I Am Not African: My Response to Dream Count

For there is no respect of persons with God. Romans 2:11 (KJV)

I recently finished reading Dream Count by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and I must say I was bored with the novel. Before I talk about the book, I want to be clear. This isn’t a book review. I’m not here to critique sentence structure or analyze symbolism. I’m writing to call something out.

My opinion isn’t just about this one book either. It’s about the worldview behind it. The posture, the assumptions, the gaze turned toward American ideals, and the subtle dismissal of us, ADOS, as if we’re not part of the American story.

In Dream Count, Adichie may be attempting the kind of layered introspection you’d expect from a Virginia Woolf novel. But she misses the mark. Rather than drawing us into an internal reckoning, she leans heavily into projection. What we get isn’t soul-searching. It’s finger-pointing.

And that finger?

It’s pointed squarely at Americans, both Black and white. The novel delivers a moral backlash, as if the societies still reckoning with corruption, exploitation, and their own colonial aftermath now stand as moral authorities.

Over the past several years, there’s been a growing awareness among us ADOS of an uncomfortable but undeniable truth. Many Africans, especially among the upwardly mobile class, carry a quiet but real disdain for Black Americans. It’s in the conversations. It’s in the podcasts. And in Dream Count, it’s baked into the narrative.

I don’t mean to suggest this is true of all Africans. It’s not. What I’m calling out is a particular elite class of Africans. These are the ones who benefit most from Western society, especially in America. They position themselves as cultural ambassadors, but their narratives sometimes carry an edge of superiority, especially when speaking about Black Americans. That’s the tension I’m naming here.

I remember reading Americanah by Adichie in my late thirties and thinking, okay, I hear her. There was something undeniable in her voice. Something sharp. Observant. She offered a lens many readers hadn’t seen before. It was the story of an African woman encountering America—not just America at large, but Black American culture in particular. I won’t lie. Her critique felt harsh at times. Her brandishing of Black people as fat, her critique of Black neighborhoods in comparison to places like Princeton, was obvious, but her lens felt blurred and narrow-minded. Even so, it rang with hints of truth.

What struck me most about Americanah was the haughtiness of the main character, Ifemelu. She moved through her American experience with a certain arrogance, as if her Africanness made her more “authentic” or somehow more connected to a real heritage. Meanwhile, the Black Americans she encountered were often portrayed as disconnected, lost, or consumed by the wounds of racism.

What complicated things, though, was how Ifemelu began to absorb the very contradictions she once stood apart from. She adopted American mannerisms, changed her accent, and moved through different cultural spaces. Sometimes she judged. Other times she tried to belong. She was moving back home and decided to get her hair braided as a way of connecting back to her homeland. In the end, when she returns to Nigeria, she’s met with a new label: Americanah. Her own people now see her as foreign. Her time in America marked her and changed her. She couldn’t just slip back into who she once was.

It’s supposed to be a love story at its core. But what truly shaped this novel was Ifemelu’s identity struggle in America. And I couldn’t shake the feeling. The same quiet judgment Ifemelu held toward Black Americans is the same judgment many African immigrants hold toward us in real life.

Let me begin by addressing some of the recurring themes I’ve noticed in both Americanah and Dream Count. Maybe this comes from something deep within me, a quiet hope that, one day, Africans will wake up and understand that ADOS aren’t trying to go back to Africa. We’re not searching for ancestral land or tribal ties. We want what they want—to live in a thriving Western society. For us, that means America. Not because we think it’s perfect, but because it’s ours. Our blood built it. Our history shaped it. We’re not lost. We’re rooted. And that’s why the subtle condescension in these narratives cuts so deep and now feels so offensive.

