HOW NIGERIA BROKE MY HEART

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie won international fame with her novel Half of a Yellow Sun and now lives half the time in Maryland – “in a big American house in a very nice, bland neighbourhood”. But she remains deeply attached to her native Nigeria, to which she returns each year. “Nigeria is mine,” she told Jessamy Calkin in The Daily Telegraph. “I don’t question my belonging. But it’s complex. The minute I land, I think, ‘This airport is rubbish!’ And that starts my complaints.” She knows Nigerians don’t like her politics – they “just want you to shut up and write”, as a friend put it, not talk about feminism and gay rights. And Adichie, 41, knows the unruly reputation Nigerians have within Africa. She becomes a different person when she’s there: “You arrive in Lagos and put on a coat of swagger.” But she still loves going back “because I am home. I get Nigeria, I get it.” Yet her faith in her country was severely tested when her 83-year-old father – a former professor at the University of Nigeria – was kidnapped. “Tell your daughter Chimamanda to get the money,” the kidnappers had instructed her mother. Three days later, after her brother had dropped off a large bag of cash in a forest, her father was released. “He had given his everything – he got his PHD in the US and had job offers there, but he was keen to come back to Nigeria, [where he] spent his life teaching. I felt that Nigeria had failed him. For a man of his age to be thrown into the boot of a car… that incident broke my heart.”