Women authors from Nigeria

"I come from a place where there are opportunities staring you in the eye, but it's looking for the people who have the heart and the courage to do it and do it right."

"Sometimes you have to take a hard decision and when you take such a decision, you have to stand by it. It’s not everybody who sees what you are seeing."

"As a people, we have the power of choice. We get to choose who we are, what we become, and what we do."

"When you are pursuing your dreams and trying to leave a legacy, you will find help."

"There are Challenges everywhere you must have Tenacity; you must have the strength of character not to cheat."

"We will not stop until every Nigerian girl-child has found their voice and found their pocket."

"Financial services are the lifeblood of an economy, enabling households and businesses alike to save, invest, and protect themselves against risk."

"Success in financial inclusion entails reaching these users with products that can significantly improve financial lives."

"We should criticise ourselves, but we should criticize to build. We should see a problem and be angry about it and innovate and seek to find the solution to the problem because we know why we want to do it. Because we know that this country must work."

"I want my nation to work, I want to be able to tell my children this is why I say you must live in Nigeria and nowhere else."

"The Nigerian woman is smart, beautiful, fashionable, driven, purposeful and has the capacity to take on the world without fear, that is not a tool you leave at home when you are building leadership"

"For a country that needs help, women are key to the success of Nigeria."

"Wherever you sit, look behind you, how has it benefited other women constructively because sometimes, you can’t do what your friends want, but you must do what is strategically effective and positive for building the power of getting women to the table."

"". I chose to maintain our integrity and retain our credibility.""

""When I started, I displayed some level of commitment to what I was doing and that is what kept me on the track up till date.""

""I said to myself I could do this, and I could do it right""

""In life, you decide on those things that are important to you,""

""I also apply wisdom most of the time""

"Feminism is a laudable theory. I like how it raises our awareness of the discrimination against women, and I sanction the equality of men and women, girl and boy that it advocates."

"As salt is the taste to food so as a healthy communication is the taste to a loving and happy marriage."

"Selection of adequate and efficient methods of financing, in addition to organisational delivery structure for health services, is essential, if a country is set to achieve its national objective of providing health for all."

"My statuses are designed to read the Nigerian mind and mentality. I want to fix this country and being a politician is not the only way to do it."

"Stop dating people not interested in your personal development. This life is beyond sex, bone straight wigs, iPhone 13, Domino pizza, Coldstone, and KFC. Find a partner who is stress-free, willing to invest in you. Never been married but I see many of y’all divorced so soon."

"Why are most of my Facebook fans in Nigeria men? Could it be the women are jealous and intimidated?"

"Madam Governor Lifestyle: Yes, I carry guns around Ibadan. There are 5 of them and I owned them legally in the US"

"Today I made my debut as an actress. I will be acting in different films IJN. Nollywood is not an easy job. I want to really commend all the actors, actresses, extras, set designers, directors, and producers. It is HARD HARD WORK. I worked on a movie today with Director @toyin_abraham. She is dynamic”"

"That prison is a big newsroom, but Nigerian prisons need reform. I met ex-Biafrans and Niger Delta agitators in the prison"

"But, why are we commercializing religion and brainwashing the congregation? I will become a Woman of God very soon and use my prophetic abilities and bible story knowledge to apply wisdom to your lives. Prison always make all inmates spiritual…right"

"It is well to dream... as long as we live, we shall continue to dream. But it is also important to remember that like babies dreams are conceived but not all dreams are born alive. Some are aborted. Others are stillborn."

"Education opens doors and gives an individual option in life."

"I am saddened by the fact that most women, especially in my part of the country, are trained from childhood to regard themselves as intellectually weak and incapable of attaining the highest peak in intellectual development."

"When I read a book, I look out for the message the author is trying to pass across to the reader. Does the work contain wisdom? Have I learnt anything from it? I also look out for entertainment. Have I been sufficiently entertained?"

"If you want to be a good writer, write what you deeply feel you should write, not what you feel the audience will like."

"The hope that somewhere, somehow, someone may have benefitted from my ideas makes me feel I have made my little contribution to humanity. In addition to that, the national and international recognition is simply great"

"I would say that life demands that we do not give up, no matter how hard it looks. I have lived by the simple code contained in almost all religions, believe in God and do good works. (Remember God does not leave anybody behind)."

"Hard work runs through my blood. It does not kill, but laziness does. If I were to write about myself I would have hundreds of titles, maybe a title for every page."

"She knew education is the master key to opportunities for a better life. Education opens doors and gives an individual option in life."

"My stories are triggered by drama of life."

"The general attitude of our society towards the female, commonly regarded as the “weaker” sex. I am saddened by the fact that most women, especially in my part of the country, are trained from childhood to regard themselves as intellectually weak and incapable of attaining the highest peak in intellectual development."

"My inability to express myself well in spoken words. Perhaps this too may have been part of my training, not to be outspoken. I find spoken words unreliable, because once the words are out in the open, it is impossible to retrieve and edit them. I, therefore, discovered early in life, that writing is my best medium of self expression and a valuable tool of communication. This started with letter writing and graduated into fiction writing. In my days, letter writing was a beautiful form of communication. Courtship was elegantly done by the exchange of letters."

"Fiction writing, for me, is also triggered by the drama of life I witness on daily basis. I find human nature an interesting study. Human relationships, especially romantic ones, are intriguing and highly fascinating."

"I should mention also that besides all these, I was born into a long line of artists from my maternal side, musicians, dancers, drummers and story tellers. My major genre is prose fiction, (the novel), followed by short stories."

"When I read a book, I look out for the message the author is trying to pass across to the reader. Does the work contain wisdom? Have I learnt anything from it? I also look out for entertainment. Have I been sufficiently entertained? I believe strongly that apart from imparting knowledge to the reader, a writer should entertain the reader, because reading should be a joyous experience."

"In the mid-eighties, I was “discovered” by Prof. Stuart Brown, a Briton, and an English lecturer at the Bayero University, Kano. He had come across an excerpt of a story I was attempting to write. He was highly impressed by what he had read and quickly assured me that I was a writer in the making. Not only did he encourage me to write, he exposed my work to the international literary scene, and made it possible for the first edition of “The Stillborn” to be published by Longman Harlow U.K."

"I cannot, now, remember any particular book that had triggered the ‘muse’ in me, but I can remember some of my best novels; Arrow of God, by Chinua Achebe, The River Between, by Ngugi wa Thiongo and Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal el Saadawi."

"The character of Ezeulu, the chief priest in Arrow of God, by Chinua Achebe is one of my favourite characters."

"Writing is my key to self expression. It has been my life line. Not only have I found satisfaction, I have been able to grow intellectually and emotionally through the art of writing. The hope that someone, somewhere, and somehow may benefit from my work makes me feel I have made some contribution to humanity. This feeling is simply great!"

"I do not have a special time, or place for reading or writing. Whenever and wherever I feel the urge to write, I write, using my small note book to capture passing ideas from within me, and scenes from the outside."

"Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiongo and Nawal el Saadawi are some of my favourite authors. There are quite a number of Western authors, too numerous to mention here. I, however, identify with these three great African writers, because they have deep understanding of human psychology and pay attention to details. They accept that human beings are what they are, and behave according to the circumstances they find themselves in; no judgement."

"I already met one of my favourite authors, Prof. Chinua Achebe in December of 1986. I had no question to ask him, I simply listened to his advice, when I narrated to him an incident that required me to take a decision. “Zaynab,’’ he said, ‘’ don’t let anybody tell you what to do."

"Lord of the Rings by J.R.R Tolkien was the book I read last. The book reflects a world moving toward a certain direction, powered by both good and evil. It is a story of an entire universe in serious conflict and impending danger. The story says, this is also your world and you are not alone in it. It is just that we may not be conscious of the presence of the “others.”"

"I have no immediate plan to read a new book because I am seriously engaged in writing someone else’s story."

"My library is next door to my home office for easy access, and it is arranged in an order of priority."

"I am a reader, as well as a writer. I read whenever I have the opportunity to do so, and as often as I can. My slogan for reading is, ‘’read a book a week.’’ You see, no matter how small the book you pick every week is, you will be sure to cover a lot of ground in reading by the end of a year."

"Writing in Nigeria is not a job, because it never pays."

"I research a lot depending on the subject-matter. The subject matter informs the nature of settings to be used in the story; historic, physical, socio-economic and political environments, also referred to as Time and Place/Space. For example if the setting is to be a hospital scene, my research will be to observe how the entire hospital management functions, and how medical and other technical staff operates."

"Ideas come from a lot of sources, experiences of friends, colleagues, neighbors, self and even strangers. However, my greatest source of gathering ideas is from listening to people talk about themselves, or about others, especially at public gatherings, weddings, naming ceremonies, funerals and the market place. A lot of ideas are also gathered at home among family members. The secret is to be a good listener, not talker."

"For me, there’s no special atmosphere for writing. Whenever I feel the urge, (known in literature as ‘inspiration’) I write, using my small note book to capture scenes from the outside and passing ideas from my mind."

"My major genre is the prose fiction, followed by short stories, and the central theme has always been about female empowerment. I am intrigued by mysteries, Sci-fi and detective books. As for children’s books, as I get older, I now realize the importance of writing for children."

"The time-factor. I often wish there are more hours in a day. When a writer is holding, rather tightly, to a demanding job, such as teaching, raising a family and fulfilling certain social obligations, writing can easily take a backbench."

