Post by archaeologist on Oct 1, 2024 8:08:49 GMT -5
Sometimes journalists can ask rather stupid questions as the French journalist who asked Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie if there are bookshops in Nigeria.
Interviewer asks Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'Are there bookshops in Nigeria?'
Half of a Yellow Sun novelist tells French journalist that the question caters to a ‘wilfully retrograde idea’ of African difference
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has hit out at a “deliberate, entitled, tiresome, sweeping, base ignorance about Africa” after she was asked by a French interviewer if there were bookshops in Nigeria.
The prize-winning Nigerian novelist was invited by France’s foreign ministry to appear as guest of honour at the Institut Francais’s cultural event La Nuit des Idées. Interviewed by the French journalist Caroline Broué, Adichie was asked if there were bookshops in Nigeria. -- In a video of the event, Adichie is shown reacting calmly to the question. “You know I think it reflects very poorly on French people that you’ve had to ask me that question. I really do. Because I think, surely it’s 2018. I mean, come on. My books are read in Nigeria. They’re studied in schools, not just in Nigeria but across Africa and it means a lot to me,” says the author. “Because obviously I’m very grateful to be read everywhere in the world but there’s something about being read by the people about whom you write.”