“The scribbling latent in her took a waltz”

Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani has taken some flak for her editorial last month in the New York Times, in which she argues that it might have been just as well that Ngugi wa Thiong’o didn’t win the Nobel Prize for literature—at least not yet.

The result, she said, might have been a crowd of Ngugi imitators to join the Achebe imitators already at work, and that would not bode well for the lighter and funnier African fiction that she herself enjoys, and to which she contributed with her novel I Do Not Come to You by Chance.

Though generous in his praise of her novel, ChieloZona Eze joins the chorus of those who have criticized Nwaubani’s opinions. He takes issue with her reference to Achebe and Ngugi’s “earnest and sober style,” claiming she fails to recognize the humor in their work. (The humor is there, but it is not usually one of the main features, and in Ngugi’s case it is often harsh and satirical.) He also quotes from an interview in Nigeria’s Daily Sun, in which Nwaubani reportedly says, “The impression I get when people talk about feminism is when a woman wants to be like a man, and I am not interested in that at all.”

Professor Eze is perhaps right to say that Nwaubani has a mistaken conception of what feminism is, but I think he goes too far in accusing her of being ignorant of the work of a long list of women authors whose concerns could be defined as feminist. And what she actually says is that she objects to the way that certain people define feminism—which is certainly reasonable.

There is room, too, for some doubt as to what she actually said. Take a moment to read the Daily Sun interview, whose freewheeling prose is unintentionally hilarious. “Svelte with a chic flair, her bulging, foxy eyes can easily browbeat. But it is the beat of her creative enterprise that won’t abet echoes of triumph.”