Okoloma was one of my greatest childhood friends. He lived on my street and looked after me like a big
\nbrother: if I liked a boy, I would ask Okoloma\u2019s opinion. Okoloma was funny and intelligent and wore
\ncowboy boots that were pointy at the tips. In December 2005, in a plane crash in southern Nigeria,
\nOkoloma died. It is still hard for me to put into words how I felt. Okoloma was a person I could argue
\nwith, laugh with and truly talk to. He was also the first person to call me a feminist.
\nI was about fourteen. We were in his house, arguing, both of us bristling with half-baked knowledge
\nfrom the books we had read. I don\u2019t remember what this particular argument was about. But I remember
\nthat as I argued and argued, Okoloma looked at me and said, \u2018You know, you\u2019re a feminist.\u2019
\nIt was not a compliment. I could tell from his tone \u2013 the same tone with which a person would say,
\n\u2018You\u2019re a supporter of terrorism.\u2019
\nI did not know exactly what this word feminist meant. And I did not want Okoloma to know that I
\ndidn\u2019t know. So I brushed it aside and continued to argue. The first thing I planned to do when I got home
\nwas look up the word in the dictionary.
\nNow fast-forward to some years later.
\nIn 2003, I wrote a novel called Purple Hibiscus, about a man who, among other things, beats his wife,
\nand whose story doesn\u2019t end too well. While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria, a journalist, a nice,
\nwell-meaning man, told me he wanted to advise me. (Nigerians, as you might know, are very quick to give
\nunsolicited advice.)
\nHe told me that people were saying my novel was feminist, and his advice to me \u2013 he was shaking his
\nhead sadly as he spoke \u2013 was that I should never call myself a feminist, since feminists are women who
\nare unhappy because they cannot find husbands.
\nSo I decided to call myself a Happy Feminist.
\nThen an academic, a Nigerian woman, told me that feminism was not our culture, that feminism was un-
\nAfrican, and I was only calling myself a feminist because I had been influenced by Western books. (Which
\namused me, because much of my early reading was decidedly unfeminist: I must have read every single
\nMills & Boon romance published before I was sixteen. And each time I try to read those books called
\n\u2018classic feminist texts\u2019, I get bored, and I struggle to finish them.)
\nAnyway, since feminism was un-African, I decided I would now call myself a Happy African Feminist.
\nThen a dear friend told me that calling myself a feminist meant that I hated men. So I decided I would now
\nbe a Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men. At some point I was a Happy African Feminist
\nWho Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes To Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For
\nMen.
\nOf course much of this was tongue-in-cheek, but what it shows is how that word feminist is so heavy
\nwith baggage, negative baggage: you hate men, you hate bras, you hate African culture, you think women
\nshould always be in charge, you don\u2019t wear make-up, you don\u2019t shave, you\u2019re always angry, you don\u2019t
\nhave a sense of humour, you don\u2019t use deodorant.
\nNow here\u2019s a story from my childhood.
\nWhen I was in primary school in Nsukka, a university town in south-eastern Nigeria, my teacher said at
\nthe beginning of term that she would give the class a test and whoever got the highest score would be the
\nclass monitor. Class monitor was a big deal. If you were class monitor, you would write down the names
\nof noise-makers each day, which was heady enough power on its own, but my teacher would also give
\nyou a cane to hold in your hand while you walked around and patrolled the class for noise-makers. Of
\ncourse, you were not allowed to actually use the cane. But it was an exciting prospect for the nine-year-
\nold me. I very much wanted to be class monitor. And I got the highest score on the test.
\nThen, to my surprise, my teacher said the monitor had to be a boy. She had forgotten to make that clear
\nearlier; she assumed it was obvious. A boy had the second-highest score on the test. And he would be
\nmonitor.
\nWhat was even more interesting is that this boy was a sweet, gentle soul who had no interest in
\npatrolling the class with a stick. While I was full of ambition to do so.
