Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie earlier this year was selected to address Harvard’s Class of 2018, an honor given to selected intellectuals who have shaped the world with their voice, dream, craft or ideas. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the greatest writers of her generation, born in Nigeria she has written novels like, Purple Hibiscus, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Half of a Yellow Sun, which won the Orange Prize; and Americanah, a 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award winner, a book she finalized during a fellowship year at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Her most recent book, Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions, was published in March 2017.
She has given two notable TED talks: “The Danger of a Single Story” in 2009, and her 2012 TEDxEuston talk, “We Should All Be Feminists,” which kickstarted a worldwide conversation about feminism, was included in Beyoncé’s “Flawless” in 2013 and published as a book in 2014.
During herHarvard’s Class of 2018 speech, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie used it as a platform to implore the students to speak the truth in a time when there’s a lot of fake information the world, though she admitted it’s not always to show true honesty it’s still very much needed in creating a more transparent and loving world for us all.
We can not always bend the world into the shapes we want but we can try, we can make a concerted and real and true effort. And you are privileged that, because of your education here, you have already been given many of the tools that you will need to try. Always just try. Because you never know. And so as you graduate, as you deal with your excitement and your doubts today, I urge you to try and create the world you want to live in.
She joins a list of great individuals like Quincy Jones, Natalie Portman, Coretta Scott King amongst others to speak at Harvard’s Class Days.
Here’s her incredible speech below:
