The Observer:'As a child, I thought my father invincible. I also thought him remote'

By Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Sun 15 Jun 2008 00.14 BST, THE GUARDIAN

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in 1977. She grew up on the University of Nigeria's Nsukka campus where her father, James, was a statistics professor. They lived in the former home of the novelist Chinua Achebe. At 19, Adichie moved to the US where she studied communications and political science. Her second novel, Half of a Yellow Sun, won the 2007 Orange Prize.

My father walks differently now. He is still brisk - he takes a walk most mornings, wearing sneakers and a baseball cap - but not as brisk as he used to be, and there is a tilt in his gait, a fragility: it is an old-man walk. When I first noticed this we were in our ancestral hometown, Abba, and I stood at a window watching as he walked across the compound, a small man with the darkest, loveliest umber-toned skin that has aged well; he could pass for 10 years younger than his 76 years.

The middle of his head is bald and the sparse hair surrounding it is so soft my brother Kene has difficulty cutting it with clippers. My father says that he and his sister got their mother's hair while my Uncle Mike ended up with tough hair. He has said this many times. My father repeats stories now. When I tell him that he has told a story before, he glances at me for a moment, says, 'Ezi okwu, have I really?' and goes on to tell it anyway. But I still listen, still ask him to explain ornate Igbo proverbs, still imagine the grandfather I never knew who in the late 1930s sold his valuables to pay school fees for his little boy, placed the child on a bicycle every morning and determinedly rode miles to the school in Nimo because a western education was key to succeeding in the new colonial state.

That child, my father, would drop out of secondary school when his family could no longer afford the fees, would work as a sanitary inspector, take his Cambridge exams as a private candidate, study pure mathematics at Ibadan, get a doctorate at Berkeley and become Nigeria's first professor of statistics; I grew up seeing sheets of paper full of strange-looking equations on the study table. When I took mathematics problems to him, he would look at them, rub his fingers together, tell me the answer, and then struggle to find simple ways to explain it to me.

Our family myth was that he never slept: Daddy was there in his study when you woke up to pee, talking to himself, shuffling papers. As a child, I thought him invincible. I also thought him remote. My mother called our friends by their nicknames, wanted to feed everyone, and laughed a lot. My father did not pay attention to our friends, did not go to the staff club to socialise, or play tennis, or drink. He was proper and precise and reserved.

I sometimes try to remember the exact moment when I began to look at him with gratitude, and to learn from being with him that it is possible to have a kind of complete joy in the mere presence of one's father. Perhaps it was when I became old enough to see him as a funny, kind, gentle person and not just the stoic shadow in the study to whom we gave our list of Things Needed for School. He kept all of those lists. He has a steel cabinet full of the records of his six children, of the house-helps who have come and gone over the years, of household expenses.

Now he writes down things and forgets where he wrote them. 'I look for my glasses when I have them on,' he says, and shakes his head, laughing at himself. His humour was always dry. Now it is more playful. Recently he and I were in a Connecticut store when a man brushed past us, and rudely said: 'Excuse me!' A stocky and unattractive man. After he walked past, my father said in Igbo, his face expressionless: 'What a tall handsome man.'

My father's stories digress now. He tells them with humour and nostalgia, lapsing into songs from his childhood, saying he recently ran into so-and-so with whom he had wrestled as a child and so-and-so no longer had any teeth. Most of his contemporaries did not get the education he did, and I still hear stories of how people in our hometown would insist that any formal documentation from the government be kept until my father came home so he would explain it to them. They call him by his title Odeluora: He Who Writes for the Community. As we, his children, sometimes do. At my graduation, my father gave a long, story-filled toast, raising the bottle of champagne and saluting his dead father, asking specific blessings for each of us, and at the end we all called out, 'Odeluora!' (We 'hailed him', in Nigeria-speak).

My father has been devoutly Roman Catholic all his life. On the living-room wall of the flat he shares with my mother there is a photo of him in the formal regalia of the Knights of St Mulumba: he is holding a sword, wearing an elaborate green cape and a yacht-like hat. My brother Okey says he looks like a superhero just about to fly off. Whenever my father travels out of Nigeria, we tease him about not taking his knightly sword, because of possible problems with airport security. My mother complains that when he wakes up at five to go to mass he turns on the light too brightly and, worse, sings as he gets ready.

He insists he has no need for new clothes. 'This shirt is very good. I bought it in London in 1975,' he'll say with that peculiar Nigerian assumption that anything purchased abroad is superior. My fashionable sister Uche will say, 'The collar is frayed, Daddy.' 'It's perfectly fine,' he will retort. But we buy him new clothes anyway and in his closet there is a pile of unworn shirts.

I came, as an adult, to deeply admire the contented simplicity in my father's nature. My sister Ijeoma says he is a man who stretches whatever soup he has to make it sufficient for his pounded yam. Or in my brother Chuk's words, my father is a man who 'doesn't have trouble'. Some people wear their unimpressionable nature like a shiny medal but he doesn't; it simply does not occur to him to think of the Joneses. In a country, Nigeria, where material wealth is often overemphasised, he has minimal interest in who has what. Perhaps it is why he takes great pleasure in little things: in watching the antics of a goat tied to a tree, in reading a map. A show on Animal Planet leaves him laughing with absolute delight, and when he laughs, sitting down, he sometimes raises one leg from the floor. Last Christmas most of my family gathered in Abba. Five of my father's six children. Four of his six grandchildren. Watching us, my father said: 'Ndi be Adichie.' The Adichie family. And there was wonder in his voice.