Purple Hibiscus, it has also been released in Nigeria.

Chimamanda was a Hodder fellow at Princeton University during the 2005-2006 academic year, and earned an MA in African Studies from Yale University in 2008; her thesis was entitled ‘The Myth of “Culture”: Sketching the History of Igbo Women in Precolonial and Colonial Nigeria’. In 2011-2012, she was awarded a fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, which allowed her to finalize her third novel, Americanah. The book was released to great critical acclaim in 2013.

Chimamanda is married and has a daughter. She divides her time between Nigeria, where she regularly teaches writing workshops, and the United States.

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