Feminism Shouldn’t Make You Mean – Chimamanda Adichie

Popular feminist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently trended on social media for saying feminism shouldn’t justify wickedness.

The renowned author actually made this statement during an old interview, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to her, she has had conversations with really mean feminists, and that is not the path she wants young feminists to take.

He added that feminism isn’t wickedness, and anyone engaging in such is not practising the right thing.

Her words, “I often say to young Nigerian feminists, please do not use feminism to justify your wickedness.”

“So you have some of these young women and I’m talking to them and they sound really mean and I say, you know what, this isn’t feminism, you’re just really nasty.”

WOW.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose works range from novels to short stories to nonfiction. She was described in The Times Literary Supplement as “the most prominent” of a “procession of critically acclaimed young anglophone authors [who] is succeeding in attracting a new generation of readers to African literature”.

Adichie has written the novels Purple Hibiscus (2003), Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and Americanah (2013), the short story collection The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), and the book-length essay We Should All Be Feminists (2014). Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017. In 2008, she was awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Adichie was born in the city of Enugu in Nigeria, and grew up as the fifth of six children in an Igbo family in the university town of Nsukka in Enugu State. While she was growing up, her father James Nwoye Adichie was a professor of statistics at the University of Nigeria. Her mother Grace Ifeoma was the university’s first female registrar. The family lost almost everything during the Nigerian Civil War, including both maternal and paternal grandfathers. Her family’s ancestral village is in Abba in Anambra State.

In 2003, she completed a master’s degree in creative writing at Johns Hopkins University. In 2008, she received a Master of Arts degree in African studies from Yale University.