Johanna Thomas-Corr, The Sunday Times

The Nigerian author’s long-awaited book, her first since Americanah, is a magnificent achievement — a big, noisy tale full of wit and compassion

Cast your mind back a decade or so ago and you may remember a brief vogue for big-name novelists delivering rallying cries for a more tolerant world.

George Saunders shared all the ways he wished he had been kinder; Zadie Smith spoke up for human relations; Ian McEwan extolled free speech.

Some of these addresses at American universities went viral. But the one that really caught fire was a 2012 TEDx talk titled We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, later published as an essay-length book.

The Nigerian writer, then 34, delivered an argument for gender equality that bristled with wit and dissatisfaction.

“Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice,” she said. “I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change.”

Beyoncé sampled the speech for her single Flawless and suddenly this acclaimed author of two novels — Purple Hibiscus (2003) and the prizewinning Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) — was a global icon, the novelist who had conquered pop culture.

That all seems a long time ago, doesn’t it? Since then we’ve cycled through culture wars, Donald Trump, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Covid, the woke reformation and a vengeful counter-reformation.

Adichie has had it from pretty much all sides. In 2017, after she drew a distinction between the experiences of trans women and biological women, she claimed to have had interviews, prizes and talks cancelled.

Fiction now appears to be the safer place for an author to embed and humanise their politics, especially if they don’t conform to any one ideological tribe.

Dream Count, Adichie’s first novel since her bestselling Americanah in 2013, is a scintillating account of the trials of four African women living on both sides of the Atlantic who are connected by blood, friendship and employment.

In some ways it’s like a novelised version of We Should All Be Feminists, in that it reads as a compendium of every hardship women and girls can endure: agonising menstruation, genital mutilation, lonely childbirth and sexual assault.

Most of all it depicts in vivid — and often entertaining — detail the pressures on women to marry and have children with men who are feckless, foolish, arrogant, deceitful, egotistical, cowardly and violent, or a combination of these traits.

But it’s testament to Adichie’s gifts that it is no grim misandrist slog but a comedy of manners with an irresistible vitality.

The first section is narrated by Chiamaka, or Chia, a dreamy Nigerian travel writer whose wealthy Igbo family pays for her pampered lifestyle in Maryland. Isolated in lockdown, she wonders, “Have I made the most of life?”

Expensive handbags and first-class travel have not protected her from boyfriends who have paid her too little respect. We’re treated to a roll call of men with fragile egos, the funniest being the most pretentious.

There’s the left-wing art historian Darnell, “the Denzel Washington of academia”, who “didn’t feel any emotion but could talk about the semiotics of emotion”.

Then there’s the shy English writer whom Chia meets on a Jan Morris fan site, who wears a battered leather jacket and talks nostalgically about crumpets, but turns out to be married.

It’s the sharpest portrait of the low-energy literary English male I’ve encountered.

The second section shifts focus to Chia’s best friend, Zikora, a highly strung lawyer and practising Catholic who moved from Nigeria to Washington and has been dreaming of marriage and motherhood.

By 31 she feels like a victim of “biology’s hysterical constraints” — especially when Kwame, the most attentive boyfriend she has had, abruptly flees on hearing she is pregnant, leaving her to deal with the consequences alone.

During childbirth the medics’ conversation with Zikora’s cold, stoical mother makes her feel like “a threadbare wrung-out rag, a thing without feeling, easy to ignore and discard”.

The book becomes more sombre as we approach the story of Chia’s housekeeper, Kadiatou, a quietly dignified single mother from Guinea, who “dreamed only of achievable things”. Kadi has lost her sister to female genital mutilation, been abandoned by her first love, watched her first child die and suffered sexual assault — all before she sets foot in America, where she is ambushed by more horrors.

In her part-time job as a hotel cleaner, Kadi is raped by a French economist who is running for president of France. After the man violently forces her to have oral sex, Kadi feels “her mouth was full of worms … she was spitting and spitting.

She was spitting on the opulent floor that was her job to clean, but she could not help herself.” I’ve read a number of powerful scenes of sexual assault in fiction but none, until now, that have made me cry tears of rage.

The story is inspired by the allegations of Nafissatou Diallo, the hotel maid from Guinea who said in 2011 that Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF chief, had attempted to rape her.

The case collapsed after Diallo was accused of lying in court about something in her past. Adichie explains in her author’s note that she wanted to “‘write’ a wrong” by creating a fictional version of Diallo as “a gesture of returned dignity”.

The result is a deeply poignant description of the aftermath, full of human details. When the sexual health nurse arrives to take Kadi’s hotel uniform it feels “like a loss, a failure” to this hard-working woman. She fears she has “caused too much trouble”.

