January 10, 2015, 2 PM, San Leandro Main Library

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Meet the Author

According to Ms. Adichie's official unofficial website, which is more complete than her official website and sometimes referred to by her official website for more complete information:

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. While in Connecticut, she stayed with her sister Ijeoma, who runs a medical practice close to the university.

Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieChimamanda 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 collection of short stories, The Thing around Your Neck, was published in 2009. Chimamanda says her next major literary project will focus on the Nigerian immigrant experience in the United States. [Note: This refers to Americanah, but the bio apparently hasn't been updated since the book was published.]

Chimamanda is now married and divides her time between Nigeria, where she regularly teaches writing workshops, and the United States. She has recently been awarded a 2011-2012 fellowship by the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Chimamanda Adichie on Americanah



Chimamanda Adichie on Feminism

This TEDx talk gained some degree of interest lately after Beyonce sampled it for one of her songs.

Nigerian Comfort Food

In Americanah, the Nigerian comfort food of choice seems to be jollof rice, which appears to be a similar to gumbo. Here is a highly rated recipe from the BBC.




Nigerian Popular Music

Ifemelu describes Obinze's mother as looking like Onyeka Onwenu, one of the most popular Nigerian singers of the 1980s and an icon of Ifemelu's childhood. Ms. Onwenu started her career as a secular musician but now focuses on gospel and inspirational music. In this video, she joins King Sunny Ade, another icon of Nigerian popular music, to advise young people to save themselves for marriage.



In Americanah, when they are teenagers, Obinze introduces Ifemelu to the music of Fela Kuti, one of the best know Nigerian musicians outside of Nigeria. This video shows Fela and his music and dance review when he was at the top of his game. The film was shot by Ginger Baker, the former drummer for Cream who was working as Fela's drummer at that time. Fela claimed to have been influenced by American R&B music, and in particular by James Brown.



As an adult, one of Ifemelu's favorite Nigerian singers was Obiora Nwokolobia-Agu, who sings under the stage name of "Obiwon".  His song "Obi Mu O" was one of the songs Ifemelu played over and over again to comfort her broken heart after she chased Obinze back to his wife.