"Unknown to many, there are some good female writers in Northern Nigeria, but they are not easily known because they write in Hausa language. For a wider audience, I have advocated for translations, for years, at various forums, at home and abroad."

"Writing in Nigeria is not a job at all, because a job pays. Writing at home does not. I certainly cannot remember the last time I heard from my publishers. Between the publishers and the book pirates a creative writer in Nigeria will have to have a better reason for writing. For me, writing is therapeutic. I find emotional and psychological healings in it. The act of writing has always been my life-line."

"I believe in the English saying that ‘No one ever kicks a dead dog’. I must be doing something worth talking about. Criticism, negative, or positive serves as a platform for my intellectual growth. In time, the ‘Mazauni gonin rawa’ will come to realize that strength and weakness have nothing to do with gender, they are personality traits. Society simply assigned weakness for women, perhaps based on physic."

"I teach, interact with students on daily basis, and supervise their theses. I create time for family members. I do not set a daily writing goal. It does not work for me that way. I realized also that I needed to be sober to write convincingly. I cannot write when I am excessively happy. Some days are simply blank. Often I would write when travelling, or at night when sleep escapes."

"Simple question, but difficult answer. At the age of eight, I literally held a hoe in my hands. Two plots of land were carved out for me from my mother’s land, one for okra, the other for groundnuts. I helped my mother pay my school fees. Many people would find this hard to believe. I am still holding a hoe, (in a sense). Hard work runs through my blood. It does not kill, but laziness does. If I were to write about myself I would have hundreds of titles, maybe a title for every page."

"A little bit of me is in every book I have written. Consciously, or unconsciously, an artist gives away a piece of the ‘self’. It is widely believed that a good piece of creative work is an extension of the artist."

"By the Grace of Almighty God, I want to believe that I have been able to touch the lives of people, not only through writing, but in other simple ways, and I intend to do that for as long as I live."

"Recommending any one of my books would depend on the target audience. For young adults, ‘The Stillborn’, for the teens, ‘The Virtuous Woman’, for a variety of readers, ‘From The Housewife’, to the university undergraduate to the footloose, ‘Cobwebs and Other Stories’, for those interested in family values, ‘The Descendants’ and for the symbolist, ‘The Initiates’."

"Brethren, this is the time anybody will need grace more than ever before. ‎"

"Don’t marry a girl who is lazy! Don’t marry a girl who cannot cook, she needs to know how to do chores and cook because you cannot afford to be eating out all the time"

"Go to your pastor first to consult for marriage before your parents"

"There is real danger in losing call of God"

"Once we begin to see women as humans with as much right to occupy spaces as men. We would have removed the foundation upon which gender-based violence thrives."

"Freedom is exercising your rights, getting an education without the fear of sexual harassment."

"It’s time we moved the shame from victim to perpetrator. They’re the ones that should be ashamed."

"Keeping up with attempting to attending as many events as you are invited but age personality interest are some factors that determine if one attends though. NETWORKING is so key in this field."

"My purpose, late Myles Munroe always said "die empty. Eternity has been on my mind, what a shame if I didn't do as much as I have been tasked with, let alone not starting on that journey."

"The identity integrity and gift to dream again people saw and learn from my life especially as a person living with disability NOW."

"A book reads us as much as we read a book."

"Negritude is an ideology of the elite, completely devoid of meaning for the masses ... Negritude is an ideology suggesting that Africans are blessed with a soul and not reason. They would have us believe that Africans can sing, dance and feel, but not think."

"" The future of Nigeria is no longer in it's army as some of us used to think, but in the oil business."

"always remember that you are an Ajayi man. Don’t forget the Ajayi motto – In all things moderation, with exception of study."

"Now the books are arranged according to which characters I believe ought to be talking to each other."

"How often I have felt lonely even when with someone. Lonelier sometimes than when I’m on my own."

"I may be old, but farting and burping in public is not something I intend to succumb to. If I can help it."

"What is done is done and I’ll wait until I get home to see how bad things really are. Consider the birds in the sky, I remind myself. Consider the birds in the sky."

"I dream of being held. Of being touched. Of being desired again. Of being recognized. Of not having to worry about what other people might one day think of this, might already be thinking."

"Madness. Old age is a massacre. No place for sissies. No place for love songs. No place for dreaming. No place for dreaming erotic dreams"

"The architects must only have thought of women when they designed retirement homes, and assumed they liked to sit and stare solemnly at gardens all day."

"I keep remembering the man who repeatedly lifted an empty fork from his plate to his toothless mouth."

"It’s tough out here, and sometimes when I read about Africa, I don’t see America being any better. It’s really a crying shame."

"How could I explain that the way he craved my body made me angry"

"I wonder if I should explain that it’s not that I don’t want to make love, only that after a long day of attending to others I’m craving space."

"Is every, every?’ ‘Everything’s fine,’ I say, sensing her struggle with the words."

"Thanks to my mum, I read many Puffin classics. I loved the miniature Beatrix Potter books, Richard Adam’s Watership Down, and tales of Brer Rabbit. As a child, I was a voracious reader, of books and of people, and still am an inveterate eavesdropper and people-watcher. Snippets of overheard conversations and the faces of people not usually noticed often inspire the stories I write. Wondering about other people’s life stories is what I do."

"I tend to disagree with most end-of-year ‘best of’ arts lists, not so much for what’s on the lists but for what gets overlooked. In the realm of recent films for example, I would have loved more attention to Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, especially his sonic and visual gem, Lovers Rock and the same for Jeymes Samuel’s directorial debut, The Harder They Fall, a casting tour-de-force. On the writing front, Yewande Omotoso’s novel, An Unusual Grief—a book about friendship, sex, grieving, domesticity, and depression is one that deserves more attention."

"Oh, there are so many! When I think of feature films, I imagine the intense drama of Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero; the quiet grief, as well as the eroticism of Yewande Omotoso’s An Unusual Grief; the forbidden wartime love story of Chinelo Okparanta’s Under the Udala Trees. Short stories such as Segun Afolabi’s ‘Monday Morning’ would also make for powerful and timely feature length films."

"In the realm of a TV series, I think of Wole Soyinka’s political satire Chronicles From The Land of the Happiest People On Earth and NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory, which might also lend itself to an animated film. There are so many exciting prospects within the genre of documentary films too. Take Hugh Masekela’s Still Grazing—how visually and sonically fabulous such a film could be. I’d also love to see my novels adapted for the screen. In Dependence as a feature film, and Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, as a TV series. Film broadens and expands our access to stories and opens many new possibilities for creative work."

"The 1960s struck me as such an exciting decade in which to start the novel—it was the time of independence movements across Africa, the Civil Rights movement in the US, and various countercultural movements across Europe. Artists ranging from Bob Dylan to Fela Kuti and the Beatles were amongst many to herald this change. But because I hadn’t lived through this decade myself, I had to do a lot of research for In Dependence for it to feel as historically authentic as possible. I loved the research which included reading back issues of local magazines and newspapers and interviewing people who’d lived through the period."

"Whenever I can’t find stories that I want to read, I try writing them for myself. In this case, I’d met many older women who’d lived colorful lives and yet when it came to fiction, I didn’t find stories that mirrored these lives, especially so when it came to the lives of Black women."

"For my second novel, I did almost no historical research. With Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun I played much more with form and with voice than I’d done in the past. As such, it was particularly gratifying to have the novel shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, a prize that rewards innovative approaches to fiction."

"This book came out of a personal search for greater perspective, inspiration and hope in the context of the current turbulence of our world. I’ve had the great privilege of getting to know the twelve people featured in this book, which allowed me to go beyond their public profiles to the more intimate conversations. They’ve all been an inspiration to me and as such I wanted to share their stories more widely."

"I’ve been surprised by how many young people as well as people who are not from the African Diaspora have found this book an inspiration and a comfort."

"Resist the temptation to write stories you’re expected to write and take inspiration from a wide array of art forms. Use all the tools available to improve your craft. Be innovative, be new! And when a door opens for you, hold it open for others. We all stand on the shoulders of giants and we’re stronger together than on our own."

"I don’t have a single best book, but I enjoyed and learned a lot from the following: actor David Harewood’s memoir: Maybe I Don’t Belong Her: A Memoir of Race, Identity, Breakdown and Recovery; poet Hanif Abdurraqib’s Go Ahead in the Rain: Notes to a Tribe Called Quest; and travel writer, Noo Sara-Wiwa’s Black Ghosts: A Journey into the Lives of Africans in China. I also enjoyed re-reading Hugh Masekela and Michael Cheer’s fabulous Still Grazing: The Musical Journey of Hugh Masekela. I also read a number of great manuscripts including two brilliant chapters from my brother’s work in progress: Common Property: An Intimate History of the 20th Century."

"I love the innovative nature of Olumide Popoola’s writings across literary genres and so I’m very much looking forward to her forthcoming novel, Like Water Like Sea. I am also looking forward to Hala Alyan’s new poetry collection: The Moon That Turns You Back."

"My main goal is to make progress on my current novel. I’d also like to play more with the new tools of artificial intelligence (AI) and have more conversations with writers about the future of writing in this age of AI, not just about what we might lose but what we might gain too."

"I have a number of books in other languages—aspirational books for when my language skills improve enough to be able to read them. I’m particularly keen to read more books by African authors that are not yet translated into English. The two that currently sit on my desk are translations from other European languages: La sombra de la Mulemba—Cuentos Africanos Lusófonos and Matemáticas Congolesas by Koli Jean Bofane. I would love to add to my bookshelves, many more books published in African languages."

