Nigerian
writer Chimamanda Adichie was asked during an interview in France if
there were any bookshops in her country — and her clapback was epic.
“I think it reflects very poorly on French people that you have to ask me that question,” she responded.
The
audience erupted in applause as the incredulous “Americanah,” author
added: “I think surely… I mean it’s 2018,” she said in the video of
the event posted by French news channel Loopsider.
Adichie was the star guest
at a global ideas event hosted by the French government called “La Nuit
Des Idees” (A Night of Ideas).
Midway through the chat, she was asked if her books are read in Nigeria.
“You’ll
be shocked to know that they are, yes… They are read and studied, not
just in Nigeria but across the continent of Africa,” she said.
The
interviewer then followed up by asking if there were bookshops in the
country. The audience gasped and the visibly embarrassed journalist
tried to back up, explaining that “not much is said about Nigeria in
France.”
“We speak very little
about Nigeria in France, certainly not enough, and when we do it’s about
Boko Haram and the problems of violence and security,” the interviewer
said. “I would like to take advantage of your presence for us to talk
about other things and things that we don’t know about your country.”
Many
Nigerians on social media mistakenly thought the interviewer was asking
if there were libraries in the country because of the use of the French
word “librairie,” which means bookstore.
Another posted that the interviewer made a “lazy and prejudiced insinuation.”
One French commentator said
the line of questioning was a “cocktail of racism and mediocrity” that
was typical of French journalism.
Adichie later posted a response on her Facebook page
defending the journalist Caroline Broue as “Intelligent, thoughtful and
well prepared,” during their wide-ranging conversation at the Quai
d’Orsay in Paris.
She added that
she was taken aback when the question was asked as it was “far below the
intellectual register of her previous questions.”
“I
know now that she was trying to be ironic… it was a genuine, if flat,
attempt at irony and I wish she would not be publicly pilloried,”
Adichie said.
The novelist also
wrote in the same post: “To be asked to ‘tell French people that you
have bookshops in Nigeria because they don’t know’ is to cater to a
wilfully retrograde idea – that Africa is so apart, so pathologically
‘different,’ that a non-African cannot make reasonable assumptions about
life there.”
Ahead of the event,
the novelist had posted a picture of her meeting first lady Brigitte
Macron in Paris on the steps of the Elysee Palace, the official
residence of the French president.