Lack of basic national values pushing us to self-hatred

In her highly satirical novel, Purple Hisbiscus, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie magnifies for us the self-hatred and laughably hypocritical love for exotic things among the African middle class.

 In the award-winning novel we encounter Eugene, a wealthy media mogul whose pathological love for Christian doctrine ends up brutalising his children and destroying his own sense of humanity. Here is a punctiliously pious man who spends millions of Naira on priests and visitors who throng his house quoting the bible, yet he cannot help his own dying father because the latter is a ‘heathen’. To Eugene, anything of traditional African descent is either a pagan ritual or simply demonic.