Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a multi-award winning Nigerian writer has honored her mentor, Prof. Wole Soyinka as her ‘guiding light’.
Chimamanda through her Instagram feed poetically shared poured her heart out in praise of the 1986 Nobel Prize winner in Literature.
“You are, for me, a guiding light:
Your courage. The ease with which you inhabit your skin, speaking your mind, unburdened by apology.
Your kindness and humour.
Your utter coolness.
The urgent, terse poetry of The Man Died, the exuberance of Ake; your faith in possibility, in adventure, in progress.
Yes indeed, ‘the mindless ones are neither the total sum nor the true face of humanity.’
Thank you, Prof.”
Chimamanda is best known for her best-selling novels include Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah.
Her nonfiction works, We Should All Be Feminists and Dear Ijeawele: A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions.
According to Quartz Africa, Chimamanda is one of the very few African writers whose literature has been translated into Chinese. “By far the hottest African writer among Chinese fans today is Nigeria’s Adichie,” says Bruce Humes, an American linguist and Chinese literary translator.
She joins the likes of the likes of Nigerian authors Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee, and the sole Lusophone writer with at least three novels now in Chinese, Mia Couto of Mozambique.
Wole Soyinka, is an esteemed Nigerian playwright, novelist, essayist, critic, poet, and professor. He was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, the first African to be honoured in that category.
His works include A Dance of the Forests, Death and the King’s Horseman, The Lion and the Jewel, The Trials of Brother Jero, The Swamp Dwellers among many other essays celebrating the African culture.