"When was the last time you failed or faced rejection as a writer and how did you cope with it and what did you learn from the experience?"

"I’m thinking a lot about the fraught state of our world including the wars in Ukraine and in Gaza. I’ve just started reading The Ukraine by writer Artem Chapeye, who is currently fighting for his country, as well as The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. I’m also re-reading David Grossman’s To the End of the Land."

"Toni Morrison’s novel Home for the immense power of her story and the exquisite beauty of her language. I’ve read, re-read and listened to the book being read by the author."

"I usually begin with the idea of a character and then work on getting to know the character better. I’ve learned from actors that if I try to embody my characters physically, by walking, talking, and even dressing like them, then my characters become more real to me and therefore more believable on the page."

"I also never write about characters whose lives I don’t have at least some sense of or a genuine interest in. Having a deep interest in my characters gives me both the confidence and passion to stick with them and write them as best I can."

"It’s still rare to see eroticism explored in elderly female characters, but not so rare for male characters. Thanks to such authors as J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan and Philip Roth, I have many literary examples of older men’s desire, but far less when it comes to older women. Yet, when I speak to older women I hear from them many stories about desire– sexual and otherwise. So yes, desire was always going to be an important part of the book."

"The name, Morayo, means “I see joy” in Yoruba, so this already signals to some readers that joy has encircled her from birth. At the same time, Morayo works hard to stay optimistic through the challenges that life brings. She is someone who is interested in narrative and in the same way that she enjoys changing the endings of some of her favorite books, she also tries to embrace narratives that help move her forward rather than getting her stuck or depressed. I suppose I’ve written a character to inspire me."

"Thanks to my character, I too have begun to group my books in non-traditional ways. Thus far, my groupings, unlike Morayo’s, have been less about characters talking to each other and more about pairing authors. For example, I have Marilynne Robinson and Toni Morrison’s Home’s next to each other as well as God Help the Child next to Lila as there are thematic similarities in both pairings."

"And recently, because London has been on my mind, I’ve found myself placing Zadie Smith’s NW next to Brian Chikwava’s Harare North, Muriel Spark’s The Ballad of Peckham Rye and Ben Judah’s This is London. I, like Morayo, am interested in books expanding and enriching the literary landscape. As for my two novels, they currently still sit alphabetically on my shelves, happily wedged in between Jhumpa Lahiri, Amara Lakhous, Javier Marias, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez."

"At the time that I began to write the novel I was simply looking for a really good love story set in my parent’s generation with at least one character from West Africa, and because I couldn’t find such a story, I tried writing it myself. As Toni Morrison says, if there’s a book you want to read but can’t find, then try writing it."

"Had I known that my first novel would become required reading for all students applying to university in Nigeria, I probably wouldn’t have had the courage to write it. It has been an incredible honor for me to have a book read by so many people and especially exciting to know that the novel is, in some small way, inspiring a new generation of writers."

"I don’t find juggling easy. However, for the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to attend a few writing retreats (such as Hedgebrook) and that always gives my writing a boost. Currently, I’m not teaching, which makes it easier to prioritize my writing. The way that you’ve described your struggle to maintain balance certainly resonates for me."

"In the early stages of any project I need longer periods of unstructured time to delve deeply into the writing and to stick to the project. It’s easier for me to balance several things at once if I’m in the editing and polishing phases of writing. I’m almost always craving more time and solitude to write, but at the same time I know that being engaged in the world is what fuels my writing."

"Going to Hedgebrook was a transformative experience for me. I was already a published author before I went, but the experience of going to Hedgebrook and meeting other writers made me believe in myself as a writer and trust in my own voice more than I’d ever dared to before. I’ve always tried to support fellow writers and Hedgebrook has given me an even wider platform from which to do so."

"I never thought about the confluence of the two books in the way you’ve described it. I love it! This is part of the beauty of writing, being surprised by what others see. Yes, Tayo and Morayo would certainly have a lot to talk about–their relationship might even go further than a platonic one. Who knows! There are certainly thematic similarities between the books, especially around the notion of independence and interdependence. I also see a chronological continuation between both novels. I left Tayo and Vanessa at the end of In Dependence in their sixties and with Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun I moved to a character in her seventies. It would follow, therefore that my next book might feature a character in her eighties and perhaps some younger characters too. Which, coincidentally, at least thus far…is the way book three is looking."

"Thank you, Darlington. My hope is that this book will lead, in some small way, to a deeper and richer understanding of Africa and the African diaspora—of the many things we hold in common as well as our differences. Similarities range from experiences of racism and discrimination to police brutality, and to the fragility of democracies whether we’re talking about Nigeria, Zimbabwe, or America. Differences include personal histories, identities, backgrounds, and geographies."

"There are some in this book, like Michelle Obama, for example, who used the platforms they were given to effect change while others, such as Evan Mawarire, created a movement from the bottom up to speak truth to power. The twelve featured are a tiny subset of many others doing extraordinary things. My hope is that Between Starshine and Clay will inspire more writers to capture such stories and histories."

"Oh, so many things, especially the joyful moments that we shared. I remember, for example, the laughter between old friends Wole Soyinka and Henry Louis Gates Jr. as Soyinka reminisced about Morrison teaching him the phrase “knock your socks off” but then failing to deliver on the promise of knocking his socks off with the choice of a restaurant that Soyinka found lacking—not enough pepper! Or the moment when I asked Morrison if we could talk about sex, to which she responded with a wry smile, “Yeah! I’m in a good position to talk about it, since it’s been like a thousand years. What do you want to know?” Or the day, when walking with 102-year-old Willard Harris, that she insisted I seize the opportunity to travel to the South Pole, repeatedly saying, “You go, girl!” And so it was that the stories and the laughter flowed. I also love the adage that several of them cite, from Michelle Obama to Lord Michael Hastings, Margaret Busby, and Senator Cory Booker—plant trees under whose shade other generations will sit. Each of those featured embodies this evocation."

"How I wish that Baldwin was still with us—he was so wise, and his work feels just as relevant today as it was during his lifetime. Baldwin’s presence is felt throughout this book in part because he meant so much to many of those featured, including Morrison. In Morrison’s eulogy for Baldwin, she refers to three gifts that he gave to her: tenderness, courage, and language. These are gifts that I feel he’s given to all of us, and of course Morrison has left us with similar gifts, too. A copy of Baldwin’s Collected Essays has sat close to my writing desk for more than two decades. It sits alongside Margaret Busby’s groundbreaking anthologies, Daughters of Africa and New Daughters of Africa—my literary taliswomen."

"I have written about Baldwin in Between Starshine and Clay and elsewhere. Baldwin means a lot to me for the following reasons: he inspires me as a writer; he inspires me for his wisdom—his insights and clarity around many issues; and I identify with the various places and peoples of the African diaspora that he writes about from France to America. My introductory essay is a reverent nod to Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son with its personal exploration of race, histories, and countries lived in."

"Humans are fond of putting people into categories for all sorts of reasons, but oftentimes, especially when it comes to skin color and nationality, for creating hierarchies or pecking orders. As for my experiences of race and identity, that’s a very big question deserving of an essay-length response, hence my introductory chapter."

"But in brief, as a child of a multiracial marriage who has lived in various countries with different histories of race and racism, and as a scholar and novelist for whom race and identity feature fairly prominently in my work, it’s safe to say that these issues are weighty, albeit not to the point of holding me back. Here again is where I take my cue from Baldwin, who advocates remaining committed to the struggle against injustices while keeping one’s heart free of hatred and despair."

"My first thought is that there are, of course, harsher forms of exile. Morayo does at least have a comfortable place to live, food to eat, and access to health care. I also suspect that Morayo, with thoughts of the ethnic and religious strife that had taken place in her home city of Jos, might be quick to say that the internally displaced face the cruelest form of exile."

"In many ways, the story I chose to write is not what readers might associate with the archetypal immigrant or exile story. It’s not a story of someone who has arrived in a country without all the necessary documentation, or of someone living on the edges of society, just barely scraping by. I chose to write about a character who lives a life of the mind and is materially well off. Yet, as you highlight, she too faces hardships and loneliness in her old age."

"I’d met many older women who had lived colorful lives, and yet when it came to fiction I couldn’t find many stories that mirrored this, especially so when it came to the lives of Black women. Similarly, I couldn’t find many books that explored an older woman’s sexuality. I had many literary examples of older men’s desire, but far less when it came to older women, and so I decided to go there, albeit in a small way."

"You mention Abubakar’s wonderful novel, Season of Crimson Blossoms, and I can tell you that when it came out I joked with him that his fifty-five-year-old Bintu could hardly be considered an old woman, at least not in comparison to my Morayo, two decades older. However, I hadn’t yet met Willard Harris, a real-life character and now a dear friend whom I write about in my new book. Mrs. Harris was ninety-seven years old when I first met her, and at that time she had a “gentleman friend” who was at least a decade younger than her. You know what they say about life being stranger or more interesting than fiction."

"Thank you, Darlington, and what a touching story! I’d love to meet your neighbor’s daughter. In terms of what inspired the novel, it was simply as Morrison once put it: If there’s a story you’re dying to read and you can’t find it, then write it. I was looking for a great interracial love story set in geographical locations and historical periods that I was particularly interested in—namely West Africa from the 1960s to present day—and because I couldn’t find that story, I attempted to write it."

