Popular Nigerian female author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has disclosed in a speech in Stockholm, Sweden that she suffered sexual assault at the age of 17.
The outspoken writer revealed that she was assaulted sexually by a “powerful man in the media” but she failed to mention the name of the said man.
The prominent supporter of the #MeToo movement which is aimed at exposing sexual misconduct shared her story at the Stockholm Forum for Gender Equality.
She reveled that “There was a powerful man in the media who I knew would help with this book launch, and so I found my way into his office in Lagos and I told him about my book. Would he please support the book? I asked. He was very impressed, he told me. While other teenagers were hardly reading at all, I was serious enough and focused enough to have written a book.”
Ngozi Adichie went on to reveal that this powerful man “was pleasant, avuncular, warm, and then he got up from his desk and walked around to where I was seated and stood behind me, and in a move that was as swift as it was shocking he slipped his hand under my button down shirt, under my bra and squeezed my breast. I was so taken aback that I did nothing for seconds. Then I pushed his hand away but gently, nicely, because I didn’t want to offend him.”
Ngozi Adichie who was angered by the assault she was subjected to further said that “Later that day I broke into a rash – on my chest, my neck, my face. As thought my body were recoiling. As though my body were saying what my lips had not said. I felt a deep loathing for that man and for what he did.”
“I felt as if I didn’t matter, as if my body existed merely as a thing to be done with as he wanted, yet I told no one about it and I kept talking to him, being polite, hoping he would help with my book,” the author added in her speech.
Source: Africafeeds.com
