When Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie spoke at the convocation of Wellesley College in 2015, She talked about her most passionate theme – femininity. She recounted the reason she started wearing make-up, “I wasn’t very interested in makeup until I was in my twenties, which is when I began to wear makeup. Because of a man. A loud, unpleasant man. He was one of the guests at a friend’s dinner party. I was also a guest. I was about 23, but people often told me I looked 12. The conversation at dinner was about traditional Igbo culture, about the custom that allows only men to break the kola nut, and the kola nut is a deeply symbolic part of Igbo cosmology. I argued that it would be better if that honor were based on achievement rather than gender, and he looked at me and said, dismissively, ‘You don’t know what you are talking about, you’re a small girl.’ I wanted him to disagree with the substance of my argument, but by looking at me, young and female, it was easy for him to dismiss what I said. So, I decided to try to look older. So, I thought lipstick might help.” After reading Chimamanda’s above narrative recently, it became obvious to me that she would one day become a Nobel Prize Winner in Literature, continuing a winning streak that has given her latest accolade as Winner of Winners.

The Women’s Prize for Fiction ‘Winner of Winners’ is for her bestselling novel Half of a Yellow Sun. The Winner of Winners prize was awarded to celebrate 25 years of the Women’s Prize for Fiction which was formerly known as the Orange Prize. The winner was chosen through a public vote that involved selecting the best book from the 25 winners in the prize’s history. The Women’s Prize for Fiction is a United Kingdom prize that recognizes the year’s best novel written by a woman in English. From her debut book Purple Hibiscus that won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize to her 2013 novel Americanah that won the National Book Critics Circle Award, Chimamanda continues to blaze the trail and put Nigeria in the most positives of lights. In a time of dark dictatorial rule that is masked in a pseudo-democratic government where corruption, extra-judicial killings by the police, abuse of the rule of law, and media suppression is the norm, she is a light that is becoming a lighthouse. Chimamanda was just 29 years when she won the Women’s prize for her second novel in 2007. That year’s contest pitched her work against Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss and Anne Tyler’s Digging to America. The chairman of the judging committee in 2007, Muriel Gray, remarked that Half of a Yellow Sun is “astonishing, not just in the skillful subject matter, but in the brilliance of its accessibility”.

Kate Mosse, who founded the Women’s Prize in 1995 after the judges of the 1991 Booker failed to include any woman author on their shortlist, said she was “thrilled” that Adichie had won an award that was intended to show that “great books live beyond their time”. She continued that Adichie’s novel tackles colonialism, ethnic allegiances, class, race, and female empowerment. “But it’s beautifully told because you’re there rooting for characters, and in the end, that’s what history is. It’s about the real people who stood on that spot.” This attribute of Chimamanda to speak up for women, men, Nigerians, African Americans, and other disadvantaged groups wherever she has found herself in her words and works, would most likely be the most important factor that will single her out for the Nobel Prize. This is more so because our giftings are not gifted to us for personal consumption only. Our talents are innately given to teleport us into a platform where we can use our voice to speak for the voiceless. And for causes that would ordinarily be ignored by the mainstream media. So, as we celebrate Chimamanda, know that you have a talent that is waiting to be discovered, developed, and deployed to help humanity. In her Wellesley College speech, she also said, “I already knew that the world does not extend to women the many small courtesies that it extends to men. I also knew that victimhood is not a virtue.” In Nigeria today, or wherever you are, it is easy to find an excuse for not becoming who you should be, that you are reading this means you can read and access the internet – one of the most uncelebrated twin assets. Use this asset to access the unlimited talent building contents on the internet and setup yourself for greatness like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Ata Ukuta, Editor – www.towncryyers.com