On this day one year ago, I lost my dear mother to cancer. It has been the toughest as well as the most conscious year in my life. Conscious, because as Janis Joplin sang, “Freedom is just another word for nothing left to loose,” and having lost the most important person in my life, those lines…
Archives for May 2016
Writing about gender politics in a new column
A few months before the Nigerian journalist Dele Giwa was murdered in 1986, he was on a flight from Europe to Lagos. I know this because I happened to sit next to him on that flight. My age at the time was eight, so when the news about his murder came out, I was old enough…
Africa, Feminism, Doublethink
Doublethink was described by George Orwell in his legendary book, 1984, as the ability to simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs. But unlike cognitive dissonance, a related term where contradictory beliefs cause conflict in a person’s mind, doublethink is marked by complete unawareness of holding contradicting views. In a piece for The Guardian Nigeria titled “Feminism…