Jumia Books The Thing Around Your Neck Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Fiction

Feminist analyses of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "The Headstrong Historian" read the short story as a revisioning of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart, offering a feminist perspective on the Southern Nigerian Igbo community and its experience with Western colonialism.[3][4][5] Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi criticises Nigerian literature for its exclusion of women.[6] Adichie's contemporary Elleke Boehmer commends "The Headstrong Historian" for its feminist agenda, which is identified as extending Achebe's Things Fall Apart and challenging its account of Igbo history.[7]

Contemporary feminist scholar Anene Ejikeme notes that, since its publication in Western publishing outlets, Things Fall Apart has been celebrated as the authentic account of the late nineteenth-century Igbo experience during the colonial era.[8] Neil ten Kortenaar defines Achebe as a ‘historian of Igboland’.[9] While this has been argued, Achebe maintains that "the world's stories should be told from many different perspectives".[10] Ejikeme says that Adichie "forces us to acknowledge that there is not a "single story"of the Igbo past" by revising Achebe's account and claiming a space for Igbo women.[11] "The Danger of a Single Story" is one of Adichie's TED talks.