• Celebrated author, Chimamanda Adichie, laments bizarre happenings
From Jude Chinedu, Enugu
The grand finale of the Things Fall Apart Festival held on July 5, 2025, with a keynote that shook many. It was not just a literary event, but also a reckoning, a cultural confrontation delivered in the piercing voice of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, one of Igboland’s fearless daughters.
The International Conference Centre, Enugu, Enugu State, where the closing event took place, was filled with hundreds of guests who had followed the weeklong festival with interest. But when Adichie mounted the podium, what followed was more than a keynote, it was an unflinching appeal for introspection:
“Things Fall Apart demonstrates the central Igbo values. Okonkwo accidentally murders a member of his community. It is truly an accident. His gun goes off during a feast. Yet his community punishes him severely. He was banished for years. Imagine the severity of the punishment in Igbo culture. Igbo culture abhors taking someone’s life.”
Her voice sharpened as she turned to the present: “And yet today we hear of people being murdered for ritual practices. It is worthy to note that the victims of this recent upsurge are mostly women. It is not just infuriating but mentally disorienting to even contemplate that in the 21st Century Igboland, women are considered expendable in these acts of rituals.”
She repeated the thought, this time with a deeper sting: “Igbo culture abhors the taking of innocent lives. But today we hear grotesquely inhumane stories of people murdered in ritual practices for money. And it is important to note that the victims of this recent upsurge of barbarism are almost women. It is not just infuriating but mentally disorienting to even contemplate that in 21st century Igboland, women are considered expendable ingredients in the blighted acts of evil rituals.”
Adichie, known for her clarity and candour, reminded the audience that women have always played central roles in Igbo history and identity: “Igbo women who historically have been strong, have been valued. Igbo women like the Omu whose boat led expedition in the pre-colonial times.
Igbo women like the female king in Enugu Ezike.
“Igbo women who participated in the Aba women rebellion in 1929. Igbo women who through centuries have traded and shown initiative, and now we are reducing women to victims of money rituals. Ndi Igbo, what is happening to us? When did this rain start to beat us?”
The audience sat in uneasy silence. You could hear a pin drop. She went on to confront an even more unsettling trend, the rise of violence within the Igbo themselves: “When we hear of Igbo people randomly murdering fellow Igbo people, the instinct is disbelief. Are these stories true? They cannot be true. But they are true. How can they be true, how can they be happening among the great early civilizations in West Africa?”
Adichie then turned to history to remind the people of who they are: “How can these be happening to people traditionally known for greatness and for achievement and for hard work? How can these happen to Igbo people who have long been known for their interesting dualism at the centre of their culture, one of individualism on one hand and the other a communal ethic?”
Her message was also about identity and language: “Today we are overseeing our own decline. There is of course the smaller desecration that we have brought on ourselves in the past 30 to 40 years. One of which is the Igbo language.
“We do not have thriving Igbo literature. We cannot seem to reach a consensus on a classical form of written Igbo. And many of us are proud to say that our children do not speak Igbo.”
She stated that it was the result of the “lack of value for what is ours. We do not value what is ours. And this lack of value is also reflected even in the contemporary Igbo practice of giving strange names to our children. Names we like, not because of their beautiful or deep meanings but because they can be easily shortened to sound western.
Kasi, Zara, Jida—answering names without meaning.”
She acknowledged the political marginalisation of the Igbo in Nigeria’s history but insisted that internal reforms must precede external demands: “I think any honest assessment of Nigeria history since 1970 will acknowledge the political marginalisation that the Igbo people have suffered. But it is time to suspend the subject of marginalisation until we have cleaned in-house.
“We are giving those who want to marginalise us reasons to justify that marginalisation. We must first clean the house.
“Part of that house cleaning must involve a concerted return to unity. We must unite. Unity is not the absence of difference.
Unity does not mean that we all agree on everything. Unity means for us to come together for a greater goal despite our differences. Unity is a beautiful act of shared will. It is an act of intelligence. Unity comes from the ability to think lucidly.”
She gave a scenario that drew scattered murmurs of agreement from the crowd: “If all of the governors of the Igbo-speaking states, and all of the senators from the Igbo states, decided to come together in unity and put away party affiliations, it would confer on Igbo land great bargaining power for policies that will benefit all of Igbo land.”
Adichie tackled the confusion that now surrounds Igbo identity: “The contemporary distinctions we often make today about Igbo identity, they’re not cultural identities, they’re political identities. There’s a difference between a cultural identity and a political identity.
“When we say somebody is Delta Igbo, it is a political identity, it is not a cultural identity. Igbo-speaking peoples are one nation, one language with different dialects. All languages have dialects. A dialect is not a language.
“Political identities are acts of political expediency. They’re transient, fleeting and hollow at the core. But cultural identities come from shared language, shared traditions, shared ideals. All Igbo peoples, nobody is more Igbo than another.”
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