"I think that every relationship has its complications, and in the case of Tayo and Vanessa, they had to contend with the added family and societal pressures of being an interracial couple at a time of pervasive colonial attitudes. In the 1960s, there was a great deal of societal resistance to interracial relationships, attitudes that arguably still persist to this day whether in the UK, America, or elsewhere. If I’d written a novel without complications, I also suspect that your neighbor’s daughter would have exercised her spirit of independence and found a different book to immerse herself in."

"I’m so grateful to Adichie for having written Half of a Yellow Sun with its focus on the Nigerian civil war. Her novel, alongside other books with the war at its core, including Soyinka’s memoir The Man Died, Chris Abani’s novella-in-verse Daphne’s Lot, and Chinelo Okparanta’s novel Under the Udala Trees, all give us a greater sense of the events and conditions of that horrific war. While the civil war is not the central focus of In Dependence, it forms part of the tragic backdrop to the story. In Dependence is deeply personal for me in that I am writing about my parents’ generation. This is not my parents’ story, but it could have been their story."

"That’s a really interesting observation. You’re right that there are similarities between the two protagonists. Tayo and Obi are roughly of the same generation, they both win scholarships to study abroad, and they return to Nigeria full of idealism before finding themselves buffeted by some of the same issues and challenges of the day. What’s also interesting is that it’s Vanessa who urges Tayo to read Achebe’s novels. When Tayo does read No Longer at Ease, he’s struck by how tragic the story is but doesn’t, at least not in his letter to Vanessa, go as far as reflecting on how Obi’s story might be relevant to his own life."

"The warmth that I feel toward Okigbo actually comes from hearing my father speak about him. In the late 1950s, my father was one of his students at Fiditi Grammar School, Ibadan, where Okigbo taught Latin and English literature and was also the sports coach. I suspect that my dad, the football team’s goalkeeper, might have been one of Okigbo’s favorite students. He recounts the story of how Okigbo came to him one afternoon and asked if he’d ever traveled in a car that went as fast as one hundred miles an hour. “Hop in,” said Okigbo to my father, and then proceeded to dazzle him with a speedy drive to the University of Ibadan in his red sports car."

"My father describes Okigbo as a fast-speaking, fast-driving, fun-loving, and extremely intelligent young man. He apparently had a flair for languages, routinely reciting passages of Ovid in Latin, and tutoring one student in Greek who subsequently got an A in the Greek exam. My dad also describes how Okigbo, along with the school headmaster, Alex Ajayi, would have various “bashes” over the weekend. They were, as my father later reflected, a high-powered Bloomsbury Group of young intellectuals and scholars. These are stories I wish we had more of, and they’re part of the impetus behind Between Starshine and Clay: Conversations from the African Diaspora."

"In these tumultuous times, I keep returning to James Baldwin’s essays and in particular to his Notes of a Native Son. He reminds me of the importance of holding on to two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time: staying committed to the struggles against injustices while keeping one’s heart free of hatred and despair."

"As a child, I was a voracious reader, of books and of people, and still am an inveterate eavesdropper and people-watcher. Snippets of overheard conversations and the faces of people not usually noticed often inspire the stories I write. Wondering about other people’s life stories is what I do."

"Henry Louis Gates Jr’s op-ed piece in the New York times, Who’s Afraid of Black History? didn’t change my mind on the topic but it brought much needed perspective and insight to the current curriculum debates in the US."

"Hating, after all, was a drier form of drowning."

"The pieces of life, even when put together, assembled, never amount to the life itself."

"She understood what perhaps they are only just learning. That if you attempt to clean the messiness of life you end up scrubbing the life away from living. We can't excise joy from pain."

"Coming from across cultures, I believe I mostly value difference as opposed to being threatened by it... Over time as I gain in knowledge and become braver I hope to set more stories solidly in Nigeria or Barbados but you cannot, as a writer, fake familiarity with a place – I don’t think so anyway."

"My mother died when I was 23, and apart from the recent birth of my children, that is the most profound experience of my life. The grief that followed is a sharp memory of mine and I’ve often joked that the experience irrevocably marked my writing."

"Regardless of how many years I’ve lived in South Africa I think of myself as a product of three nations: Barbados, Nigeria and South Africa. Nigeria forms a very strong part of my sense of myself, my identity"

"Identity is complex. I love being a Nigerian, I love belonging to that identity even if my belonging is complex, due to my multiple identities and migratory life experience"

"When I think of dangerous women I don’t think of women in whose presence I am in danger. When I think of dangerous women I think of women in whose presence the dangers of life finally meet their match. The kind of dangers I’m talking about are the hypocrisies, the patriarchy, the rules that are no rules at all but simply ways to cheat freedom and oppress those who dare sing out"

"Dangerous women show up sometimes, they disturb something"

"Many of the women on the island of my birth are like this. Their bow tongues launch arrows into the world and never miss their mark"

"My grandmother was one such woman. For very long she convinced me only of her sweetness until one day when I commented on how lovely she was she, holding a pot of boiling water, said Muh dear there was time when I throw this water on you soon as look as yuh. It would appear, I learnt, that my sweet grandmother once had a temper. Most dangerous women do, an important ability to access their rage whose existence alone runs counter to nursery rhymes we were fed about sugar and nice"

"My mother’s cousins. Dangerous in the sense that they take up magnificent space, they know what it is to laugh even though they have cried too"

"I believed that the woman in front of me, frail and sitting, had eaten life, swallowed it completely whole. I imagine she danced, fell in love, made love, made children, made lives, and set people straight with her arrow-words. And you know, danger, in the way it manifests in these women, has never been more allowing or more generous"

"This is a new kind of meaning, this danger. A serious kind of love. For oneself, one’s kin; and what life is meant for. Dangerous. I didn’t say it then; I was too young and answered Doctor or Mother but ask me now what I wish to be when I grow up"

"Go to work diligently I'd like to be devout of fruit and results not because god did not give us the ability but because we did nothing with the ability he gave us."

"The believer is not meant to have these problems solved the believer is meant to solve problems."

"It was love that held Jesus on the cross not the nails."

"When god is with you that is all that matters you need not approval from anyone."

"It is time to move from mere talk to action in the second quarter of the Year make bold move, this time Refuse delays, laziness and indecision and see how God will turn things around for you this is time to arise and shine."

"I didn’t just want to document: I wanted to fully understand what I was documenting. I wanted to be very aware of how you take photographs in certain situations; not to expose people, and to try to present the narrative you want without making it into a spectacle of a human being in suffering. That is why I see myself as a visual scholar. I need to understand the aspects of what I am working with."

"The first thing I would say is to understand there is a history of activism, of the arts, and literature and to keep that in mind and not discard the past and what people did. It is important to learn about the past and build on it. That is quite important to understand. Ageism is still very prominent in how people speak, write, and create their ideas, particularly on social media. I would say the first thing is to look at the past and build on it and respect it, just as I respect what is happening now and what young people are doing."

"You can’t change anything if you don’t have imagination... Don’t let the oppressor dictate the narrative. I think we have the tendency to react to the oppressors’ narrative and really we should be dictating our own narrative. That is something I learned: sometimes we focus on them rather than what we ought to change in ourselves. They are there to distract us from what we need to do."

"People need to understand we are invested in the future and how that future will be."

"Caught between Western imperialism, African patriarchy and religious fascism, the continent’s gay community needs a strong, articulate set of voices. This is a work of African resistance that boldly states: We are here, and we are many!"

"I want to resist the “African homosexual” as an empirical figure waiting to be discovered or, through NGO and international interventions, to be created and saved"

"Now I know the signs of an abuser and a trafficker. If I had known the signs, I wouldn’t have fallen a victim or stayed in slavery for two years."

"I believe that helping the youth in the community identify their potential with helping them to maximize such potential in their own local community."

"She found her fellow survivors, “energetic, intelligent, resilient, and very engaging. Meeting them felt like meeting missing or separated siblings. We all connected because we had all survived one form of torture or the other as a result of various forms of human trafficking.”"

"“As a victim of labor trafficking, I have survived all odds in an unknown land to be able to lend a voice to the voiceless, advocate for other victims, and empower survivors.”"

"People need to know that being abroad does not necessarily mean greener pastures, but she explained. It could be a potential trap to human trafficking or domestic abuse."

"People need to know that being abroad does not necessarily mean greener pastures…It could be a potential trap to human trafficking or domestic abuse."

"Every community has its own challenges, but when people are able to see the potentials they have, it makes the problem of economic hardship to be half solved."

"I am grateful to God for life."

"I believe that education is the greatest tool for preventing this heinous crime in our communities."

"The thing is the wound is inside and it is hard to heal. I’m tearing up not because I’m sad but because it’s always an open wound that is there. You heal through the process but it’s not a healing that happens once."

"It was a situation of a slave at the beck and call of her master. It could be described as the Israelites in the hands of Pharaohs and the Egyptians,”"

"I am not scared of lifting other women up. As long as I wear the crown, no one can take my throne."

"You can’t boldly say you have succeeded in life till you help someone who can never pay you back."

"I LOVE YOU: Even the toughest man will melt a bit when his partner professes their love for him. They love hearing we love them. Also, they like hugs, kisses and cuddling too. Even a nicely-worded email or text message will work"

"YOU ARE MY DAD: It’s less of an ego-boost as it is a verbalization of respect. It’s a testament to both our efforts and our priorities – which are the woman and her well-being."

"I APPRECIATE YOU AS A MAN: Men need to feel like men.. It has everything to do with knowing that their partner appreciates something about their character (honesty, integrity, selflessness, etc.) or something else."

