Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on growing up surrounded by malaria

Acclaimed writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie reflects on a childhood surrounded by malaria
PA

Two stories on malaria, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie written for the Malaria Summit, London.

PART 1

I was about ten years old. My mother had brought me to the medical center on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, where I grew up. As we sat waiting for the doctor, people stopped to say hello to my mother. The campus was a small community and everyone knew everyone else. Each person who greeted my mother would then turn to me and say, “Ndo, sorry for your malaria.’

Malaria was so common that everyone assumed that if you were in the hospital, it was because you had malaria. Actually, on that day, I was in hospital for an eye allergy but it occurred to me that it was the only time I had ever been to see a doctor for an illness that was NOT malaria.

We knew malaria. We knew malaria intimately. So intimately that we recognized the specific contours of its affliction. My malaria always came with an unbearable rumbling, aching feeling that I can only describe as an anguish in my stomach. It left me light-headed, weak, nauseous, helpless. My brother Okey’s malaria came with deeply painful aches at his joints. For my brother Kene, a bitter taste would cling to his tongue and his head would ache and feel twice its size. My friend Obianuju’s malaria came with a fever that made her look like a foreign, frightening version of herself, her eyes would bulge and her teeth would chatter and she would vomit and vomit until she felt weak and emptied.

We knew malaria so intimately that we knew the medicines well, fansidar tablets tasted like paint, chloroquine injections made us itchy everywhere, even beneath our fingernails, novalgin injections were too painful to bear.

Each time I had malaria, I didn’t go to school. Once, in Class 2, at the age of 13, I had a very bad case of malaria that made me miss a whole week of school. My friends came to visit bearing cards, as though on pilgrimage, and when I finally went back to school, I felt left out, bereft, because so much had passed me by. It was during that week that quadratic equations were covered in mathematics class. I missed it all. And I have, since then, never been able to make sense of quadratic equations. So perhaps the only good thing I can say for malaria is that I can’t be held responsible for my poor grasp of mathematics. It’s all malaria’s fault.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

We knew malaria so intimately that mosquitoes were familiar. In the evenings, when we played outside, we expected the mosquitoes to bite us, and they did. There was the sting, and then the itchy bump that would rise on our skin, red and painful. There was the delicious sense of accomplishment we got from slapping at a mosquito that had landed on our skin. And then the disgust we felt at seeing that insect swollen fat with our blood.

Our windows had mosquito nets. But mosquitoes found their way into the house anyway – all it took was a few seconds, the front door opened to come indoors, the back door opened to go outside. They seemed to be more active at night. There was often a mosquito buzzing at my ear as I tried to sleep, stubborn and patient and annoying, waiting to feed on my blood.

As one must have fed on my friend Ekumeku’s blood.

Ekumeku was a bright, funny girl, two years older than me. She was pretty and popular and she had a skill that we children considered very exotic: she could crochet, she would hold a crochet needle and a ball of wool in her hands and before you knew it, a hat or a shawl had materialized. One day she fell sick. It was, of course, malaria. She took chloroquin tablets. Two days later she was shaking in bed. She had seizures, her skin so hot it almost burned and her eyes looked blank and she was delirious. She was talking, sentences running into one another, but nothing she said made any sense.

She was taken to hospital. She missed school for weeks. When finally she returned to school, we could tell that something was desperately wrong; her eyes were glazed, and it seemed as if a different person had inhabited her body. We were told that she had cerebral malaria. That the malaria had got to her brain. It changed her life forever. Today, I often think of her and wonder whether she can still crochet.

