From a UK Times interview with Orange prize (fiction) winner, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:
Perhaps because she is young, beautiful and internationally successful, [Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie] has almost a paradoxical relish in hailing from a global underdog: “When you come from Nigeria, which doesn’t have very much power, you can better examine the dynamics of raw power.”
Something she does not relish, however, is the overriding view of Africa as a doomed basket case: “There is a famous saying, ‘Africa is my brother, but he is my junior brother’, which comes from a 19th-century missionary in the Congo. It really sums up the way that people look at Africa today.
. . . Nobody helps Africa by adopting its children. We need to talk about structural things like loans and trade. I just wish I wasn’t from a continent about which everyone has to feel sorry.”
Adichie is indignant about the type of news coverage that Africa usually ends up with: “On TV you never see Africans involved in helping Africa. It’s always some kind westerner. If I got my information only from American TV, I would think Africans were a bunch of stupid idiots.”
Her novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, tells the story of two sisters living through a Nigerian civil war. (via Books, Inq.)