She once wrote about Nigeria with a love so fierce it hurt. Now, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speaks of her homeland with a distance that feels foreign even to her.
The acclaimed author sat down with The New York Times for an interview that was never supposed to be about grief. When asked if Nigeria still felt close to her heart, she paused. Then she answered honestly. “My feelings toward Nigeria have changed,” she said. “I do not want to go back to Nigeria.”
The words landed like a stone in still water. For a writer whose entire body of work is rooted in the Nigerian experience, the admission carried the weight of a rupture. But the rupture began in December 2025, when her 21-month-old son, Nkanu, one of her twin boys, died after a medical emergency at Euracare Hospital in Lagos.
What followed was a chain of events that Adichie has recounted in painful detail. Her son developed a fever. Her husband, Ivara Esege, placed him on antibiotics. When his condition didn’t improve, they took him to the hospital. During an MRI, Nkanu was sedated with propofol. He suffered cardiac arrest and died the next day.
Then came the moment that Adichie says she will carry until her own death. A doctor approached her after the procedure. “Well, look, they gave him too much Propofol,” the doctor told her. “Those were his exact words,” Adichie said, “which I will never forget until the day I die.”
She has since raised allegations of medical negligence, and the circumstances surrounding Nkanu’s death are now the subject of a coroner’s inquest. But the legal process has been slow, and Adichie has accused the hospital of stalling. She and her husband have not filed a lawsuit. Instead, they are pushing for something harder to measure: accountability, and change.
Reflecting on the grief, Adichie described a sensation of living outside her own life. “I mean, it is so surreal, all of this,” she said. “I still can’t believe we’re talking about my son who died. You’re going through something, but you also feel like you’re outside of it.”
Yet even in her pain, she left one door ajar. Her surviving children, she said, could be the only reason she might return to Nigeria. Her daughter still calls the country her “happy place.” For now, Adichie remains in the United States, holding onto that small thread, and writing her way through a grief that has no ending.