PART 2

Growing up on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, my brothers and I had a happy childhood full of outdoor play – football and badminton and rolling old tires. During the rainy season, there would be stagnant water in an old basin in the backyard. Tiny wriggly things would appear in the water. Mosquito larvae. We watched them in fascination. Sometimes we scooped some up and put them in a container, which we took indoors to our room because we wanted to see them turn into mosquitoes. This was – obviously – a terrible idea. But we were children and we were foolhardy and curious in the way that children are. Today, I have two homes. I live in the US, and I live in Lagos. Each time I am at home in Lagos, I’m struck by how many neighborhoods, both in affluent and non-affluent areas, are full of stagnant water. And so I am vigilant about malaria, so vigilant that it annoys my family and friends. At home, I frequently examine the mosquito nets on the windows to check for gaps. I am obsessive about keeping fully-shut at all times the doors that lead outside. A frequent refrain that friends and family hear from me when they visit me is ‘Mechie uzo osiso maka mosquito!’ ‘Shut the door quickly because of mosquitoes!’ I always carry a repellent spray in my handbag. When I go out in the evening, to a restaurant or to visit a friend, I bring out the canister from time to time and spray myself.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Daniel Hambury/@stellapicsltd

My friends roll their eyes at all this. ‘It’s just malaria,’ they say. They’ve become so conditioned to having malaria, malaria has become so commonplace, that they are blasé about it. They think malaria is inevitable. But it isn’t. We don’t HAVE to have malaria. I certainly don’t want to have malaria. And so, dramatic as it may sound, I live in fear of malaria. Because it is such a miserable experience, because I worry that if I get malaria after not having had it for a while, it will be even worse. Still, despite all my precautions, I got malaria in December and was indeed beyond miserable. It left me unable to write, to think, to do. A waste of a week. But it is my two and a half year old daughter that I worry the most about. There is much from my childhood that I would like my daughter to also have - the outdoor play, the sense of adventure. But I do not want her to be as intimately familiar with malaria as I was growing up. I do not want her to be familiar with getting injections of malaria medicine, as I was. I still remember starting to cry even before my parents and I got to the medical center, and into the nurses room full of terrifying little vials of medicine.

I would be feverish from malaria, my head aching and my stomach in an acute stage of unrest. My father would hold me across his lap, gently but firmly so that I didn’t move, and my mother would soothe my forehead, while everyone coaxed me not to tighten my muscles so that the needle wouldn’t break, and I would lie very still, holding my breath, anxiously waiting to feel the first prick of the needle – and then my screaming would begin anew. Now, because I am so vigilant to prevent my daughter from getting malaria, I spray every exposed part of her skin whenever she is in Lagos. I spray her ears, her toes, her neck. I am curious about repellents and I try different ones. Should I use the repellent with DDT on a two year old or should I not? Does the repellent made of natural oils really work? And so in Lagos my daughter smells of insect repellent, and each time I hold her and hug her I wish she didn’t have to smell like that. I wish she smelled of more innocent scents, the scent of babies, of fresh talcum and baby lotion and lavender. I wish she did not have to wear on her skin the proof of her mother’s eternal vigilance against malaria.

Still, despite these efforts, a few months ago I discovered a red and itchy bump on her forehead. A mosquito bite. I went into mild panic. I bought camoquin in readiness for malaria. I watched her like a hawk for symptoms but fortunately malaria didn’t happen. But it could very well have happened. And I found myself thinking of how wonderful it would be to be free of this vigilance. How wonderful to let her play outside without worry. Of course playing outside means being bitten by some insect, because that is the nature of nature after all, but how wonderful to know that insect bites, while perhaps painful, would not be the possible precursor of a horrible disease. How wonderful it would be if children no longer missed school because of malaria, if workers no longer missed work, if people no longer wasted days and weeks in the lethargy of malaria. How wonderful it would be if those roadside medicine hawkers no longer had to dispense dubious pills for people who cannot afford to go to the doctor. How wonderful it would be if Nigeria were a country where foreigners could travel to without first anxiously taking malaria prophylactics. Today we are talking about self-driving cars and drones that deliver our groceries and yet this ancient disease, this disease that we know can be conquered because it has been conquered in different parts of the world, is still killing so many people in the Commonwealth. So many that malaria is responsible for half of all the deaths in the Commonwealth. We have the science and the knowledge to beat malaria. It is doable. May we also have the will to do it.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in