Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Talks
Sat 30 Jun
Cultural Identity & Communities
Speakers: Kalaf Ângelo (Angola), Paulo Lins (Brazil) and David Treece (UK)
How can artists and creative practitioners contribute to the better integration of communities of African origin in Brazil and Europe?
City of God author Paulo Lins joins musician and poet Kalaf Ângelo and Professor David Treece to explore how music, literature and other artforms can act as a medium to define and forge identities and how the Afro-Brazilian experience compares with the multiple identities inherent in contemporary Britain.
Music & Exile
Speakers: Gilberto Gil (Brazil) and Hugh Masekela (South Africa)
Back2Black host Gil and Hugh Masekela share much in common. Cultural ambassadors for their respective countries on the world stage, they have also both experienced life in exile first hand and they both relate to London very directly. Their experiences also make them uniquely well placed to reflect on the relationship between Brazil and Africa today and how music can revitalise Brazil’s African roots.
Sun 1 Jul
Literature & Democracy
Speakers: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Nigeria) and Tahar Ben Jelloun (Morocco)
Two of Africa’s finest writers come together to discuss the role of literature in the process of Africa's democratisation and development. How can writers probe, reflect and stimulate cultural and political change across the continent?
Chimamanda is one of the New Yorker's 20 most important fiction writers under 40 and her work includes Orange Prize winning Half Of A Yellow Sun and Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonweath Writers’ Prize. Tahar Ben Jelloun was the first North African to win France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt for The Sacred Night. Much of his celebrated writing is shaped by his experience of alienation and exile – “I write to change things. I believe that literature can sometimes be a form of exorcism. When I cannot act upon reality, I write.”
Curator of talks programme: José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola)
