Nairobians and Chimamanda love affair blossoms with book launch

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie stands on the stage of the auditorium at the University of Nairobi, which is filled to the rafters. She is welcomed with a minute-long standing ovation.

I’ve attended many literary events in Nairobi, but I have never experienced anything like this. Such a huge audience, such enthusiasm for a writer, I am completely overwhelmed. But Chimamanda is a star.

She is a phenomenon both on the African continent and beyond. She became famous with her debut Purple Hibiscus, and Half of a Yellow Sun, the book which got Nigerian parents and children talking for the first time about the horrors and trauma of the Biafran war.

Now she was in Kenya to launch the East African edition of her latest book, Americanah, an event that coincides with the celebration of Kwani? at 10.
Americanah tells the story of Ifemelu, a young Nigerian woman who’s lived in America for years.

She has built a career as a successful writer and recently decided to return to her homeland.

Ifemelu writes a blog about race, because in America she experiences the role that race plays in every aspect of daily life.

Every day she finds herself confronted with a multitude of perspectives, opinions, codes of conduct and historically developed patterns that seem to determine how people relate to each other; white Americans, African Americans, African immigrants in America, American Africans, each group has its own traditions, prejudices, assumptions, way of thinking, good and bad intentions that each in their own carry an aspect of racial consciousness.

Americanah is not only a story about immigration and race, it is about a young woman who grew up in a middle class family and is trying to find her way in life.

It is a love story. It is a coming of age novel. It is a story about choices. It is a book about people who are made of flesh and blood, people who fall in love, get married and have children and live their lives in the big cities of the 21st century.

ABOUT HAIR, AFRICAN HAIR

And it is also a book about hair, African hair.
“I really wanted to write a book about love, race and hair,” says Chimamanda. “In Nairobi, one of the things that struck me is how many women wear their hair natural. Not to make a statement, not because they are counter cultural, but just because that’s just what they do.

And I love that about Nairobi. But in Nigeria the idea is that our hair is a problem, something to deal with, to do something about.”

Chimamanda starts to tell one of her great stories about how she treated her hair as a problem which had to be dealt with for years and years.

The story is like a foray into the process of self-discovery for a young woman; from weekly Sunday sessions with mom and a red hot comb through self-applied relaxer, a burned scalp, sores and scabs, to braids with extensions.

“I did anything and everything with my hair as long as it rippled and I could shake it back because that was my definition of beauty.

But after all those years of treatments and the feeling that I always had to do something with my hair, something changed in me.

Maybe it was because I had left Nigeria and in that foreign country I saw things with more distance, and I developed a clearer look at certain things.

But I came to a point where I thought, why am I doing this?

We think about where our sense of what is beautiful comes from, and we start to realise that it’s the idea of femaleness with long straight hair.

If it’s going to be wavy or curly it has to be a certain kind of wavy. As long as it is not kinky. But the point is, the way my hair grows from my head cannot do that.

Also for me, the way my hair grows from my head should not be expected to do that, because it does not. And I no longer expect it to and I no longer want it to.”

THE BIGGER STORY

While Chimamanda speaks about hair, she is telling us a much bigger story.

A story everybody in the audience can relate to, because it is a story about self-definition, it is a story about trying to figure out how you want to see yourself in the world and about how the world sees you.

And it is not told by just anybody, it is told from the perspective of an African woman.

After the session is closed the crowd gathers outside in a very long queue to get an autograph from Chimamanda.

I see that Nairobi loves Chimamanda, and not because she is cool, smart, witty and good looking and wearing killer heels (which is all true), but because she is one of the most wonderful writers of our time and just like readers all over the world, Kenyan readers relate to her stories.

Because her stories are human, and loving, and honest; she does not shy away from difficult realities, from troubled histories, nor from painful and shameful aspects of human relations, she writes about the world we live in.

And we want to read about that world. And about the people living in it.

Her protagonists are people to love and to like, people you would want to be friends with; people who may remind you of your own father or mother or your friends.

READING CULTURE

They are people you can look up to, they are people like us. People like you.

So thank you Kwani? for bringing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to Nairobi.

Thank you for proving that Kenya has a reading culture. We just need many many more writers like Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie .

And therefore I am very much looking forward to reading Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor’s new novel Dust, which was launched that same day.

I was told that Dust is a great novel - a must read. That it might have the same impact on Kenya as Half of a Yellow Sun had.