Summary

Ndibe and his wife make plans to celebrate Christmas with non-Nigerian friends in New Britain, Connecticut. Ndibe always looks forward to chicken and rice on Christmas, per Nigerian tradition. When no rice or chicken is served, he insists to his wife, Sheri, that they go home and make some. Upon doing so, they receive a voicemail from Wole Soyinka, a poet Ndibe has admired since secondary school. Soyinka was imprisoned in Nigeria after lobbying international governments against supplying weapons to the parties in the Biafran War. He wrote a memoir about his imprisonment that Ndibe found difficult upon his first reading of it, but continues to draw more meaning from it each time he rereads it. He describes Soyinka’s memoir, The Man Died, as an answer to the question of why people commit atrocities: silence enables tyranny. A...