But it’s no less complicated in Nigeria, where Chia’s self-possessed cousin Omelogor has flourished as a banker in Abuja, laundering money for corrupt politicians.

Omelogor flees “the putrid centre of Nigerian finance”, seeking “restoration” at an American graduate school, where she hopes to write a PhD about pornography.

But America makes her furious, especially the “pious class” of liberals she encounters in academia — one of whom accuses her of Islamophobia when she tells the story of how her uncle was murdered by militants.

Omelogor is a fascinating character, full of contradictions. She’s at once monstrously arrogant and entitled, embedding herself within a privileged social set who all bitch about their domestic help.

But she is meanwhile secretly redistributing the money she has laundered to poor women hoping to start small businesses, via a fund she names “Robyn Hood”.

Dream Count is a big, noisy novel that covers a lot of issues, from cancel culture in US universities to intra-black tensions between Africans and African-Americans.

It’s also extremely funny, especially in the Chia and Omelogor sections, both narrated with delicious irony in the first person (Zikora and Kadi’s stories are more straightforward third-person narratives).

And yet it’s propelled by a deep anger about the state of the world for women. Indeed, the novel seems to be addressing the question that Adichie posed in a 2021 podcast: “Why do women have such a f***ing hard time?”

According to Zikora’s proud mother, it’s because pain belongs to the female sex. “Bear it,” she tells her daughter in childbirth. “That is what it means to be a woman.”

At times, Dream Count reads like a feminist War and Peace. It is an account of the war waged against women — by society, yes, but also by their own bodies.

As Adichie said in her 2012 talk: “Women have turned pretence into an art form”. It can be heavy going, but it is a novel that men should read for precisely the reason that Omelogor points out: “Loving women doesn’t mean knowing women.”

Suffused with truth, wit and compassion, this is a magnificent novel that understands the messiness of human motivation and is courageous enough to ask difficult questions. It made me feel frustrated about the world but very good about the state of fiction.

Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (4th Estate £20 pp416). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.

Culled from The Sunday Times

By Olusegun Adeniyi

Today in Abuja, ‘A Journey of Service: An Autobiography’, by General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida, will be publicly presented. With the book coming 32 years after Babangida ‘stepped aside’ in August 1993, it means that more than 70 percent of Nigerians were not witnesses to the events in the narratives, given our young demographics. Like everything Babangida, as I wrote last August, after the publishers sent me a digital copy (planned pages) of the book while requesting for a blurb, “opinions are bound to be divided about his (Babangida’s) interpretations of some epochal events which discerning readers could argue leave more questions than answers.”

Divided into five parts and 13 chapters, the foreword by General Yakubu Gowon highlights why Babangida’s book is important. “Given the monumental and historical changes that General Babangida presided over, it is only natural that many Nigerians of different generations would be eager to learn first-hand the motivations…and the reasons behind these far-reaching decisions, and events, some of which shook the nation to its very foundation,” Gowon wrote. But the question remains: Will readers be satisfied with the explanations provided by Babangida for some of these ‘far-reaching decisions’? Perhaps the more pertinent question is: Why is Babangida publishing his memoirs now after admittedly rebuffing earlier entreaties from friends, associates and family members to ‘tell his story’? He provides an answer in the prologue. “We live in a country where primarily uninformed commentators are often the final judges of events (that) they know nothing about,” Babangida wrote. “But because I had the honour to lead a chapter in our national journey, my brief encounter with authority and responsibility may interest those with fair minds.”

The account of Babangida’s early years is quite fascinating as he weaves post-colonial political developments with historical and cultural events that shaped his growing up in what is now Niger State. He also explained why he had to change his surname from Badamosi to Babangida in January 1964 because almost everyone he encountered assumed him to be a Yoruba man! But none more revealing is the account of his life at Bida Provincial Secondary School where his classmates included Abdulsalami Abubakar, Sani Bello, Mohammed Mamman Magoro, Garba Duba, Sani Sami, Mohammed Gado Nasko and Mamman Jiya Vatsa—men who, like him, later joined the military and, at different times, held critical positions in Nigeria.

Interestingly, last Tuesday marked the 49th anniversary of the assassination of General Murtala Muhammed in the coup led by Lt Colonel Sukar Bukar Dimka. Drafted by General T.Y. Danjuma to foil Dimka’s coup, Babangida provides revealing insights on the conversation with Dimka, a friend and one of the groomsmen at his wedding (to the late Maryam) in 1969. Not only was Babangida listed among those to be killed that day but was in fact one of the reasons for the coup. Dimka reportedly told Babangida that he was a most hated military officer for being too favoured by their superiors, especially Danjuma. “How could you be a member of the Supreme Military Council?”, Babangida recounted Dimka asking him in those tense moments inside Radio Nigeria premises in Ikoyi, Lagos. But beyond the narrative of the coup, how it was foiled and the subsequent trial of culprits, Babangida also shared insights on how Danjuma (whom most officers preferred) insisted that Obasanjo, rather than him (Danjuma), should be Head of State in the meeting held to replace the assassinated Muhammed.

