Chimamanda Adichie’s story of dad’s kidnap – New York Times

Posted by admin Headlines Thursday, June 11th, 2015

I would like to think everyone, well at least nearly everyone who is literate, knows of the name Chimamanda. Not just because it is a beautifully long African (Igbo) name – the sort that makes you wonder (and cringe) at those of us who still cling on to, or worse, give to their children in this day and age, foreign names —, we know of the name more importantly because of she who has held the name aloft to the world – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

Chimamanda (you may shorten it to “Chi” or “Chima” or even “Manda” if laziness makes it too long for you) is arguably Nigeria’s brightest star of her generation in the global literary firmament today. Going 38, she is renowned by her bold, creative, and masterful literary works as represented in short stories (like That Harmattan Morning, The Thing Around Your Neck etc.) and novels (such as Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, Americanah,” etc.) that have won her laurels and acclaims, including Orange Prize for Fiction, and Commonwealth Writers’ Prize.

But the fame that her prodigious talent brought her has come with a heavy price, one that beats the imagination hollow and rends the heart: Chimamanda’s ageing father, 83, fell victim to kidnappers on May 2 in Anambra State. But happily the old man, an intellectual in his own right and former Deputy Vice Chancellor of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, was released three days later on May 5. To my shame I missed the story at the time and I am only knowing of it now through Chimamanda’s own emotive and powerfully rendered account, published a few days ago in the New York Times.

Her narration is worth culling for my readers, perhaps to jar our senses into some collective action against this insane and inhuman scourge on our Eastern states.

Yes, our Eastern states have coveted their monopoly of this mindless craze, a craze that can no longer be half-excused on the poverty in the land, and its mockery by arrant display of unimaginable wealth by some powerful clique in government and business.

No, these mad fellows in the business, nay industry, of kidnapping are not materially poor by any stretch of the imagination. They run an “industry”, controlled by big and powerful people in the society; people who are chiefs and are “respected” and “worshipped”; their true colour unbeknownst to the generality of the people.

Their poverty is of the mind and of the spirit. They belong to the Hades! For how can any group of people chose to inflict pain and horrors, on the altar of filthy lucre, on any member of a family that has brought nothing but glory and pride to their fatherland?

Of the horrors the Adichie family went through, Chimamanda wrote in New York Times:

“My father was kidnapped in Nigeria on a Saturday morning in early May. My brother called to tell me, and suddenly there was not enough breathable air in the world. My father is 83 years old. A small, calm, contented man, with a quietly mischievous humour and a luminous faith in God, his beautiful dark skin unlined, his hair in sparse silvery tufts, his life shaped by that stoic, dignified responsibility of being an Igbo first son…

“Sometimes I record his Igbo proverbs, his turns of phrase. A disciplined diabetic, he takes daily walks and is to be found, after each meal, meticulously recording his carbohydrate grams in a notebook. He spends hours bent over Sudoku. He swallows a handful of pills every day. His is a generation at dusk.

“On the morning he was kidnapped, he had a bag of okpa, apples and bottled water that my mother had packed for him. He was in the back seat of his car, his driver at the wheel, on a lonely stretch between Nsukka, the university town where he lives, and Abba, our ancestral hometown. He was going to attend a traditional meeting of men from his age group. A two-hour drive.

“My mother was planning their late lunch upon his return: pounded yam and a fresh soup. They always called each other when either travelled alone. This time, he didn’t call. She called him and his phone was switched off. They never switched off their phones. Hour after hour, she called and it remained off. Later, her phone rang, and although it was my father’s number calling, a stranger said, ‘We have your husband.’

“Kidnappings are not uncommon in southeastern Nigeria and, unlike similar incidents in the Niger Delta, where foreigners are targeted, here it is wealthy or prominent local residents.

Still, the number of abductions has declined in the past few years, which perhaps is why my reaction, in the aftermath of my shock, was surprise.

“My close-knit family banded together more tightly and held vigil by our phones. The kidnappers said they would call back, but they did not. We waited. The desire to urge time forward numbed and ate my soul. My mother took her phone with her everywhere, and she heard it ringing when it wasn’t. The waiting was unbearable. I imagined my father in a diabetic coma. I imagined his octogenarian heart collapsing.

‘How can they do this violence to a man who would not kill an ant?’ my mother lamented. My sister said, ‘Daddy will be fine because he is a righteous man.’ Ordinarily, I would never use “righteous” in a non-pejorative way. But something shifted in my perception of language. The veneer of irony fell away. It felt true. Later, I repeated it to myself. My father would be fine because he was a “righteous man.”

I understood then the hush that surrounds kidnappings in Nigeria, why families often said little even after it was over. We felt paranoid. We did not know if going public would jeopardise my father’s life, if the neighbours were complicit, if another member of the family might be kidnapped as well.

‘Is my husband alive?’ my mother asked, when the kidnappers finally called back, and her voice broke. ‘Shut up!’ the male voice said. My mother called him ‘my son.’ Sometimes, she said ‘sir.’ Anything not to antagonise him while she begged and pleaded, about my father being ill, about the ransom being too high. How do you bargain for the life of your husband? How do you speak of your life partner in the deadened tone of a business transaction?

“Kidnapping’s ugly psychological melodrama works because it trades on the most precious of human emotions: love. They put my father on the phone, and his voice was a low shadow of itself. “Give them what they want,” he said. “I will not survive if I stay here longer.” My stoic father. It had been three days but it felt like weeks.

“Friends called to ask for bank-account details so they could donate toward the ransom. It felt surreal. Did it ever feel real to anybody in such a situation, I wondered? The scramble to raise the money in one day.The menacingly heavy bag of cash.My brother dropping it off, through a circuitous route, in a wooded area.

Late that night, my father was taken to a clearing and set free…

“ ‘They asked me to climb into the boot of their car,’ he said. ‘I was going to do so, but one of them picked me up and threw me inside. Threw. The boot was full of things and I hit my head on something. They drove fast. The road was very bumpy.’

“I imagined this grace-filled man crumpled inside the rear of a rusty car. My rage overwhelmed my relief — that he suffered such an indignity to his body and mind…

“With my father’s release, we all cried, as though it was over. But one thing had ended and another begun. I constantly straddled panic; I was sleepless, unfocused, jumpy, fearful that something else had gone wrong. And there was my own sad guilt: He was targeted because of me. “Ask your daughter the writer to bring the money,” the kidnappers told him, because to appear in newspapers in Nigeria, to be known, is to be assumed wealthy.

The image of my father shut away in the rough darkness of a car boot haunted me. Who had done this? I needed to know…” End of excerpts.

One thing I want to beg of President Muhammadu Buhari, the madness of kidnapping must stop. The police generally (can) know those who are behind this crazy “industry.” Buhari must put in charge of the police an IG who can bring this scourge to an end, not only in the East but anywhere in Nigeria. Indeed the remit of the new IG is: end the kidnapping scourge within six months or lose your job! Adequately motivated, the police can do it. I swear.wp_posts

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Posted by admin on Jun 11 2015. Filed under Headlines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry