CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977. She is from Abba, in Anambra State, but grew up in the university town of Nsukka where she attended primary and secondary schools and briefly studied Medicine and Pharmacy. She then moved to the United States to attend college, graduating summa cum laude from Eastern Connecticut State with a major in Communication and a minor in Political Science. She holds a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins and a Masters degree in African Studies from Yale.

She is the author of the novels Purple Hibiscus and Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), and she has recently published a collection of short stories titled The Thing around Your Neck (2009). She has received numerous awards and distinctions, including the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (2007) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2008).

Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. It was also short-listed for the Orange Prize and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and long-listed for the Booker Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in Granta, Prospect, and The Iowa Review among other literary journals, and she received an O. Henry Prize in 2003. She was a 2005-2006 Hodder Fellow at Princeton, where she taught Introductory Fiction. She divides her time between the United States and Nigeria.

Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's novel Half of a Yellow Sun takes place in Nigeria during the Nigerian-Biafran War in 1967-1970. The effect of the war is shown through the dynamic relationships of five people’s lives ranging from high ranking political figures, a professor, a British citizen, and a houseboy. After the British left Nigeria and stopped ruling, conflicts arose over what government would rule over the land. The land split and the Nigeria-Biafra war started. The lives of the main characters (two sisters Olanna and Kainene) drastically changed and were torn apart by the war and decisions in their personal life.

Chimamanda Adichie: The danger of a single story at TED Talks

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding.

"And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story." "The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar."

"Of course, Africa is a continent full of catastrophes. There are immense ones, such as the horrific rapes in Congo. And depressing ones, such as the fact that 5,000 people apply for one job vacancy in Nigeria. But there are other stories that are not about catastrophe. And it is very important, it is just as important, to talk about them."

TEXT SOURCES AND FOR MORE INFORMATION
http://www.halfofayellowsun.com/

http://www.l3.ulg.ac.be/adichie/index.html

http://www.ted.com chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story.html

ELECHI AMADI'S CONCUBINE

Elechi Amadi was born into an Ikwerre family in Aluu near Port Harcourt, in the Delta region of Eastern Nigeria. He studied at the Government College in Umuahia, and like other major Nigerian writers, he was educated at the University College of Ibadan. Its legendary English department and the student magazine The Horn encouraged a number of aspiring writers, the likes of Nobel Laurette Wole Soyinka. Amadi, however, studied natural sciences receiving his B. Sc. in physics and mathematics in 1959.

Amadi's early novels, like Chinua Achebe's, are set in his traditional African setting. Amadi's first novel, The Concubine, was published in 1966, six years after Nigeria's independence. The story was set in the area near Port Harcourt. It starts out as a depiction of village life, its conflicts, ancient customs, and gods, but then it proceeds into mythological level. Ihuoma is the most desirable woman in Omigwe village and the tragic heroine, whose well-fed look does a great credit her husband. He dies, but she has won the heart of the hunter Ekwueme. They deny their love so that Ekwueme can marry another woman, to whom he has been betrothed since birth. At the end Amadi reveals that Ihuoma is actually the wife of the Sea-King, the ruling spirit of the sea, but she had assumed the human form.



The widely acclaimed work was followed by his other works such as The Great Ponds, depicting a war between two villages over fishing rights, and The Slave, in which the protagonist fights against his background, but after a brief career in freedom. Amadi's books form a historical trilogy about traditional life in the rural, pre-colonial Nigeria.

BOOKS PUBLISHED

• THE CONCUBINE, 1966
• THE GREAT PONDS, 1969
• translator: with Obiajunwo Wali and Greensille Enyinda: Okwukwo Eri, 1969 (hymnbook)
• translator: Okupkpe, 1969 (prayerbook)
• SUNSET BIAFRA: A CIVIL WAR DIARY, 1973 (essays)
• ISIBURU, 1973 (play)
• PEPPERSOUP, 1977 (play)
• PEPPERSOUP, AND THE ROAD TO IBADAN, 1977 (play)
• THE SLAVE, 1978
• DANCER OF JOHANNESBURG, 1979
• ETHICS IN NIGERIAN CULTURE, 1982 (essays)
• ESTRANGEMENT, 1986
• ELECHI AMADI AT 55: POEMS, SHORT STORIES, AND PAPERS, 1989 (ed. by W. Feuser and Ebele Eko)

