Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
4th Estate
Otago Daily Times, May 30th 2025
“Where have all the years gone?” wonders the narrator in the early pages of Dream Count, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fourth novel. “[Have] I made the most of life…and how I would know if I have?” This question, born in the depths of Covid lockdown, is one each of the story’s four main characters must work her own way through.
Three are wealthy Nigerian women who, in their forties, have not achieved their culturally expected roles as wives and mothers. Chiamaka, an aspiring but little-published New York based travel writer, has moved from relationship to relationship in search of true love. It is not that she doesn’t want a husband or child, but that the prospect of “a marriage that wasn’t a merging of souls, a baby not intensely born of love” is intolerable.
Her best friend, Zikora, is a high-powered lawyer who never doubted that marriage and children happen “as naturally as night becomes day.” Despite her professional success, however, the years slip by without a single proposal. So when, in her late thirties, she meets a man who seems serious in his intentions, she stops taking birth control, only to be abandoned when she reveals her pregnancy.
Chia’s cousin Omelogor, meanwhile, has no interest in finding a permanent relationship or starting a family. Having amassed a sizeable sum working for a corrupt Nigerian bank, she lives in Abuja and divides her time between looking for local businesswomen on whom to bestow the profits, and her website, For Men Only, on which she provides relationship advice to men whose only understanding of female desire comes from pornography. But for all her self-aware eschewing of convention, an aunt’s suggestion she adopt a child has started to haunt her dreams.
Kadiatou, Chia’s former housekeeper, has a very different life trajectory. Born in a small Guinean village and subject to an arranged marriage in her teens, she fled to America with her baby daughter after her husband’s death. Now a maid for prestigious New York hotel, her life falls apart when she is raped by a high-profile guest. Despite her shame at speaking of something so personal, Kadi is encouraged to pursue charges only to find herself condemned in the court of public opinion and threatened with deportation for lying in her asylum application.
Written after the death of Adiche’s mother in 2021, Dream Count is a deeply personal exploration of love, grief, and happiness; the associations between maternity and female identity; and the complexity of mother-daughter relationships. It is also an attempt to address the damage caused to women by the Madonna/whore dichotomy. Kadi’s story is based on that of Nafissatou Diallo, who accused the head of the IMF of sexual assault in 2011 but was forced to drop the charges when inconsistent details about her personal life were revealed by the defence. In telling Kadi’s story, Adiche restores dignity to Diallo and others like her – not as saints, but as people who, whatever their faults, deserve justice.