Maverick Citizen: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Men should be made to read women’s stories

The writer was making a case for the power of storytelling to change the world. Her lecture, entitled “The Idolatry of Theory: A Defence of Storytelling”, started with a story from her own life. She said a woman had once told her and a few others that she often found that women were their own worst enemies.

“To unleash this potential, to make room for humanity to grow in new ways, we need to welcome different ideas and opinions, to listen to them, examine them and respond to them intelligently. It does not mean we have to agree with them,” said Phakeng, possibly referring to an earlier call by the university’s student representative council asking the VC not to host Ngozi Adichie as an act of solidarity with the university’s trans community, a request that was denied.

Ngozi Adichie had, until that point, been considered a vocal advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights. During this week’s lecture she restated her political belief in trans rights, specifically trans health rights, as well as her conviction that inclusivity and equal rights for all people were premised on difference.

“It felt to me as though the past was not yet the past or that there was a concerted and collective resolve to turn away from this truth. South Africans of all races spoke to me of what they called the rainbow nation. I did not trust this optimism, well choreographed as it was.

The writer, whose literary fiction has been translated into 30 languages, said that “we must deal with the world as it is, rather than as we wish it were”, because that was the only way to make real change. Only storytelling “in all of its glorious and complicated messiness” could enable us to do that.

“How we relate to people who are different from us, people who we might never get to see, who we might never have a personal interaction with, is very much shaped by the stories we consume of those people, how they are portrayed in media, and it seems to me that because we are unfamiliar with the stories of one another, we are then unfamiliar with one another.”

Be made!!!

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