\nBut I was female and he was male and he became class monitor.
\nI have never forgotten that incident.
\nIf we do something over and over again, it becomes normal. If we see the same thing over and over
\nagain, it becomes normal. If only boys are made class monitor, then at some point we will all think, even
\nif unconsciously, that the class monitor has to be a boy. If we keep seeing only men as heads of
\ncorporations, it starts to seem \u2018natural\u2019 that only men should be heads of corporations.
\nI often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone
\nelse. Take my dear friend Louis, who is a brilliant, progressive man. We would have conversations and
\nhe would tell me, \u2018I don\u2019t see what you mean by things being different and harder for women. Maybe it
\nwas so in the past, but not now. Everything is fine now for women.\u2019 I didn\u2019t understand how Louis could
\nnot see what seemed so evident.
\nI love being back home in Nigeria, and spend much of my time there in Lagos, the largest city and
\ncommercial hub of the country. Sometimes, in the evenings when the heat goes down and the city has a
\nslower pace, I go out with friends and family to restaurants or caf\u00e9s. On one of those evenings, Louis and
\nI were out with friends.
\nThere is a wonderful fixture in Lagos: a sprinkling of energetic young men who hang around outside
\ncertain establishments and very dramatically \u2018help\u2019 you park your car. Lagos is a metropolis of almost
\ntwenty million people, with more energy than London, more entrepreneurial spirit than New York, and so
\npeople come up with all sorts of ways to make a living. As in most big cities, finding parking in the
\nevenings can be difficult, so these young men make a business out of finding spots and \u2013 even when there
\nare spots available \u2013 of guiding you into yours with much gesticulating, and promising to \u2018look after\u2019 your
\ncar until you get back. I was impressed with the particular theatrics of the man who found us a parking
\nspot that evening. And so as we were leaving, I decided to give him a tip. I opened my bag, put my hand
\ninside my bag to get my money, and I gave it to the man. And he, this man who was happy and grateful,
\ntook the money from me, and then looked across at Louis and said, \u2018Thank you, sah!\u2019
\nLouis looked at me, surprised, and asked, \u2018Why is he thanking me? I didn\u2019t give him the money.\u2019 Then I
\nsaw realization dawn on Louis\u2019s face. The man believed that whatever money I had ultimately came from
\nLouis. Because Louis is a man.
\nMen and women are different. We have different hormones and different sexual organs and different
\nbiological abilities \u2013 women can have babies, men cannot. Men have more testosterone and are, in
\ngeneral, physically stronger than women. There are slightly more women than men in the world \u2013 52 per
\ncent of the world\u2019s population is female but most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by
\nmen. The late Kenyan Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai put it simply and well when she said, \u2018The
\nhigher you go, the fewer women there are.\u2019
\nIn the recent US elections, we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law, and if we go beyond that nicely
\nalliterative name, it was really about this: in the US, a man and a woman are doing the same job, with the
\nsame qualifications, and the man is paid more because he is a man.
\nSo in a literal way, men rule the world. This made sense \u2013 a thousand years ago. Because human beings
\nlived then in a world in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival; the
\nphysically stronger person was more likely to lead. And men in general are physically stronger. (There
\nare of course many exceptions.) Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to
\nlead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more
\ncreative, more innovative. And there are no hormones for those attributes. A man is as likely as a woman
\nto be intelligent, innovative, creative. We have evolved. But our ideas of gender have not evolved very
\nmuch.
\nNot long ago, I walked into the lobby of one of the best Nigerian hotels, and a guard at the entrance
\nstopped me and asked me annoying questions \u2013 What was the name and room number of the person I was
\nvisiting? Did I know this person? Could I prove that I was a hotel guest by showing him my key card? \u2013
\nbecause the automatic assumption is that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker.
\nBecause a Nigerian female alone cannot possibly be a guest paying for her own room. A man who walks
\ninto the same hotel is not harassed. The assumption is that he is there for something legitimate. (Why, by
\nthe way, do those hotels not focus on the demand for sex workers instead of on the ostensible supply?)