As an officer during the coup that toppled the First Republic, the countercoup that brought in General Gowon, the civil war that followed and the subsequent coups in which he was a direct participant, Babangida’s accounts of that era are quite profound. For instance, it was Danjuma who proposed the elevation of the late Shehu Musa Yar’Adua from the rank of Lt Colonel to Brigadier General (later, Major General) to become the Chief of Staff, Supreme Headquarters, apparently for ethno-religious balancing in the country. This speaks to the character of Danjuma who chose to be the number three man in Nigeria when he could easily have been number one. Meanwhile, six months earlier, following the overthrow of Gowon, when senior officers canvassed that Muhammed should head a collegiate leadership of himself, Obasanjo and Danjuma, he (Muhammed) rejected the idea at a meeting Babangida said lasted several hours, insisting that as Head of State, he (Muhammed) would not share power with anyone.

Expectedly, Babangida’s book details his rise to power in 1985 as a military president and the reform programmes initiated while in office. But the most consequential chapters are ‘The Challenges of Leadership’ and ‘Transition to Civil Rule and the June 12 Saga’. The issues addressed in the first (chapter ten) include the death of Dele Giwa, a personal friend with whom he spoke often on phone and met a few times; the Gideon Orkar coup that tried to divide the country; the OIC Palaver; the 1989 SAP (Structural Adjustment Programme) riots, the Nigeria Airforce C-130 plane crash involving 151 mid-career military officers and what he described as “a deep personal sense of betrayal”—the coup involving his friend, Mamman Vatsa whose execution he sanctioned.

Readers should find out his take on Dele Giwa’s assassination and other issues but on Vatsa, Babangida painted a picture of close friendship that started from childhood and how at some point in their lives they both shared a room. “We would reach out for whatever shirt was available, irrespective of whose it was, and just wear it and head out! We were that close,” Babangida wrote while explaining how he found out later that Vatsa was always jealous of his achievements. He also explained the encounters he had with Vatsa when there were rumours about the plot and the mediatory roles played by others before the coup unravelled. “Being intermediate and senior officers, they were fully aware of the consequences of planning a coup and failing,” Babangida wrote to explain why Vatsa had to die by firing squad. “That is one of the most elementary lessons every military officer knows by heart.”

Perhaps the account most Nigerians have been waiting for is that on June 12 and Babangida renders it in chapter 12. The central character in the narrative is General Sani Abacha. In fact, according to Babangida, Abacha annulled the June 12 (1993) presidential election! I leave readers to find out the details and reach their own conclusions.

From cover to cover, each page of Babangida’s memoir promised more and more insight into the military and the Nigerian state. He also highlights some of his foreign interventions, including initiating ECOMOG which helped to end the war in Liberia and Sierra Leone. And he sheds light on several domestic issues regarding his administration—convincingly in some, not so in others. He also lays the boot into a number of key players of that era, in a few cases, with innuendoes. But in a way, Babangida also knows that in the eyes of most Nigerians of a certain generation, his stewardship will forever be defined by ‘June 12’ on which he expressed regrets. “If I have to do it all over again,” he wrote, “I’d do it differently.” Sadly, in statecraft, rarely do leaders get a second chance to make a first impression.

Meanwhile, I wrote four books on that elastic transition to civil rule programme which ended with the death of Abacha. The first, ‘Fortress on Quicksand’ was on the futile efforts by 23 presidential aspirants in the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and National Republican Convention (NRC) before they were all disqualified and banned from contesting elections. The second, ‘POLITRICKS: National Assembly under Military Dictatorship’, detailed the intrigues of having a civilian legislature with Babangida as a military president. The third, ‘Abiola’s Travails’ was published to mark his (Abiola’s) 60th birthday at a period he was in detention. ‘The Last 100 Days of Abacha’ completed the series. I have combined (and edited) them into one book that will be released in June this year.

Writing a memoir—especially by those who have held leadership positions at the highest political levels—involves walking back through countless challenges and tough decisions. With his memoir, Babangida has shown proof of a retirement spent reflecting on a nation that gave him everything; and to which he gave his best, notwithstanding the ironies of history. Regardless of how some readers may perceive Babangida, his ‘Journey of Service’ provides historical context to some of the issues that dogged the administration he led. His recollections may not provide all the answers, and there are aspects many will dispute, but at least he has reopened the conversation about a troubled and troublesome era in Nigerian history.