"I RESPECT YOU: As men age, They have less of a need to be recognized for selfish reasons . This feeling is replaced by the need to feel respected out of love. They love feeling admired and respected from the people who love and care about them!."

"I APPRECIATE WHAT YOU DO: Men need to feel like they are good providers for the people they love. If they believe anything less, they don’t perceive themselves as the man they should be. As such, when they are told that you’re thankful for their hard work, effort, and for providing, it means a tremendous deal to them."

"YOU LOOK GREAT: This one’s a no-brainer, right? After spending a significant amount in a relationship, they still love hearing that our partner finds them attractive. This is particularly the case if they’ve been putting in some time at the gym. Your compliments serve as a reward for their hard work and as motivation to keep them going."

"I TRUST YOU: There are fewer things more sacred than trusting someone with your life. When you’re in a relationship, this is an essential truth. Here’s a bit of advice from Georgianna Donadio, Ph.D., “The best time to share your feelings (is) just before or during close intimacy. At that time, levels of oxytocin, a hormone that enhances feelings of trust, love and intimacy, are elevated, making it the best moment to love talk with your partner."

"I'M LISTENING: Men and women communicate very differently. For example, in an argument, a woman is usually more willing to sit down and have a dialogue. The man often feels an inclination to seek solitude to think things over or distract himself. They do love hearing “I’m listening” or “I’m ready to listen when you’re ready to talk” in any case."

"THANK YOU: Similar to women, men appreciate recognition for efforts small and little. “Thank you” is a straightforward yet powerful phrase that shows them your appreciation for what they do. (Here’s a tip, ladies: if you say “Thank you” on a regular basis for something they do, they are much more likely to do it again.)"

"I also love books of people learning to do this like going to ballet school, or how to ride horses. There's just something about the process and setback's it's very interesting."

"The only way to try and interrogate or possibly persuade stories to reveal something about themselves is to make all these provocations and assaults on them, and try and unpack them and unpick their seams and see if they react."

""Please tell me a story about a girl who gets away." I would, even if I had to adapt one, even if I had to make one up just for her. "Gets away from what, though?" "From her fairy godmother. From the happy ending that isn't really happy at all. Please have her get out and run off of the page altogether, to somewhere secret where words like 'happy' and 'good' will never find her." "You don't want her to be happy and good?" "I'm not sure what's really meant by happy and good. I would like her to be free. Now. Please begin." White for Witching (2010) p 165"

"“...a place can live in you without letting you know about it for the longest time.” Parasol Against the Axe (2024)"

""Her heart was heavy because it was open, and so things filled it, and so things rushed out of it, but still the heart kept beating, tough and frighteningly powerful and meaning to shrug off the rest of her and continue on its own”. Mr Fox (2011) p 171"

""You don’t return people’s smiles—it’s perfectly clear to you that people can smile and smile and still be villains." Boy, Snow, Bird (2014) p 8"

"The water was so cold on her skin that it felt dry.”"

"“She thought I hadn't seen her, but she's no good at hiding her intentions. She can't help tiptoeing around with a finger to her lips at key moments.”"

"“It was like dancing with a mask that was attached to a stick—she dared not lower it, no matter how tiring it was to hold the mask up. She was the ugly girl at the ball.”"

"What is the meaning of it? Three creaks, three weeks? If she comes back for her shoes in three days, then I only need to empty them another three times. If it really is three weeks that were meant, what then. If three months, what then. Three years. That's why I had to write it down now. By then I may no longer believe I heard anything in Miri's room.”"

"“Love. I'm not capable of it, can't even approach it from the side, let alone head-on. Nor am I alone in this—everyone is like this, the liars. Singing songs and painting pictures and telling each other stories about love and its mysteries and marvelous properties, myths to keep morale up—maybe one day it'll materialize. But I can say it ten times a day, a hundred times, 'I love you,' to anyone and anything, to a woman, to a pair of pruning shears. I've said it without meaning it at all, taken love's name in vain and gone dismally unpunished. Love will never be real, or if it is, it has no power. No power. There's only covetousness, and if what we covet can't be won with gentle words—and often it can't—then there is force.”"

"“The whole thing was so intense, so full of hurt that when I look back at it I squint. I want it forgotten.”"

"“I was so jealous it burned, and I knew I had to let it alone or I'd break something inside me.”"

"“I love sleeping. Waking is more and more hateful the older I get. I say this as if I've lived too long. I'm twenty-two.”"

"“As always, the soucouyant seemed more lonely than bad. Maybe that was her trick, her ability to make it so you couldn't decide if she was a monster.”"

"“She is a double danger—there is the danger of meeting her, and the danger of becoming her. Does the nightmare of her belong to everyone, or just to me?”"

"“Maybe she was not really like that. It's just that I would prefer you to think that what happened to her was justified.”"

"“Easy to see the solution when you're not in the story, isn't it.”"

"“She won't forget or recover, she is inconsolable.”"

"“A song called 'Earth Angel' played in her head all morning—also three trumpets and a piano.”"

"“Her heart's breaking. It breaks three times a week on account of people treating her so badly, and she knows that all you can do is laugh it off.”"

"“And other times—too often, maybe—I don't dare have an opinion in case it upsets anyone.”"

"'But what will I do for a whole year?'"

"“She had had such a strong feeling that she needed to talk to someone who would tell her some secret that would make everything alright. She had been unable to think who it was.”"

"“His heavy eyebrows lowered and he made some small, involuntary gesture with his hand that was recognisably superstitious, as if the words 'God forbid' had flowed into his body.”"

"“I examined the portraits nearest to me but couldn't get past the sensation that here was the same man over and over, crouched in old boxes, readying himself to spit on my plate.”"

"“One or the other of us said 'I can't,' and if it was me I don't know why because I wanted to. Maybe I'm just remembering it wrongly to help me get over the rejection.”"

"“She smiled with a scary energy, as if she had been told to at gunpoint.”"

"“I'm not saying I'm amazing or anything, but I'm decent-looking. Why shouldn't a decent-looking girl expect to be kissed?”"

"“I was always weak in the head—that must be it. I can't seem to care anymore about what I'm supposed to do.”"

"“Our exchanges always seem to turn into whatever he wants them to.”"

"“Have you ever heard a note in someone's voice that said 'This is the end?' I heard it in the next words he said to me, and I stopped listening.”"

"“Have you forgotten about our fox?"

"“I almost forgot to mention another fox I know of—a very wicked fox indeed. But you are tired of hearing about foxes now, so I won't go on.”"

"“There was . . . a mirror that crawled across the wall in a wooden frame. When I go into Miri's room all I can see, all I can think of is that enormous mirror, like a lake on the wall.”"

"“What do you think of Poe?""

"He's awful. He was obviously . . . what's the term . . . 'disappointed in love' at some point. He probably never smiled again. The pages are just bursting with his longing for women to suffer. If he ever met me he'd probably punch me on the nose."

""I think Poe's quite good, actually. The whole casual horror thing. Like someone standing next to you and screaming their head off and you asking them what the fuck and them stopping for a moment to say 'Oh you know, I'm just afraid of Death' and then they keep on with the screaming.”"

"“Solitary people, these book lovers. I think it's swell that there are people you don't have to worry about when you don't see them for a long time, you don't have to wonder what they do, how they're getting along with themselves. You just know that they're all right, and probably doing something they like.”"

"“Imagine having a mother who worries that you read too much. The question is, what is it that's supposed to happen to people who read too much? How can you tell when someone's crossed the line.”"

"“I know of witches who whistle at different pitches, calling things that don't have names.”"

"“I’m never sad when a friend goes far away, because whichever city or country that friend goes to, they turn the place friendly. They turn a suspicious-looking name on the map into a place where a welcome can be found. Maybe the friend will talk about you sometimes, to other friends that live around him, and then that’s almost as good as being there yourself. You’re in several places at once! In fact, my daughter, I would even go so far as to say that the further away your friends, and the more spread out they are the better your chances of going safely through the world…”"

"“The first coffee of the morning is never, ever, ready quickly enough. You die before it’s ready and then your ghost pours the resurrection potion out of the moka pot.”"

"“It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one.”"

"“I wish there was someone I could have written to after that, someone I could have written to explain how awful it was to have someone touch you, then look at you properly and change his mind.”"

"“… there’s a difference between having no one because you’ve chosen it and having no one because everyone has been taken away.”"

"“What you're doing is building a horrible kind of logic. People read what you write and they say, 'Yes, he is talking about things that really happen,' and they keep reading, and it makes sense to them. You're explaining things that can't be defended, and the explanations themselves are mad, just bizarre — but you offer them with such confidence. It was because she kept the chain on the door; it was because he needed to let off steam after a hard day's scraping and bowing at work; it was because she was irritating and stupid; it was because she lied to him, made a fool of him; it was because she had to die, she just had to, it makes dramatic sense; it was because 'nothing is more poetic than the death of a beautiful woman'; it was because of this, it was because of that. It's obscene to make such things reasonable.”"

"“That's the ideal meeting...once upon a time, only once, unexpectedly, then never again.”"

"“It occurred to me that I was unhappy. And it didn’t feel so very terrible. No urgency, nothing. I could slip out of my life on a slow wave like this—it didn’t matter. I don’t have to be happy. All I have to do is hold on to something and wait.”"

"“A library at night is full of sounds: the unread books can't stand it any longer and announce their contents, some boasting, some shy, some devious.”"

"“But then, maybe “I don’t believe in you” is the cruelest way to kill a monster.”"