\nIn Lagos, I cannot go alone into many reputable clubs and bars. They just don\u2019t let you in if you are a
\nwoman alone. You must be accompanied by a man. And so I have male friends who arrive at clubs and
\nend up going in with their arms linked with those of a complete stranger, because that complete stranger, a
\nwoman out on her own, had no choice but to ask for \u2018help\u2019 to get into the club.
\nEach time I walk into a Nigerian restaurant with a man, the waiter greets the man and ignores me. The
\nwaiters are products of a society that has taught them that men are more important than women, and I know
\nthat they don\u2019t intend harm, but it is one thing to know something intellectually and quite another to feel it
\nemotionally. Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible. I feel upset. I want to tell them that I am just as
\nhuman as the man, just as worthy of acknowledgement. These are little things, but sometimes it is the little
\nthings that sting the most.
\nNot long ago, I wrote an article about being young and female in Lagos. And an acquaintance told me
\nthat it was an angry article, and I should not have made it so angry. But I was unapologetic. Of course it
\nwas angry. Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice. I am angry. We should all be angry. Anger has
\na long history of bringing about positive change. But I am also hopeful, because I believe deeply in the
\nability of human beings to remake themselves for the better.
\nBut back to anger. I heard the caution in the acquaintance\u2019s tone, and I knew that the comment was as
\nmuch about the article as it was about my character. Anger, the tone said, is particularly not good for a
\nwoman. If you are a woman, you are not supposed to express anger, because it is threatening. I have a
\nfriend, an American woman, who took over a managerial position from a man. Her predecessor had been
\nconsidered a \u2018tough go-getter\u2019; he was blunt and hard-charging and was particularly strict about the
\nsigning of time sheets. She took on her new job, and imagined herself equally tough, but perhaps a little
\nkinder than him \u2013 he didn\u2019t always realize that people had families, she said, and she did. Only weeks
\ninto her new job, she disciplined an employee about a forgery on a time sheet, just as her predecessor
\nwould have done. The employee then complained to top management about her style. She was aggressive
\nand difficult to work with, the employee said. Other employees agreed. One said they had expected that
\nshe would bring a \u2018woman\u2019s touch\u2019 to her job, but she hadn\u2019t.
\nIt didn\u2019t occur to any of them that she was doing the same thing for which a man had been praised.
\nI have another friend, also an American woman, who has a high-paying job in advertising. She is one of
\ntwo women in her team. Once, at a meeting, she said she had felt slighted by her boss, who had ignored
\nher comments and then praised something similar when it came from a man. She wanted to speak up, to
\nchallenge her boss. But she didn\u2019t. Instead, after the meeting, she went to the bathroom and cried, then
\ncalled me to vent about it. She didn\u2019t want to speak up because she didn\u2019t want to seem aggressive. She
\nlet her resentments simmer.
\nWhat struck me \u2013 with her and with many other female American friends I have \u2013 is how invested they
\nare in being \u2018liked\u2019. How they have been raised to believe that their being likeable is very important and
\nthat this \u2018likeable\u2019 trait is a specific thing. And that specific thing does not include showing anger or being
\naggressive or disagreeing too loudly.
\nWe spend too much time teaching girls to worry about what boys think of them. But the reverse is not
\nthe case. We don\u2019t teach boys to care about being likeable. We spend too much time telling girls that they
\ncannot be angry or aggressive or tough, which is bad enough, but then we turn around and either praise or
\nexcuse men for the same reasons. All over the world, there are so many magazine articles and books
\ntelling women what to do, how to be and not to be, in order to attract or please men. There are far fewer
\nguides for men about pleasing women.
