Celebrated Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has expressed how she felt after receiving backlash from Nigerians when she questioned Hillary Clinton for describing herself first as a wife in her Twitter bio.
Adichie who sat in a session with young Nigerians on Saturday said it made her sad to see her parents read all the negative comments that followed her conversation with Hillary Clinton.
She said, “Watching my mother, I felt close to tears,”
“When I got back to Lagos and there is just all of this noise and apparently it’s just all of ugliness, people said to me: ‘they are writing public letters to you. They said you are a demon; that you want to break up marriages, all kinds of things. I felt. Let me be honest, that is the first time I really started to rethink how I felt about Nigeria. I have never done that before. Until then, I had been a very dutiful daughter of Nigeria and I am still at that phase where I am thinking about how I really, really feel about Nigeria.”
“Quite frankly, the reason I asked that is that it was a political thing, particularly in the contest of Hilary Clinton a woman who had to change her name and take her husband’s name because people would not vote for her husband if she had kept her name. A woman that for many Americans they still need to see a woman in domestic terms before they can concede a little power to her politically. We don’t think that of men.”