One theme that stood out to me in Dream Count, and honestly took me back to Americanah, was the topic of Black women’s hair. Back in my thirties, most of us were already wearing natural hair and getting our hair braided in small, sometimes dirty shops with African women braiding countless heads, speaking in a language we didn’t understand, popping their teeth, selling stories, and laughing among themselves. We sat there in silence, sometimes smiling, sometimes tolerating the push and pull of one or two women braiding every single strand of our hair. It was cultural. It was layered. That part of Americanah resonated with me because it felt real. And even though times have changed—Black Americans braid hair now too—those early exchanges between African women and Black American clients were complicated and familiar.

In Dream Count, Adichie revisits the hair theme. Chia, while dating a white Dutch man named Luuk, changes her hairstyle to a straight weave. It is Luuk who tells her he preferred the braids. That moment didn’t feel romantic. It felt revealing. Chia, so quick to adjust herself to please him, didn’t hesitate to change her look. Yet throughout the novel, she holds his culture with a kind of smug detachment, as if nothing outside Nigeria is worth honoring. The contradiction was clear. Even while judging others, she was still performing. Still shifting under the gaze of someone whose approval she craved.

Reading Dream Count, I feel that discomfort all over again. Except now, it feels worse. Overdone. Overused. Condescending. It’s like the disowning of American identity is presented as something righteous or enlightened. Africans are framed as the wise ones, and everyone else in the world is just running around lost and confused.

Throughout the novel, I felt trapped in the lives of the main characters. Not in a way that made me empathize, but in a way that made me feel stuck. By the end, I didn’t feel enlightened. I didn’t feel transformed. I felt exhausted. The deep dislike for America and Americans was constant. Beneath that disrespect was a deeper insult: the portrayal of Black Americans as pitiful byproducts of the West. Cultural orphans. Emotionally broken. Spiritually stunted.

And yet, the Africans in the novel? They’re no better.

Chia, in her whorish ways, flying around the world, in and out of this bed and that, somehow still manages to come off as prim and proper. Zakira reads like a prop. She’s flat, convenient, unformed—a single parent whose baby’s father abandoned her. Omogloso is a straight-up thief. And of course, there’s Kadiatou, the maid allegedly raped by a rich white man. This is a play on the true story of Nafissatou Diallo and her claim against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former IMF Director who would have run for president in France, alleging he had sexually assaulted her at the Sofitel Hotel in New York. Adichie makes it clear that Diallo wasn’t a liar and that the world should believe her story simply because she’s African. Kadiatou is Diallo, and surely she must be believed. There’s no need for nuance. No room for doubt. As if virtue is inherited through suffering. As if she, by birthright alone, couldn’t possibly lie. The truth of that matter may never be resolved, as the civil case was settled. A scam? Who knows. But somehow Adichie sets Diallo free by setting Kadiatou free.

There’s a moment in Dream Count when a Black American character is introduced. But she quickly disappears, swallowed by a narrative that centers whiteness and foreign elite perspectives. The white characters, by contrast, are front and center. They are used either as fake saviors, symbols of decadence, or props in the moral commentary. Then there’s a scene where a Black American girl visits Nigeria and walks into a store, only to be scolded for taking pictures of the dusty shop. It’s played for sentiment, but the undertone is clear. She didn’t belong there. Later, this same Black American is portrayed as ignorant when she fails to grasp the horror of a man caught with human body parts in Lagos. Her confusion is treated as proof of her detachment from African “culture.” These moments aren’t just literary. They’re loaded. They reduce Black Americans to outsiders, observers, and often, quiet punchlines. It’s a form of narrative discipline. You don’t know who you are.

I don’t deny it. My perspective could be off. I could be biased. But I’ve heard it firsthand—interviews with individuals from various African countries who recall being warned by their parents to stay away from ADOS. As if we are the bad part of America. As if we’re not truly part of America. As if we don’t belong here.

This is the sentiment running through Dream Count. America equals whiteness. It’s not Black Americans they seek to be accepted by. They feign acceptance by white society. We’re painted as lazy bystanders, just happening to live in America, adding nothing of value. They pretend that wealth and their Western education make them superior. We’re looked at with a strange mix of pity, suspicion, or outright dismissal. But they never look honestly at the countries they come from—countries where even the poorest ADOS often fare better than billions living under broken systems and corrupt leadership.