\nI teach a writing workshop in Lagos and one of the participants, a young woman, told me that a friend
\nhad told her not to listen to my \u2018feminist talk\u2019; otherwise she would absorb ideas that would destroy her
\nmarriage. This is a threat \u2013 the destruction of a marriage, the possibility of not having a marriage at all \u2013
\nthat in our society is much more likely to be used against a woman than against a man.
\nGender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we should begin to dream
\nabout and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are
\ntruer to themselves. And this is how to start: we must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise
\nour sons differently.
\nWe do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define
\nmasculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.
\nWe teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true
\nselves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak, a hard man.
\nIn secondary school, a boy and a girl go out, both of them teenagers with meagre pocket money. Yet the
\nboy is expected to pay the bills, always, to prove his masculinity. (And we wonder why boys are more
\nlikely to steal money from their parents.)
\nWhat if both boys and girls were raised not to link masculinity and money? What if their attitude was
\nnot \u2018the boy has to pay\u2019, but rather, \u2018whoever has more should pay\u2019? Of course, because of their historical
\nadvantage, it is mostly men who will have more today. But if we start raising children differently, then in
\nfifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by
\nmaterial means.
\nBut by far the worst thing we do to males \u2013 by making them feel they have to be hard \u2013 is that we leave
\nthem with very fragile egos. The harder a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is.
\nAnd then we do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of
\nmales.
\nWe teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.
\nWe say to girls, \u2018You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too
\nsuccessful, otherwise you will threaten the man. If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a
\nman, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him.\u2019
\nBut what if we question the premise itself? Why should a woman\u2019s success be a threat to a man? What
\nif we decide to simply dispose of that word \u2013 and I don\u2019t know if there is an English word I dislike more
\nthan this \u2013 emasculation.
\nA Nigerian acquaintance once asked me if I was worried that men would be intimidated by me.
\nI was not worried at all \u2013 it had not even occurred to me to be worried, because a man who would be
\nintimidated by me is exactly the kind of man I would have no interest in.
\nStill, I was struck by this. Because I am female, I\u2019m expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to
\nmake my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Marriage can be a good
\nthing, a source of joy, love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage, yet we
\ndon\u2019t teach boys to do the same?
\nI know a Nigerian woman who decided to sell her house because she didn\u2019t want to intimidate a man
\nwho might want to marry her.
\nI know an unmarried woman in Nigeria who, when she goes to conferences, wears a wedding ring
\nbecause she wants her colleagues to \u2013 according to her \u2013 \u2018give her respect\u2019.
\nThe sadness in this is that a wedding ring will indeed automatically make her seem worthy of respect,
\nwhile not wearing a wedding ring would make her easily dismissible \u2013 and this is in a modern
\nworkplace.
\nI know young women who are under so much pressure \u2013 from family, from friends, even from work \u2013 to
\nget married that they are pushed to make terrible choices.
\nOur society teaches a woman at a certain age who is unmarried to see it as a deep personal failure.
\nWhile a man at a certain age who is unmarried has not quite come around to making his pick.
\nIt is easy to say, \u2018But women can just say no to all this.\u2019 But the reality is more difficult, more complex.
\nWe are all social beings. We internalize ideas from our socialization.
\nEven the language we use illustrates this. The language of marriage is often a language of ownership,
\nnot a language of partnership.
\nWe use the word respect for something a woman shows a man, but not often for something a man shows
\na woman.
\nBoth men and women will say, \u2018I did it for peace in my marriage.\u2019
\nWhen men say it, it is usually about something they should not be doing anyway. Something they say to
\ntheir friends in a fondly exasperated way, something that ultimately proves to them their masculinity \u2013
\n\u2018Oh, my wife said I can\u2019t go to clubs every night, so now, for peace in my marriage, I go only on
\nweekends.\u2019
\nWhen women say \u2018I did it for peace in my marriage,\u2019 it is usually because they have given up a job, a
\ncareer goal, a dream.
\nWe teach females that in relationships, compromise is what a woman is more likely to do.
\nWe raise girls to see each other as competitors \u2013 not for jobs or accomplishments, which in my opinion
\ncan be a good thing, but for the attention of men.
