20 years ago, Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, made her debut in the Nigerian literary scene with Purple Hibiscus. With all its masterfully curated elements that immediately stamped Adichie as a global literary voice, her 2003 novel remains an incisive guide to Nsukka.
Editor’s note: This essay is available in our print issue, Pan-African Dreams. Buy the issue here.
The description of Eugene Achike, the wealthy father of the protagonist and narrating voice of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus, as an ‘oblate in a grey robe’ pulls him from that first paragraph of the first page of the story and places him in front of you. He does not come alone, and he does not return to those pages. He hauls the rest of the book behind him in the narrating voice of his shy but observant fifteen-year-old daughter, Kambili Achike. And long after you are done reading, you find that his story, as told by Kambili, sticks inscribed to your forehead like the ash he meticulously applies on the people in his very slow line on Ash Wednesday...
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