Consider Nigeria today, Adichie’s homeland—a struggling state crumbling under its own contradictions. Its deepening ties with China, through loans for projects like the Lagos-Calabar railway, have fueled a debt crisis, with the naira plummeting over 70 percent in value since 2015 and inflation soaring. Corruption and oil dependency compound the economic decay, while conflicts such as Boko Haram in the northeast, banditry in the northwest, and separatist violence in the southeast tear at the nation’s fabric.

Yet, in Americanah, there’s this air that—despite all the strikes and unrest—Nigeria is a country on par with the United States. We see Aunty Uju, mistress to a married Nigerian general, travel to the United States to give birth on American soil, securing U.S. citizenship for her son, Dike. This act speaks volumes. And in Dream Count, Zikora has her baby in the U.S. as well. One thing the book makes clear is that for many African elites from countries like Nigeria, America represents the ultimate prize—offering stability, opportunity, and the trappings of Western norms. Adichie herself lives in the U.S. with her husband, a Nigerian doctor, while Nigeria is begging for more doctors and nurses to care for its communities. She romanticizes Africa—Nigeria in particular—and fills her novels with characters who long for Nigeria’s cultural roots while chasing America’s promise. It’s a paradox. They critique the West yet covet its benefits, tiptoeing around the failures of their own systems.

To be honest, Dream Count also feels like a repackaged version of stories we’ve already seen. Adichie seems to borrow heavily from the four-woman model made famous by Black American sitcoms like Living Single and Girlfriends. The career woman. The flighty one. The loyal one. The rebel. It’s a genre born out of the Black American experience—a distinctly cultural way of storytelling shaped by our humor, our struggle, our friendships, and our pursuit of selfhood in a world that often denies it. Now it’s rebranded through an African lens and sold back to readers like me. But those stories of figuring out life, love, and profession have already been told. And better.

To be plain about my view, Adichie’s narrative is played out. Overdone. What’s missing isn’t cleverness. It’s true self-reflection. In the novel, there’s so much projection. Every character looks outward, never inward. The main characters are painted as unfortunate victims of colonization, greed, and idolatry. They speak of corruption and greed, but it’s just their way. They never stop to examine their own choices or their own complicity. They don’t seem capable of holding a mirror to themselves. Instead, like dogs, they bark for American acceptance and cast scornful eyes at ADOS.

As we read these books and listen to African critics of ADOS, we need to sit back and reflect on a few things.

To start, Africa is the poorest continent in the world, and it’s been that way for centuries. It’s riddled with corruption, poverty, famine, disease, war, and idolatry. All of it is wrapped in the lie of so-called African spirituality. This is a land overflowing with minerals and natural resources, yet it’s constantly pillaged and plundered. Those who manage to escape the devastation often do so on the backs of the starving poor.

Greedy leaders rob their nations blind, then send their children to live Western lives. Lavish. Safe. Far removed from the suffering back home. They long to be like white Americans. Yet they take the best parts of the ADOS culture—our music, our fashion, even our words—and pretend it’s theirs, trying to live out an American lifestyle while remaining disconnected from our community.

We should remember that. So the next time a finger is pointed at us, we can look right back and say: I am American. I was born this way. I am not African.

I know there are some ADOS who long to return to the homeland. Some have made their way back—to Ghana, to Kenya—only to be confronted with the truth. Even in Africa, they are still seen as American.

Africans, especially those writing for the West, need to wake up and start doing something to save their own homelands. They need to build. They need to fight corruption. They need to protect their people. And they need to stop pretending they hold the moral high ground.

Because Dream Count makes it painfully clear. Many who come to America from Africa arrive with an agenda. And it’s not always as noble as they’d like us to believe.

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© 2025 Jacqueline Session Ausby. All rights reserved. This post and all original content published under DahTruth are the intellectual property of Jacqueline Session Ausby. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.