Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie strives for a holistic vision in her novel, Purple Hibiscus, one that integrates Igbo customs and language with Catholic ritual and which incorporates men into her gender politics and embraces the literary traditions of her elders – Chinua Achebe, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Alice Walker. If this sounds high flown, we need to understand that Adichie attempts to represent this syncretised world through the material culture and everyday realities of life in modern Nigeria. Solid objects – tables and chairs, grains of rice and ceramic ornaments – are syncretised with bodies and infused with spiritual life. They create a world where the boundaries between the living and the dead, the animate and the inanimate, the big and the small, the literal and the symbolic, words and things, are breached.

Where does this implicit belief in the power of the old gods sit in a novel by a Catholic African author? She says in an interview that she is ‘interested in colonized religion, how people like me can profess and preach a respect of their indigenous culture and yet cling so tenaciously to a religion that considers most of indigenous culture evil’ (Adichie in interview with Anya 2003: 15).