Speaker

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a writer born in Enugu, Nigeria. As she states in the TED talk, she comes from a middle-class Nigerian family: “I come from a conventional (…) family. My father was a professor. My mother was an administrator” (ll. 26-27). She claims that she started reading at the age of four, and she began to write at the age of seven (ll. 3-5).

When she was 19, Adichie moved to the United States to study communication and political science. In her speech, she comes across as highly educated, as she mentions her academic background and references numerous writers from different cultures and eras.

Adichie states that she never thought about herself as an African before leaving Nigeria (l. 46). Adichie’s experience with racism in America and her struggle with the racial identity people assigned to her served as an inspiration for her third novel, A...