My father was targeted because of me, says Chimamanda

The illustrious writer and Half of a Yellow Sun author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie wrote about her father’s kidnapping in an opinion article published in the New York Times on Saturday.

In the New York Times article, Chimamanda narrated how her-83-year-old father and Nigeria’s first professor of statistics, James Nwoye Adichie, was kidnapped on May 2.

“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.

“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.’

She revealed how the family was able to free her father and the emotional aftermath even after he had been freed. She opened up on her guilt on being the reason behind her father’s kidnap.

“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, and fearful that something else had gone wrong,” She wrote.

“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.”

Then she went on to lament the appalling treatment of the case by Nigerian security services, how she was asked to part with significant sums of money and get ‘authorization from Abuja’.

“To encounter that underbelly, to discover the hollowness beneath government proclamations of security, was jarring”.

Chimamanda’s father was on his way from Nsukka to his home town in Aba, Anambra state, when he was kidnapped. He was freed a few days later after the ransom, which was reportedly as high as $250,000 was paid.