\nWe teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are. If we have sons, we don\u2019t mind
\nknowing about their girlfriends. But our daughters\u2019 boyfriends? God forbid. (But we of course expect
\nthem to bring home the perfect man for marriage when the time is right.)
\nWe police girls. We praise girls for virginity but we don\u2019t praise boys for virginity (and it makes me
\nwonder how exactly this is supposed to work out, since the loss of virginity is a process that usually
\ninvolves two people of opposite genders).
\nRecently a young woman was gang-raped in a university in Nigeria, and the response of many young
\nNigerians, both male and female, was something like this: \u2018Yes, rape is wrong, but what is a girl doing in
\na room with four boys?\u2019
\nLet us, if we can, forget the horrible inhumanity of that response. These Nigerians have been raised to
\nthink of women as inherently guilty. And they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of
\nmen as savage beings with no self-control is somehow acceptable.
\nWe teach girls shame. Close your legs. Cover yourself. We make them feel as though by being born
\nfemale, they are already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have
\ndesire. Who silence themselves. Who cannot say what they truly think. Who have turned pretence into an
\nart form.
\nI know a woman who hates domestic work, but she pretends that she likes it, because she has been
\ntaught that to be \u2018good wife material\u2019, she has to be \u2013 to use that Nigerian word \u2013 homely. And then she
\ngot married. And her husband\u2019s family began to complain that she had changed. Actually, she had not
\nchanged. She just got tired of pretending to be what she was not.
\nThe problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are.
\nImagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves, if we didn\u2019t
\nhave the weight of gender expectations.
\nBoys and girls are undeniably different biologically, but socialization exaggerates the differences, and
\nthen starts a self-fulfilling process. Take cooking, for example. Today, women in general are more likely
\nto do housework than men \u2013 cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a
\ncooking gene or because over the years they have been socialized to see cooking as their role? I was
\ngoing to say that perhaps women are born with a cooking gene until I remembered that the majority of
\nfamous cooks in the world \u2013 who are given the fancy title of \u2018chef\u2019 \u2013 are men.
\nI used to look at my grandmother, a brilliant woman, and wonder what she would have been if she\u2019d
\nhad the same opportunities as men during her youth. Today, there are more opportunities for women than
\nthere were during my grandmother\u2019s time, because of changes in policy and law, which are very
\nimportant.
\nBut what matters even more is our attitude, our mindset.
\nWhat if, in raising children, we focus on ability instead of gender? What if we focus on interest instead
\nof gender?
\nI know a family who has a son and a daughter, a year apart in age, both brilliant at school. When the boy
\nis hungry, the parents say to the girl, \u2018Go and cook Indomie noodles for your brother.\u2019 The girl doesn\u2019t like
\nto cook Indomie noodles, but she is a girl and she has to. What if the parents, from the beginning, taught
\nboth children to cook them? Cooking, by the way, is a useful and practical life skill for a boy to have. I\u2019ve
\nnever thought it made much sense to leave such a crucial thing \u2013 the ability to nourish oneself \u2013 in the
\nhands of others.
\nI know a woman who has the same degree and same job as her husband. When they get back from work,
\nshe does most of the housework, which is true for many marriages, but what struck me was that whenever
\nhe changed the baby\u2019s nappy, she said thank you to him. What if she saw it as something normal and
\nnatural, that he should help care for his child?
\nI am trying to unlearn many lessons of gender I internalized while growing up. But I sometimes still feel
\nvulnerable in the face of gender expectations.
\nThe first time I taught a writing class in graduate school, I was worried. Not about the teaching
\nmaterial, because I was well prepared and I was teaching what I enjoyed. Instead I was worried about
\nwhat to wear. I wanted to be taken seriously.
