Chimamanda To Be Honoured with The W.E.B Du Bois Medal At Harvard University 

The multi-award-winning Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the individuals honored by Harvard University this year for their contributions to Black history and culture.

By Omotayo Olutekunbi

At Harvard’s Sanders Theatre on its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Adichie will receive recognition with activists and basketball icon Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, award-winning actress Laverne Cox, and philanthropist and patron of the arts and education Agnes Gund, among others.

The highest honor given by Harvard in the area of African and African American studies is the W. E. B. Du Bois Medal. The medal bears the name of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, who in 1895 became the first Black person to get a Ph.D. from Harvard.

Adichie joins a select group of trailblazers who have already received the illustrious medal, including Muhammad Ali, Maya Angelou, Ava Duvernay, Dave Chappelle, Queen Latifah, Nasir “Nas” Jones, John Lewis, Steven Spielberg, athlete-activist Colin Kaepernick, and others.

Adichie has earned worldwide recognition for her writing throughout the years and has earned various honors and awards.

Purple Hibiscus, her debut book, received the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2003. Her second, Half of a Yellow Sun (2006), received the world’s most prestigious yearly book prize for fiction written by a woman, the Orange Prize for Fiction (later the Bailey’s Prize and now the Women’s Prize for Fiction). Out of the 10 winners of the award during the prize’s second decade, Half of a Yellow Sun later won Bailey’s “Best of the Best” award.

The Us National BoSk Critics Circle awarded her 2013 book “Americanah”, which was also selected as one of the year’s Top Ten Best Books by the New York Times.

Two of Adichie’s TED Talks have become classics: The Danger of a Single Story (2009) and We Should All Be Feminists (2012), which started a global discussion on feminism and was later turned into a book in 2014. Her essay on losing her father, Notes on Grief, was released as a memoir in 2021.

She holds 16 honorary doctorates and belongs to both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Adichie splits her time between the US and Nigeria, where she runs a program for creative writing that was founded in 2008.