In an interview with the British journalist Stephen Moss, published on The Guardian website, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recounts a conversation with an American professor at the university where she was a postgraduate student, who refused to believe in the veracity of her first novel Purple Hibiscus (2003):

In this interview, Adichie's story about the Johns Hopkins’ professor attests to continuing stereotypes about Africa and Africans, even in elite university circles in the global North. In part, this seems symptomatic of a homogenising tendency, as expressed by that professor, which refuses to recognise class differences in African countries, or that some Africans occupy an environment increasingly recognisable as middle class. But if we are to investigate modern Nigerian and African identities being shaped and transformed by globalising and localising tendencies, the question of social class cannot be ignored.

I want to explore how African authors are representing themselves within cyberspace both as African people and as individuals with a burgeoning self-identification as middle class. As previously alluded to, I use the term ‘middle class’ to designate those who possess the accoutrements of a middle class in terms of education and cultural capital. Illustrating from Nigerian examples, I will discuss how some online writings operate to consolidate the notion of a middle-class identity, how this both performs as something indigenously Nigerian and also reaches towards an international middle-class audience.

The issue of class identity offers the opportunity to robustly unpack the complexity of Nigeria and Kenya in the twenty-first century and it highlights the intersection of literary sociability and class consciousness.