\nI knew that because I was female, I would automatically have to prove my worth. And I was worried
\nthat if I looked too feminine, I would not be taken seriously. I really wanted to wear my shiny lip gloss
\nand my girly skirt, but I decided not to. I wore a very serious, very manly and very ugly suit.
\nThe sad truth of the matter is that when it comes to appearance, we start off with men as the standard, as
\nthe norm. Many of us think that the less feminine a woman appears, the more likely she is to be taken
\nseriously. A man going to a business meeting doesn\u2019t wonder about being taken seriously based on what
\nhe is wearing \u2013 but a woman does.
\nI wish I had not worn that ugly suit that day. Had I then the confidence I have now to be myself, my
\nstudents would have benefited even more from my teaching. Because I would have been more comfortable
\nand more fully and truly myself.
\nI have chosen to no longer be apologetic for my femininity. And I want to be respected in all my
\nfemaleness. Because I deserve to be. I like politics and history and am happiest when having a good
\nargument about ideas. I am girly. I am happily girly. I like high heels and trying on lipsticks. It\u2019s nice to be
\ncomplimented by both men and women (although I have to be honest and say that I prefer the compliments
\nof stylish women), but I often wear clothes that men don\u2019t like or don\u2019t \u2018understand\u2019. I wear them because
\nI like them and because I feel good in them. The \u2018male gaze\u2019, as a shaper of my life\u2019s choices, is largely
\nincidental.
\nGender is not an easy conversation to have. It makes people uncomfortable, sometimes even irritable.
\nBoth men and women are resistant to talk about gender, or are quick to dismiss the problems of gender.
\nBecause thinking of changing the status quo is always uncomfortable.
\nSome people ask, \u2018Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or
\nsomething like that?\u2019 Because that would be dishonest. Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in
\ngeneral \u2013 but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular
\nproblem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been
\nexcluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women. That the problem was
\nnot about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided
\nhuman beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the
\nsolution to the problem should acknowledge that.
\nSome men feel threatened by the idea of feminism. This comes, I think, from the insecurity triggered by
\nhow boys are brought up, how their sense of self-worth is diminished if they are not \u2018naturally\u2019 in charge
\nas men.
\nOther men might respond by saying, \u2018Okay, this is interesting, but I don\u2019t think like that. I don\u2019t even think
\nabout gender.\u2019
\nMaybe not.
\nAnd that is part of the problem. That many men do not actively think about gender or notice gender.
\nThat many men say, like my friend Louis did, that things might have been bad in the past but everything is
\nfine now. And that many men do nothing to change it. If you are a man and you walk into a restaurant and
\nthe waiter greets just you, does it occur to you to ask the waiter, \u2018Why have you not greeted her?\u2019 Men
\nneed to speak out in all of these ostensibly small situations.
\nBecause gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation.
\nSome people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes \u2013 that
\nsort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.
\nSome people will say, \u2018Well, poor men also have a hard time.\u2019 And they do.
\nBut that is not what this conversation is about. Gender and class are different. Poor men still have the
\nprivileges of being men, even if they do not have the privileges of being wealthy. I learned a lot about
\nsystems of oppression and how they can be blind to one another by talking to black men. I was once
\ntalking about gender and a man said to me, \u2018Why does it have to be you as a woman? Why not you as a
\nhuman being?\u2019 This type of question is a way of silencing a person\u2019s specific experiences. Of course I am
\na human being, but there are particular things that happen to me in the world because I am a woman. This
\nsame man, by the way, would often talk about his experience as a black man. (To which I should probably
\nhave responded, \u2018Why not your experiences as a man or as a human being? Why a black man?\u2019)
\nSo, no, this conversation is about gender. Some people will say, \u2018Oh, but women have the real power:
\nbottom power.\u2019 (This is a Nigerian expression for a woman who uses her sexuality to get things from
\nmen.) But bottom power is not power at all, because the woman with bottom power is actually not
\npowerful; she just has a good route to tap another person\u2019s power. And then what happens if the man is in
\na bad mood or sick or temporarily impotent?
