A Letter to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: A Mother’s Love, A son Lost, A Continent’s Unfinished Reckoning

Madam Chimamanda,
I do not know you personally, and you do not know me. But grief, when it belongs to a mother, does not require an introduction. It walks into every home that has ever loved a child, and it sits down uninvited. That is why I write to you today — not as a stranger reaching for your fame, but as a fellow African, a fellow parent in spirit, and a man who has read your words long before I ever had reason to write to you about your pain.

Your son is gone. No sentence I construct, however carefully, will undo that fact. But silence, too, felt like a wrong I did not wish to commit. So I offer you this instead: an honest account, told without exaggeration, of what happened to your boy, and a small tribute from a corner of West Africa that grieves alongside you.

What We Know
Nkanu Nnamdi — one half of the twin sons you and your husband, Dr Ivara Esege, had waited many years to hold — died in the early hours of January 7, 2026, in Lagos. He was twenty-one months old.

By the accounts you and your family have given, the trouble began simply enough. Your family had travelled home to Lagos for Christmas, as you had done in many years past, when your son developed what first looked like an ordinary cold. It worsened into a more serious infection, and he was admitted to Atlantis Hospital. Doctors there, working with a medical team from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore who were preparing to receive him for specialist care, arranged a series of procedures — an echocardiogram, a brain MRI, a lumbar puncture, and the insertion of a central line — ahead of a planned medical evacuation to the United States. Atlantis Hospital referred the family to Euracare Multi-Specialist Hospital, reportedly recommended as the facility best equipped to carry out these procedures.

It was there, your family has said, that everything went wrong. You have described how your son, sedated with propofol for the procedures, was not properly monitored afterward, and how he suffered a rapid and devastating decline — loss of responsiveness, seizures, and ultimately cardiac arrest. He did not survive the night.

A Family's Search for Answers

What has followed since is not only a family's mourning, but a public reckoning. On January 10, 2026, lawyers acting for you and Dr Esege — led by the senior advocate Kemi Pinheiro — served Euracare Hospital with a formal legal notice, alleging that the hospital, its anaesthesiologist, and other attending staff breached their duty of care. The notice raised concerns over inadequate monitoring, improper sedation dosing, insufficient oxygen supply, understaffing, delayed emergency response, informed consent, and the availability of resuscitation equipment. Euracare, for its part, expressed sympathy for your loss while disputing the account and announcing its own internal investigation.

The matter did not stay within the walls of one hospital. Lagos State Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu ordered a formal probe. The Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria opened its own investigation and, following its inquiry, found what it called a prima facie case of medical negligence against both Euracare and Atlantis Hospital in the management of your son's care. Three doctors, including the hospital's director, were provisionally suspended from practice pending a full disciplinary hearing. Separately, a coroner's inquest was opened at the Yaba Magistrate Court in Lagos, with proceedings scheduled to examine the full circumstances of his death.

I set these facts down plainly, Madam, because I believe your fight has never been about pity. It has been about the truth — about what exactly happened to your son in those hours, and about whether the systems meant to protect Nigerian children, rich or poor, famous or unknown, actually do.

In Fairness to All Sides
I would be doing you no honour, and doing no honour to my own trade as a writer, if I pretended that a court had already spoken. It has not. The Medical and Dental Council's finding is preliminary, a basis for disciplinary proceedings rather than a final verdict, and the coroner's inquest remains the proper forum for establishing, in full and under oath, what took place. Euracare Hospital has denied wrongdoing and deserves the same presumption that any accused party deserves under law, until the process runs its course. This is not a caveat I add to soften your grief. It is a caveat I add because you yourself, in the words you have used publicly, have asked not for a mob's verdict but for accountability arrived at properly — through documentation, through inquiry, through institutions doing the work they exist to do. That is the more difficult road, and the more honourable one.

What This Means for Us in Ghana
I write to you from Accra, not from Lagos, but the distance between our two capitals has never been very wide when it comes to matters of health. Many Ghanaian families know the particular helplessness of watching a loved one deteriorate in a hospital corridor while asking questions that go unanswered — about dosages, about delays, about why nobody senior appeared until it was too late. We have our own Euracares, under different names, in Accra, Kumasi, and Takoradi. Your son's death has therefore become, whether you intended it or not, a mirror held up to every hospital system in West Africa. If a family with your resources, your international networks, and your access to some of the finest doctors in two continents could still lose a child to what is alleged to be carelessness, then what protection does an ordinary market woman in Madina or a cocoa farmer in Sunyani truly have when she carries her sick child through a hospital gate?

In Akan tradition we say, obi nka obi — let no one bite another, let no one cause another needless harm. It is a proverb built for exactly this moment: a plea that the vulnerable, especially the smallest among us, should never pay with their lives for another's negligence. If your son's death forces even one hospital, in Lagos or in Accra, to tighten its protocols around sedation, monitoring, and emergency response, then his short life will have purchased a kind of protection for children he never met.

A Mother's Note, From One Writer to Another

Madam Chimamanda, I have long admired the courage with which you have written about difficult things — about war, about womanhood, about the half of a story that history often leaves untold. I never imagined you would one day have to write, or speak, about the hardest half of your own story: burying a son barely out of infancy, while his twin brother grows beside an empty space at the table. There is no literary device sturdy enough to carry that weight, and I will not insult your grief by pretending otherwise.

I write today only to say this: that your loss has been seen, and not only in Lagos or Abuja or Washington, but here too, in Accra, where mothers who have never read a page of your novels still understand, in their bones, exactly what has been taken from you. May the inquiry that lies ahead be thorough and honest. May whatever it uncovers spare another family your sorrow. And may the memory of Nkanu Nnamdi be, in the fullness of time, a gentle one — carried not only in grief, but in the changes his short life may yet compel.

With deep respect and heartfelt condolences,

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams

About the Author
Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian author, columnist, and filmmaker, and the founder of the Brownsy Silva Company, a multi-disciplinary creative platform spanning fiction, film, and opinion journalism. He writes regularly for Modern Ghana on topics ranging from African social affairs to global culture and public health, and is currently pursuing further studies in engineering in Accra.