"“For reasons of my own I take note of the way people act when they’re around mirrors.”"

"“With boys there was a fundamental assumption that they had a right to be there—not always, but more often than not. With girls, Why her? came up so quickly.”"

"“I've read that madness is present when everything you see and hear takes on an equal significance. A dead bird makes you cry, and so does a doorknob.”"

"“If you should find yourself in a place that is indifferent to you and there is someone there that your spirit stretches to, then that person is kin.”"

"“And without further argument he unsheathed the sword and cleaved Miss Foxe's head from her neck. He knew what was supposed to happen. He knew that this awkward, whispering creature before him should now transform into a princess - dazzlingly beautiful, free, and made wise by her hardship."

"“I was born, and then I was quietly resentful of that fact for a few years...but then I went to a library and it was okay.”"

"“... it's not whiteness itself that sets Them against Us, but the worship of whiteness. Same goes if you swap whiteness out for other things-- fancy possessions for sure, pedigree, maybe youth too... we beat Them (and spare ourselves a lot of tedium and terror) by declining to worship.”"

"“The general advice is always be yourself, be yourself, which only makes sense if you haven't got an attitude problem.”"

"“To you who eat a lot of rice because you are lonely"

"“And she walked away, and she walked away, and that was that, and that was that.”"

"“In Narnia a girl might ring a bell in a deserted temple and feel the chime in her eyes, pure as the freeze that forces tears. Then when the sound dies out, the White Witch wakes. It was like, I want to touch you, and I can touch you, now what next, a dagger?”"

"“She encouraged herself to see her very small presence in the world as a good thing, a power, something that a hero might possess.”"

"An anti-heroine has her own purity, a singleness of intention."

"I sometimes consider a story’s anti-heroine to be an embodied protest against the set of ideals the narrative upholds in the form of the perfect heroine."

"Without further ado I give you my number one [anti-heroine]: Carabosse, the fairy who goes where she is not invited expressly in order to curse a princess whose life was all set up to be a bright and gracious path from birth to death."

"Sleeping Beauty is not herself, and doesn’t become so until the isolation of her hundred-year sleep, during which she must dream her own dreams. Carabosse’s curse is the most meaningful gift the girl could have been given."

""Words describing white people, white things, every single story spun out in some place where WE don’t exist! It has no value; in my eyes, it is to confuse.”"

""It was Nigeria. That was the problem. Nigeria felt ugly." (Part 1, Chapter 1, Page 6)"

""well, out of place. His face was wet with perspiration and flushed pink, and even the way that he stood marked him out as different." (Chapter 1, Page 9)"

""He was looking at her, but in a distracted manner, as if she was something to look at while he waited for something else.”(Page 15)"

""England, where people who stared at you would shift their eyes away with an embarrassed, smiling gesture if you stared back. England, where people didn’t see you, where it was almost rude to, wrong to.” (Page 16)"

""In Nigeria, her mother had said, children were always getting themselves into mischief, and surely that was better than sitting inside reading and staring into space all day.” (Part 1, Chapter 3, Page 21)"

""Wuraola sounded like another person. Not her at all. Should she answer to this name, and by doing so steal the identity of someone who belonged here?” (Part 1, Chapter 4, Page 28)"

""Who is this woman who has a Nigerian maiden name in a British passport, who stands here wearing denim shorts and a strappy yellow top, with a white man and a half-and-half child?" (Chapter 2, Page 12)"

""Maybe Jessamy has all these 'attacks' because she can't make up her mind whether she's black or white!" (Chapter 2, Page 13)"

""Once you let people know anything about what you think, that's it, you're dead. Then they'll be jumping about in your mind, taking things out, holding them up to the light and killing them, yes, killing them, because thoughts are supposed to stay and grow in quiet, dark places, like butterflies in cocoons”. (Page 82)"

""The truth shall set you free” (Chapter 11, Page 86)"

""‘You weren’t, though! If that had been my father ’handling that’, she would’ve been flat on the floor with a few teeth missing!’” (Page 198)"

""Jess’s father is upset and confused, saying to Jess’s grandfather, “One minute you’re telling her to think on Jesus and the next you’re calling a witch doctor!” (Page 236)."

""Jesus doesn’t have lips as big as yours, and his skin is fair. How can you ever be as good as him on the outside when there’s nothing of him on your face?” (Page 246)"

"”Jess shrank, her arms raised protectively over her head in anticipation of another blow. Her dad spoke tentatively from behind her: ‘Sarah, I was handling that ...’" (Page 326)"

"Once you crash the idea of normal in your mind, all impossibilities become possible."

"Men are nothing. They are fools. The penis between their legs is all they are useful for. And even then, if not that women needed their seed for children, it would be better to sit on a finger of green plantain. Listen to my words. Only a foolish woman leans heavily on a man’s promises."

"The choices we have to make in this world are hard and bitter. Sometimes we have no choices at all."

"I like doing things that put Africa and Africans on the map. My job and the stuff that I do allows me to come in contact with so many talented, incredibly hardworking people. Young but doing incredible stuff. I want the world to see them. And when I say the world, the truth is, in fact, more than anything, I’m talking about Africa, as in the African world."

"A real woman must always do the things she wants to do, and in her own time too. You must never allow yourself to be rushed into doing things you're not ready for."

"The sad truth is, polygamy constitutes a national embarrassment in any country that fantasises about progress and development. Polygamy devalues women and the only person who revels in it is the husband who gets to enjoy variety. You, poor women, will become nothing more than a dish at the buffet."

"Now, in my working life as a teacher and writer, and as a mother of four children, I watch with horror when women of my generation opt to be second or third wives. And I have been shocked by the ease with which men in their mid-30s marry additional wives."

"Husband-sharing is ugly and, one way or another, someone's dreams are crushed when a new wife joins a household."

"The world has no patience for spinsters. It spits them out."

"When a plan does not go right, you plot again. One day you will succeed. One day you will be able to damage the person who hurts you so completely that they will never be able to recover."

"Anyone who laughs at you for showing your family respect is a fool."

"“Only a foolish woman leans heavily on a man's promises”"

"“My daughters were born with eyes in their stomachs so they are quick to digest all that they see.”"

"“Even listening in on their plans for me did not take the tomato seller off my mind. After searching for days, I traced her to the farmland on the edge of our village. When I saw her, courage failed me. My liver weakened and I could not bring myself to talk to her. I abandoned my fufu and stalked her, overjoyed to be breathing the air she was breathing. I saw every man she teased. A gasp escaped my lips every time she rolled her hips and jiggled the beads that adorned her waist. Sweat was dripping from my neck like rain from the awning. I can’t explain why but I wanted her for myself. I wanted to build a house for her and keep the key between my breasts. I wanted to dress her in the finest aso oke so she could parade herself for my delight alone. I wanted to lock her between my thighs.”"

"“Men are so simple. They will believe anything.”"

"“How could I tell her that I had failed to preserve my dignity? I was too ashamed to let her see the fickle shell I’d become. Inevitably, it became unbearable. The more she pushed, the more I resisted. I didn’t want a job! I didn’t want a white wedding! I just wanted the war between who I used to be and who I’d become to end. I didn’t want to fight anymore.”"

"“If you drag her by the hair, she’ll follow you anywhere, I swear it!”"

"“Don’t think I can’t see the challenges ahead of me. People will say I am a secondhand woman. Men will hurt and ridicule me but I won’t let them hold me back. I will remain in the land of the living. I am back now and the world is spread before me like an egg cracked open.”"

"My fingers liked the feel of money. My eye liked to see the piles of money swell. I worshipped money."

"Even when the boys teased me over flap of flesh that circled my neck, I wasn't bothered. I looked at them and sniggered, knowing their father's fathers could not have a fraction of the wealth i have accummulated."

"Let us not allow the world to see our shame, let us keep our secrets from those who may seek to mock us"

"Taju claimed that he’d beaten his wife senseless for letting his only son suck on a coin. This happened about a week after a male senator slapped a female colleague. The slap had resonated through all the quiet meeting rooms of the senate building and into the heart of every man on the street…men were slapping their womenfolk as if it had become a national sport…peeved taxi drivers prodded the heads of mothers who bargained with them; young girls were assaulted and stripped naked in the streets. Even in the labour wards baby girls frowned upon by their fathers. Taju too was inspired to throw his best punch"

"Baba Segi only comes to deposit his seed in my womb. He doesn’t smile or tickle me. He doesn’t make jokes about my youth; he just rams me into the mattress…"

"Your father left me for a beautiful woman. I told him I was pregnant but he didn’t want to hear it. He sliced me like okra and left."

"I strongly believe we have hope of properly tackling corruption in Nigeria."

"We need to stop tolerating and celebrating unexplained wealth."

"Our votes are our power, they are not for sale."

"Majority of people that messed up their lives end up becoming wasted... There are exceptions though... So I am not the one punishing men in my novels, life treats them accordingly."

"There have been more than 70 studies done on my books at various levels of education-NCE, Bachelors, Masters, Diploma etc. Many of these students are fascinated that Hausa writers have such great ideas... This is great that we contribute in positive ways to our society’s attitudinal change and by extension national development. Writers are diamonds. We crystalize societies."

"I am not disputing the fact that some writers have crossed boundaries in their writings. Yes, some have gone the extra mile to be explicit. That is very, very wrong. I hope they will stop one day. But why are people only worried about Hausa novels? What about the English and other literature in which many things that shouldn’t be told are written bare! I advise parental control over reading."

