Cancel culture is ‘obscene’, says novelist fêted by Oprah Winfrey and Obamas

The war on woke has an unlikely new champion. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the best-selling Nigerian-American writer, who is a favourite of Oprah and the Obamas and author of books including We Should All Be Feminists, has spoken out against cancel culture in an online essay, branding it “obscene”.

She joins a growing list of prominent left-wing figures, such as JK Rowling and Stephen Fry, who have criticised the trend for hounding famous people for failing to live up to “the prevailing ideological orthodoxy” – and the chilling effect this is having on personal freedom and free speech. In 2020, Rowling wrote in her blog about abuse she had received for her stance on trans issues; Fry, meanwhile, has argued in defence of free speech in a conversation with Jordan Peterson, published in The Telegraph.

In her three-part, 7,000-word essay, Adichie stands shoulder-to-shoulder with them. “We have a generation of young people on social media so terrified of having the wrong opinions that they have robbed themselves of the opportunity to think and to learn and to grow,” she argues. “The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness.”

Adichie came to fame with her novels Purple Hibiscus (2003) and Half of a Yellow Sun. Purple Hibiscus was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction; Half of a Yellow Sun won it three years later. Both books are set in post-independence Nigeria, and drew on her family’s experiences in the aftermath of the 1967-70 Nigerian Civil War. Adichie’s parents were well-known intellectuals – her father was a professor of statistics and her mother was the University of Nigeria’s first female registar. But both suffered in the post-war chaos, and Adichie pursued her graduate and postgraduate studies in America.

Her subsequent books, including Americanah and The Thing Around Your Neck, deal with the experiences of immigrant alienation and the notion that, as a first generation migrant to the USA, her eyes were suddenly opened to America’s tortured racial politics. In addition to her writing, she delivered two acclaimed TED talks – The Danger of a Single Story and We Should all be Feminists, which was turned into an essay. She is close to a landmark in contemporary fiction: she has shared a stage with Michelle Obama and Hilary Clinton, had tea with Oprah Winfrey, and her songs have been used in a Beyoncé song.

Yet it seems she is not above the perils of cancel culture. The danger of instant judgements and monolithic narratives is the theme of her recent essay.

“In this age of social media,” she writes, “where a story travels the world in minutes, silence sometimes means that other people can hijack your story and soon, their false version becomes the defining story about you.”

In the first two parts, she details an explosive example of this process in action. A few years before, she had befriended a pupil at one of her writing workshops in Lagos. The pupil hero-worshipped her; and Adichie felt like a “support-giver, counsellor, comforter” for this “Bright Young Nigerian Feminist”.

Their relationship, though, began to sour. In March 2017, Adichie gave an interview in which she said “my feeling is trans women are trans women”. This comment was seized upon by social media warriors and there were calls for her to be silenced.

But it was the response of her friend and former pupil which “stunned” Adichie. “She went on social media and insulted me,” she writes. “She could have emailed or called or texted me. Instead she put on a public performance.”

The woman, Adichie says: “Knows me enough to know that I fully support the rights of trans people and all marginalised people. That I have always been fiercely supportive of difference. And that I am a person who reads and thinks and forms my opinions in a carefully considered way.”

Such nuance, though, was lost on her former pupil. And Adichie argues this trend to assume the worst – particularly of well-known figures – has become increasingly common. “The truth is that the famous person remains irretrievably human. You will wrap your mediocre malice in the false gauziness of ideological purity. But it’s still malice. You will tell yourself that being able to parrot the latest American Feminist orthodoxy justifies your hacking at the spirit of [another] person.”

The next part of the essay gives a further example of this phenomenon. Another anonymous pupil, who had cited (without permission) Adichie’s mentorship in her debut novel’s biography, had used her trans comments to launch a social media pile-on.

“This person has created a space in which social media followers have trivialized my parents’ death, claiming that the sudden and devastating loss of my parents within months of each other during this pandemic, was ‘punishment’ for my ‘transphobia’. This person has asked followers to pick up machetes and attack me.”

In the last part of the essay, Adichie widens her gaze and takes aim at cancel culture in general.

“In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop,” she notes. “I find a cold-blooded grasping; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; [and] a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.”

Social media, she says, stokes this censorious high-handedness. And the language of cancel culture, its hedging and policing, scorches subtlety and encourages snap-judgement.

“People wield the words ‘violence’ and ‘weaponize’ like tarnished pitchforks. People depend on obfuscation, who have no compassion for anybody genuinely curious or confused.”

Her full-throated rallying cry has been cheered by many. The historian Niall Ferguson called it “a remarkable commentary on the perils of teaching the current generation of students”. The critic Sarah Ditum said “there is nothing worth reading on the internet today apart from Chimamanda”.

But some were less fulsome. One Twitter user wrote: “Personally, i prefer to read african fiction writers who don't traffic in abstractions, aphoristic language, a prophetic tone and sanctimony (sic).”

Another said: “She does not generate original thoughts. If you’ve ever taken African studies 101 at a liberal arts college, it’s all just stuff from the midterm.”

This rambunctious response, of course, neatly illustrates Adichie’s point that you don’t come to social media for reflection and thoughtfulness. But her final lines carry a warning which should echo beyond the Twitter bear-pit.

“We are no longer human beings,” she writes. “We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another. God help us.”