Dream count

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is Nigerian-American and has written ten award-winning and highly acclaimed books. Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, and Half of a Yellow Sun and Americanah have also received awards.

I read Dream Count. It’s nonsense that writers are supposed to show and not tell. If you are gifted enough, you show through telling. This novel consists of narratives, and it draws the reader in completely, hook, line and sinker.

Four Nigerian women, two of them in Nigeria and two in America, take turns speaking. They tell of their experiences with men. With the exception of Kadiatou, who is a domestic worker, they are black princesses: wealthy and privileged.

Chiamaka is a travel writer, but she does not write about remote, primitive places. She writes about lush destinations and luxury hotels. Her father is an extremely wealthy businessman and she does not need to work at all. She is given houses, apartments, cars as gifts. She is in her forties and unmarried. She is stunningly beautiful and has received many marriage proposals, but she has a romantic soul and longs for a great and perfect love—which, of course, is about as common as unicorns.

It is a novel about love. What is love, and can it last? Chia likes dark, successful men who spoil her rotten. But soon something about them begins to trouble her. Her great love was a complete scoundrel: Darnell, a professor of art history. He was always angry and grim, mocked her privilege while enjoying its benefits. An arrogant, self-satisfied pretender. Adichie does not tell you this; she shows it through incidents. Chia spoiled him outrageously and yearned for his approval. Perhaps that was the secret: his emotional unavailability kept her on her toes. Their relationship ran aground when, in Paris, in front of his equally pretentious friends in a refined restaurant, she ordered a mimosa—to his embarrassment and suspicion.

There are quite a few candidates after Darnell, such as the white Englishman and the Swedish Nazi. But Chia’s freedom is everything to her, as are her impossible ideals.

Chia’s best friend Zikora is a successful lawyer whose greatest wish is to meet the love of her life, get married and have children. Time is running out. She meets Mr Perfect, but of course their relationship does not have a happy ending, and she struggles to process the disappointment.

Chia’s fearless cousin Omelogor has become extremely wealthy in banking in Nigeria. Unfortunately, it is a nest of corruption, and she had to learn to play the game. She explains to someone:

Look, you have to understand that lying and deceiving are not moral issues in everyday life here, they are just tools, survival tools. Compunction is not even an option, because you would need to think of these issues first as moral. And many of our people just don't.

And:

Money is at the heart of everything, absolutely everything. We don't admire principle or purpose. Even people who can afford to take ideas and ideals seriously don't. We don't live with grandeur.

She climbed the career ladder in an environment dominated by men. Her director approves huge loans to government officials—loans that are never repaid. To himself as well. Omelogor’s words to him: Let me help you hide it better.

She is deeply affected by the story of an old man who did not receive his state pension for eleven months. He had to prove over and over again that he was still alive. And so he died in the blazing sun one morning while waiting to show that he was still alive. There was no money in the pension fund; it had been stolen.

Omelogor becomes a kind of Robin Hood who steals, extremely cleverly and subtly, from large accounts and gives the money in cash to women who sell food along the roadside or want to start a small business. They are almost without exception successful.

After that she goes to study pornography in America in order to expose the industry. She has a blog where she addresses men and tries to help them become better people, while making it clear that she is on their side. She returns to Nigeria broken, completely disillusioned by America.

Chia’s domestic worker Kadiatou is a woman who comes from Nigeria, but from a different region. She grew up poor. She received a refugee visa because she was subjected to female circumcision (mutilation). She works in a hotel and for Chia. One day she is assaulted in the hotel by an influential guest with an international profile, a sex pest who always gets away with it. The hotel opens a case, but will she—a poor refugee—receive justice in a world that revolves around men, money, and power? And what does she herself regard as justice?

It is a book that makes you think. On the surface, the women are almost superficial, with their obsessions with wigs, hair extensions, false eyelashes, nails, shoes and handbags and social media, their almost Jane Austen-like yearning for a happy marriage. But they are complicated and multidimensional. Each survives lockdown in her own way.

It is a strong feminist novel that asks quantum-physics-type questions such as:

In the final days of lockdown, I lay in bed thinking of all the things I left unsaid throughout the years, and all my futures that never were. Why do we remember what we remember? Which reels from our past assert their vivid selves and which remain dim, just out of reach? I remembered some fleeting encounters so clearly that I wondered if the remembering itself was significant.

I highly recommend it. There is an overwhelming, audacious honesty and vibrant turbulence to African novels, and food plays a major role. Nigerian dishes make my mouth water.

Deam Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is published by HarperCollins and costs R425 at Exclusive Books.