"We are Muslims and we have rules in Islam for marriage and so on. But sometimes, our culture dominates the religious dictates and culture and religion are different. So, I fight because I want to stress that culture and religion are different. Probably that is why I'm called a controversial writer."

"...I tackle issues that some people and writers are afraid to talk about. Before, some old people like my mother's age mates think that their husbands are second to their God but I let them know that their husband is their mate, friend and whatever. Before, it was not like that and because that belief is still dominant in the northern states, whenever you touch that area, men don't like it."

"I don't buy the idea of early marriage because I had to push myself to understand the little English I'm speaking with you. If I hadn't pushed myself, I wouldn't have understood any English. I really desire our daughters in the North to be well educated. I have only two daughters and I want them to have quality education."

"Just as Yakubu fought her way to getting an education and becoming a successful writer, she isn’t one to wait for ideal writing conditions."

"We are talking about a woman who realized early on in life that she had to be improvisational in her approach to life. In spite of a really rough start, she went on to help invent the Soyyaya literary phenomenon."

"It is not enough for us to say we must tell our own stories if we don’t equally think or talk about the enabling infrastructure that supports the generation of those stories, the infrastructure that enables the circulation of ideas and the flow of knowledge."

"It is publishers who take stories from their raw state and turn them into food, food that may nourish or poison us. We have to talk about and acknowledge the unseen infrastructure that ensures that books are in circulation, because books, unlike print media or blogs, offer us some of the densest, extended, and interpretive conversations we can have about the world around us."

"It is also through books that some of the most enduring and pernicious images about Africa and black people persist. Yet, books also have a redemptive potential and plenitude. It is through books that we come to learn and read about each other as Africans across our differences and continue to have a reason to gather…"

"The African literary space is most likely the only artifact of culture in this neo-colonial moment that has yet to cut loose from its colonial mooring."

"What I am interested in is how we create what I am calling the African archival future which will then form part of a global archive. Publishing for me is therefore essentially the work of archival creation and a potential tool of power and control, a tool that helps to shape how we view ourselves and make sense of the world."

"We need to produce our own data in awesome, saturating quantities so that our own archives come to drown out the noise and the interpretive bias of the excessively confident outsiders who have little regard for our multi-tongued, polyrhythmic, polytheistic and metaphysical horizon."

"Perhaps the biggest challenge of publishing in Nigeria is that it’s close to impossible to find a consistently reliable local printer. After several disastrous experiences, we made the decision to print overseas."

"Digital innovation is likely to have an even stronger impact across Africa than in the West, simply because of the historic lack of access to books... Digital innovation is allowing us to build our audience base through social media. And because we have a single platform for markets —Nigeria and the rest of the world–audiences are able to interact, connect and engage each other in a way that they would not have previously done."

"...In the age of new socializing media, who can deny that a book as a material object is infinitely richer and more meaningful than any of the arts? This is because, through the thick description they enable, all the other artifacts of civilization (music, fine arts, film, science, etc) can be folded and compressed into that singular object. In the book, worlds, cultures, emotions, and habits of being are collected, dissected, and revealed to us so that we can have different voices to converse with, in that quiet moment of aloneness or to whip out to stimulate debate, dialogue, or foment a revolution."

"There are some infrastructure challenges but they are challenges that I see as opportunities. In Nigeria and across the continent, you have a publisher, who is also the distributor, who also warehouses the book, who is also doing the bookselling as well. But that is an opportunity because it means that we also have a direct relationship with consumers."

"I am so happy to be here today. To be on this stage and to share the Abantu vision. Before I begin, I want to say thank you, thank you for inviting me. I always feel I am home when I am here. Joburg is my second home. London is my first and Nigeria, my third home."

"Let me begin, in 2003, I moved back to Nigeria to take up a position as a senior research fellow at Obafemi Awolowo university. The plan was to embark on a research project exploring how Yoruba women experience and conceptualise erotic love (This was before Lola Shoneyin gave us an incline into the erotic universe of Yoruba women in her brilliant, tragic-comic debut novel The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives)."

"My research was going to be substantive, thorough and deliciously juicy and it would preoccupy me for the next few years. But, I was confounded by the empty bookshelves or lack thereof, in the middle-class homes I visited. As an avid reader who loved to talk about books, I looked into people’s shelves to get a sense of who they are and more importantly, their politics. Instead, many of the places I visited had empty bookshelves or when stocked at all, were filled with business, religious and self-help motivational books with titles like: ‘The Purpose Driven Life’, ‘Chicken Soup for the Soul’, ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’. And the few times I spotted fiction it was Dan Brown or John Grisham."

"Really, I thought to myself, how do you build a civilisation or ignite the imagination based on such a meagre diet of Euro-American airport fiction and self-help books? Yes, I am judging! Where is the counter-balance? I wondered why Amos Tutuola, Mariama Ba, Bessie Head, Aminatta Forna, Zaynab Alkali, Paulin Hountondji, D.O. Fagunwa, Bernardine Evaristo or Ben Okri were missing from these shelves. These emptied of spirit bookshelves, this erasure of African voices and vibrancy from view became the inspiration to set up a publishing company, Cassava Republic Press."

"We have to talk about and acknowledge the unseen infrastructure that ensures that books are in circulation, because books, unlike print media or blogs, offer us some of the densest, extended and interpretive conversations we can have about the world around us. It is also through books that some of the most enduring and pernicious images about Africa and black people persists. Yet, books also have a redemptive potential and plenitude."

"It is through books that we come to learn and read about each other as Africans across our differences and continue to have a reason to gather (as we are here today) so that we can salivate over the apparent genius of the solitary writer while we sublimate the collective geniuses (the editor, book designer, proof reader, copy editor, publicist, sales people, indexer, the literary critic, the blogger, instagramer etc.) that are involved in the production of any one book for the celebration of the singular authorial voice."

"Still, even in the age of new socialising media, who can deny that a book as a material object is infinitely richer and more meaningful than any of the arts? This is because through the thick description they enable, all the other artefacts of civilisation (music, fine arts, film, science etc) can be folded and compressed into that singular object. In the book, worlds, cultures, emotions and habits of being are collected, dissected and revealed to us so that we can have different voices to converse with in that quiet moment of aloneness, or to whip out to stimulate debate, dialogue or forment a revolution."

"So today, I want to talk about why, despite its many ups and down, I am a publisher. I am a publisher because I love stories. I am a publisher because I love ideas and I think ideas and words can change the content of our mind and transform our worlds and the norms we live by. I am a publisher because I like power, especially enabling and productive power which we must embrace. Finally, I am a publisher because I am interested in the future. I am interested in contributing to and helping to shape what people in 100, 200 or even 500 years’ will be discussing and mulling over when they take a walk into the labyrinth of their past that is our present moment. I am interested in how we can create the archive of the future in the present."

"The archive as a reservoir of and for memory is the place where ideas and material culture of historic interest or social relevance are stored and ordered. It is where society warehouses what it wants to remember and what it sees as worthy of remembrance, especially for the future. Whether that archive is of literature, music, visual art, film, plastic art, buildings, I am interested in what future people will find that gives them a record, a sense of this present moment."

"Will they find only the record of African writing that has been served up from the conveyor belt of large corporate and indie publishing houses of western metropolis? Will some of the mediocre writing that is currently being peddled as the pinnacle of African excellence and genius by the legitimatising authority of the west be the only thing they have to subsist on and account for as our own contribution to civilisation and to the global archive of ideas? Or will they only find the realist tradition of writing bequeathed to us from the Achebe generation?"

"The African literary space is most likely the only artefact of culture in this neo-colonial moment that has yet to cut loose from its colonial mooring. And the reason is simply, it still relies on the colonial centres for its aesthetics, market, economics, relevance, affirmation and symbolic legitimacy."

"The framing of African literature only in terms of the English metaphysical empire was not only a tragedy and an act of symbolic violence (perpetuated and sedimented by Africans themselves), it created a rupture in how we periodise our literary tradition(s)."

"For Wa Ngugi and Beach, the English metaphysical empire, refers to ‘an empire of language and literature that would outlive the actual British empire’ (p19). The crowning of English language (and to a lesser extent the other colonial languages) as the medium to transmit and transmute African literary expression, according to Wa Ngugi was (and I agree with him) inaugurated in 1962 at the “African Writers of English Expression” conference that convened at Makerere University, in Uganda. Even the title of the conference already suggests that the quality and depth of African literary tradition will be determined in English, leading to the erasure of earlier literature in African languages. What a waste! What a wasted and a missed opportunity to break away from colonial linguistic capture!"

"So much so that a figure like Achebe (never mind that he himself rejected the term) is heralded as the father of African literature despite being preceded by other writers such as Amos Tutuola who had published 3 books before him and even earlier writers in South Africa like Thomas Mofolo, writing in the 1800s and whose work was translated to English in the 1900s or The Life and Struggles of Our Mother Walatta Petros: A Seventeenth-Century African Biography of an Ethiopian Woman, written by the Ethiopian emperor Galawdewos. This means that even the systemising and the categorising of our literary tradition is wrong, there’s a gap, a missing antecedent of writing in favour of writings and writers who pay homage to the metaphysics of English. Of course, this has meant that in the literary space, we have not been as prolific as our situation demands or the population of the continent."