MORE INFORMATION
Elechi Amadi Official Web Page

RAGEH OMAAR: A BEACON OF HOPE TO THE PEOPLE OF SOMALIA

Rageh Omaar is a product of Oxford with a quick brain, elegant diction and a self assuredness that can not be rattled

Rageh Omaar is a former BBC's Africa correspondent, whose sterling work during the Iraq war is reported to have made him a household name. Omaar was born in Somalia, and educated at Cheltenham Boy's School and Oxford University, where he gained a BA in Modern History. Omaar is married and has two children. He began his journalistic career as a trainee for the Voice newspaper, and in 1991 he moved to Ethiopia where he freelanced as a foreign correspondent, working mainly for the World Service. A year later, he returned to London to work as a producer and broadcast journalist for the BBC. He moved to South Africa after being appointed the BBC's Africa correspondent. Many of his broadcasts were syndicated across the U.S., where the Washington Post labelled him the 'Scud Stud'. Omaar is also a recipient of the British EMMA (Ethnic Multicultural Media Award) award for the Best Media Correspondent.

Omaar has never forgotten his Somali roots and is a strong advocate for the Somali community in Britain. Omaar's new book Only Half of Me, provides a personal glimpse into Omaars experiences as a Somali descedent living in Britain. Omaar relates not just to his East African roots (his parents have returned to northern Somalia) but to the experiences of Somali family members. Omaar's parents emigrated to Britain by choice however members of his extended family came to the Britain as refugees seeking assylum running away from the civil unrest in Somalia.

"... I did have close relatives who fled wars and who lived in Mogadishu during the US intervention, and went through that appalling experience, and who have been asylum-seekers. It's not something that even many of my colleagues in the BBC knew about. They just saw Rageh, a very privileged bloke. But it has been very important to the way I've approached the world and has made me who I am. It has perhaps given me a different perspective to many other colleagues who have not had relatives who have gone through the experiences we are reporting on every day." From the interview with 'The independent'

He is a source of inspiration to many Black and Asian people and feels that although things are changing significantly in the rise of people from ethnic minorities in the media there is still a long way to go.

It is time, he says, for news organisations to "fess up" and make clear that many of the pictures that comprise what are effectively "pooled reports" have been shot by anonymous Iraqi freelancers, whilst the Western journalists have remained inside the protected Green Zone in Baghdad. "If we as an industry don't grapple with the question of putting up a health warning then we will slowly but surely have some of the legitimacy sapped from us."

Omaar has no regrets after walking out on the BBC. In an interview with The Independent a British newspaper, Omaar perceives western news organisations are perpetrating a “fraud” on their viewers with their misleading coverage of the war in Iraq, the conflict in which he established himself as an internationally-recognised journalist. Omaar’s fear is that if atrocities and scandals in Iraq are later brought to light by Non-Governmental Organisations or other non-journalistic bodies, the public will feel betrayed by the journalist who should have been airing this issues in the first place.

On Al Jazeera Omaar believes that the reputation bestowed upon Al Jazeera is unfair because it has dared to "throw political and cultural hand-grenades" into an Arab world formerly used to the censored reports of state broadcasters. For example when the storm over the abuses of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib was at its height, Al Jazeera dared to point out that conditions in regular Arab jails were appalling too.

Omaar's asserts in his interview with 'The Independent' that his new stint with Al Jazeera will approach news-gathering from a different perspective,and will feature reports from Cuba, Iran and other countries whose film-makers he claims are invariably ignored by Western broadcasters.

Omaar claims Al Jazeera has no allegiances. "It won't be beholden to one sensibility...This is not an organisation that's going to have to watch its back in terms of what newspapers write about it. The worst has been said already." (The Independent Newspaper)

More Information on the interview with 'The Independent' Click Here