\nSome people will say a woman is subordinate to men because it\u2019s our culture. But culture is constantly
\nchanging. I have beautiful twin nieces who are fifteen. If they had been born a hundred years ago, they
\nwould have been taken away and killed. Because a hundred years ago, Igbo culture considered the birth of
\ntwins to be an evil omen. Today that practice is unimaginable to all Igbo people.
\nWhat is the point of culture? Culture functions ultimately to ensure the preservation and continuity of a
\npeople. In my family, I am the child who is most interested in the story of who we are, in ancestral lands,
\nin our tradition. My brothers are not as interested as I am. But I cannot participate, because Igbo culture
\nprivileges men, and only the male members of the extended family can attend the meetings where major
\nfamily decisions are taken. So although I am the one who is most interested in these things, I cannot attend
\nthe meeting. I cannot have a formal say. Because I am female.
\nCulture does not make people. People make culture. If it is true that the full humanity of women is not
\nour culture, then we can and must make it our culture.
\nI think very often of my friend Okoloma. May he and others who passed away in that Sosoliso crash
\ncontinue to rest in peace. He will always be remembered by those of us who loved him. And he was right,
\nthat day, many years ago, when he called me a feminist. I am a feminist.
\nAnd when, all those years ago, I looked the word up in the dictionary, it said: Feminist: a person who
\nbelieves in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.
\nMy great-grandmother, from stories I\u2019ve heard, was a feminist. She ran away from the house of the man
\nshe did not want to marry and married the man of her choice. She refused, protested, spoke up whenever
\nshe felt she was being deprived of land and access because she was female. She did not know that word
\nfeminist. But it doesn\u2019t mean she wasn\u2019t one. More of us should reclaim that word. The best feminist I
\nknow is my brother Kene, who is also a kind, good-looking and very masculine young man. My own
\ndefinition of a feminist is a man or a woman who says, \u2018Yes, there\u2019s a problem with gender as it is today
\nand we must fix it, we must do better.\u2019<\/p>\n
———<\/p>\n
One of my best childhood friends was Okoloma. He lived on my street and was like a big brother to me: if I was interested in a boy, I would seek Okoloma’s advice. Okoloma was a witty, clever woman who wore a<\/p>\n
The tips of the cowboy boots were pointed. In a plane crash in southern Nigeria in December 2005,<\/p>\n
Okoloma passed away. It’s still difficult for me to express how I felt. Okoloma was a person with whom I could disagree.<\/p>\n
with, laugh with, and actually converse with He was the first person to refer to me as a feminist.<\/p>\n
I was about fourteen years old at the time. We were in his house, arguing, both of us bristling with half-baked knowledge<\/p>\n
based on the novels we’d read I don\u2019t remember what this particular<\/p>\n
All of us, women and men, must do better.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Okoloma was one of my greatest childhood friends. He lived on my street and looked after me like a big brother: if I liked a\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9033,7586,1386,7589,9034,9031,7587,7588,7584,7585,9032],"tags":[8809,7838,8811,8808,8813,8807,8806,8814,8810,8812],"class_list":["post-106810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-assignment-help-uae","category-best-dissertation-writing-service-in-australia","category-best-research-paper-writing-services-in-usa","category-capstone-project-writing-service","category-cheap-essay-writing-services-china","category-essay-writing-service-usa","category-legitimate-phd-dissertation-writing-services-usa","category-term-paper-writing-service","category-thesis-writing-service-in-canada","category-uae-best-dissertation-writing-help-service","category-write-my-essay-australia","tag-best-master-thesis-writing-service","tag-best-thesis-writing-services","tag-cheap-thesis-writing-services","tag-master-thesis-help","tag-master-thesis-writing-service","tag-thesis-help-online-free","tag-thesis-writing-help-online","tag-thesis-writing-services-cost","tag-thesis-writing-services-near-me","tag-thesis-writing-services-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.studyproessays.com\/help\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}