"If we do not start the deliberate project of infusing our vision of the world now with what we want to see, if do not start publishing in vast quantities, what future beings will find in the archive about Africa and by Africans will be yet more emptiness and silence no different to the emptied bookshelves in those Lagos homes I visited. As with our generation, they will have only recourse to the meticulous and avaricious archiving of colonial records at the British library or what HarperCollins or Penguin Random House tells us African writers are writing and thinking today or what the Makerere generation left us with. What an impoverished archive that will be!"

"However, if we take the project of archive seriously now, what they will find will be determined by people like me, what we produce now, the decisions we take now – whether we are satisfied to continue to do wonders with the English language as Achebe implored us to or follow in Ngugi’s step and develop a robust African language literary culture – will be entirely up to us."

"If we don’t like the structure of our present is, if we think the books by African writers coming out of the western publishing establishments do not speak to the fullness and totality of the reality we see around us or how we want to appear now and into the future, we have a responsibility in the present for the sake of tomorrow to flip the script and create our own publishing infrastructure across the continent that is more than the skeletal ones that we currently subsist on and over-celebrate."

"Secondly, on mourning and melancholia, we know that mourning is still better than melancholia. At least with mourning there is a recognition that there has been a loss, a hurt or a wound that is necessary in order to recover from that loss. It is therefore not construed as a pathology, but a ‘working through’ of the hurt or absence. However, when melancholia replaces mourning, we are moving into a state of mental disorder and this may come with suicidal impulse. It is this that is considered a pathology. I guess given the successive blows of the last 500 years, the African world (from Lagos to Los Angeles, Benin to Bahia) probably oscillates between mourning and melancholia and we are still struggling to shake off."

"So, we have to stop thinking of the archive merely as that which is past, we have to think of it simultaneously as past, present and future. We have to think of the archive as a curation of knowledge, experience and worlds in the now, to help order a past for the purpose of the future. We have to understand that the archive and its curation is always caught up in regimes of power and control."

"When we understand the archive in these relational terms, we’ll then begin to see that there is a fundamental problem and an ontological injustice in our complicitous silence and tacit acceptance of English or any of the European languages as the inevitable medium to transmit African writing across our linguistic differences. Perhaps then we can begin to have a sense of urgency and deliberateness about how we narrate and share our stories with the world and the urgency to produce loads and loads of data about how we see and imagine the world that is opening itself to us."

"We must take ourselves more seriously and value what we do, even the minutia action and document. There’s no other time in history then now when archival creation is available to us all. All of us can contribute to the archive. We do not have to wait for the great archival institutions of the past which are usually controlled and organised by government institutions or some royal court record keepers. The time is now!"

"We need to understand that every action we take in the present moment, every cultural production, every scientific discovery, every dance movement, every new melody, every Yoruba panegyric that is slowly receding from our tongue, every Facebook update, every twitter spat, every email exchange, every graffiti on a mutatu is an opportunity to create and contribute to the archive. Whether we conceive of our actions as a potential contribution to the archive or not, someone else is already doing it for us, watching our updates, mapping our habits of being and archiving them to better understand how to induce new desire(s) in us for profit and capitalist accumulation."

"African literature today is still struggling to emerge from the shadow of that 1962 conference, which according to Mukoma, set in motion the hegemony of the realist tradition in African literature. The realist tradition inaugurated by the Makerere Brotherhood (and yes, we can talk in terms of brotherhood because only two female writers were present) not only disregarded and arrested the growth of writing in African languages, it curtailed the growth of writing styles and flights of fancy that may be more attuned to some of the fantastical wanderings of nocturnal storytelling traditions that many may be familiar with."

"I think there is no one of us who can boast of having telescopic eyes. But when you read, books become your telescopic eyes. You will see the whole world through the books you have been reading. And you become wiser. If you don’t read any book at all, you will rarely develop."

"when I wrote My Father’s Daughter, some people said it was too good to be true; but it couldn’t be too good to be true, because if you set your mind in good things, you will do good things."

"I still pay tribute to my English teacher, Mrs. Ore Cole, who taught me how to become a writer. It makes you wiser and more intelligent. When you read a lot you eventually want to become a writer."

"Some people who didn’t have better fathers said it was fiction. I said, ‘Well. if you didn’t have the kind of father that I had then there is no point in trying to belittle my own father. My father was a great man'."

"When you write children’s literature, you write for different ages."

"I like to revise my works to be as near perfect as possible."

"Women are full of themselves, they always say men are frightened or intimidated by their financial success but the issue is COMPATIBILITY."

"I believe that if people had more information, access and easy to understand information, especially as Nigerians, we will make better conscious choices with our health."

"I don't have much of an imagination, but I have a mind bank of details, which I play with. It's how I daydream, so writing like that is natural for me."

"People don’t fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it’s too much."

"You don't need attention to write. All you need is passion for your work and an overwhelming desire to tell a story you genuinely care about. Readers can sense your sincerity and it separates you from pretenders."

"I never wanted to be a writer; I just had stories I needed to tell."

"She drinks her Eva water. Their parents were taken down by cancer, heart attacks and strokes. Respectable diseases."

"Most of the children were shoeless and you were confronted with the dilemma that, no matter how much money you had and no matter where you could escape to overseas, you could not save yourself from your own country."

"I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain."

"I get stage fright with short stories . For me it feels like stand up comedy: kill or die. I’m more confident when I begin a novel because I know I have space to fail"

"Cooking was a skill, I thought; an art form. In our country, we appreciated the end result, but not the craft, perhaps because we didn’t have fancy names. Paring was “cut it.” Julienne was “cut it well.” Chopping was “cut it well well,” and so on till you had puree, which would probably be “mash it.” And, if anyone was measuring any ingredient in a kitchen, it meant that they really didn’t know what they were doing."

"It occurred to me that there was nothing more precious than satisfaction. That it was possible to end up committing a crime just because you were contaminated by a little discontent. You could convince yourself that you were satisfied, then someone could come along and say, 'But I can offer you more', and then you could begin to think, My life is not worth much after all. In fact, you could tell yourself, My life was completely worthless from the start."

"History is very important to my work in that regard and thank you for noticing. I’m no expert on Fanon, but I used the quotation as an epigraph because I found it amusing and apt. The bourgeois phase in the history of a country like Nigeria is indeed completely useless, which is why the novel ends as it begins, with middle-class preoccupations, despite the political changeover that occurs in the story."

"The quotation is for those whom it may concern. Our country doesn’t work. We know that. We also know why. What we may not be ready to accept is that progress will continue to elude us so long as we follow trajectories that are alien to us, the most damaging of which are driven by unbridled capitalism. This is not to suggest that a return to our traditional systems is the way forward; I don’t idealise them in the novel."

"Nigeria isn’t exactly a newly industrialised country either, but we have engaged in trading activities for centuries, and have a history of selling people for mere beads. Fast forward to what we have witnessed of late, with our governments selling us down the river by privatising public utilities, and contracting out public services, such as waste management, to foreign companies. Yet we still don’t have regular electricity supply or a clean environment."

"We call that development, but at every traffic light along the way are beggars, most of whom are children and disabled adults. Some are amputees and presumably they are often victims of sharia law punishments. We look away only to see billboards advertising business conferences at mega churches."

"Perhaps living in other countries has given me a different perspective, but for me these are not signs of a country’s progress, by which I mean its advancement towards freedom, justice and equality. The way we are going, I don’t think we’re prepared for the political impacts, social shifts and economic disparities that will come, and we still have no common ideology that unites us more than capitalism does."

"Yet it benefits only a minority of us and fails the rest of the country. In fact, it is the underlying cause of our moral failings, and whether or not you care about the welfare of your fellow citizens, being a member of the elite can no longer save you. There is nowhere to hide from the dysfunction, which is why Nigerians who can afford to, escape abroad as often as they can."

"Even activism is for personal gain in Nigeria, so it’s no surprise that nothing improves. Should that happen, activists would be out of business. I am part of the world I complain about, but writing is not business as usual for me. It is an expression of hope that I might, in my small way, play a part in bringing about change. Now, you can’t kill the beast by feeding it, but you can slip poison into its food, which is what I attempt to do by writing honestly."

"In this particular novel, the Fanon quotation identifies the process we’re going through and explains our failures so far. What I then do is show we are products of complex pre- and postcolonial systems that determine our orientations. The heart of the story, though, is Remi Lawal’s difficult relationship with Nigeria."

"If anyone says they fit in nicely with the Nigerian upper class, I would have to come to the conclusion that they are thoughtless. No one is responsible for their upbringing and no one deserves to be defined by any social class. My late father was the son and great-grandson of traditional rulers and he attended Oxford University. I often joke that the women in my mother’s family carry themselves as if they are royalty. They are proud of their parents, who worked hard to educate them."

"When I was a child, I was called oniranu a lot at home because I poked fun at people I ought to respect. I was about six years old when I made up a song about a certain Lagos society woman. One line, I remember, said she had rashes, even though she didn’t. I’m still an oniranu at heart. I never grew out of it. In my play Lengths to Which We Go, which you’ve read, I have an aspiring character called Mrs. Babalola who calls herself upper “clarse”."

"In my short story “Unsuitable Ties”, I have a snobbish character called Biola whom I refer to as an authority on class since her early schooling in Switzerland. Characters like these provide comic relief for me. Blame the British as well. They left us with a social construct called class distinction, which makes no sense except to justify the oppression of the majority of Nigerians."

"I suppose the reason I write about the Lagos elite at all is that they don’t become writers. Ikoyi people in particular are underrepresented in Nigerian literature. Ikoyi itself is often described as a place where rich, powerful people live. But when I was growing up there, the people I knew were not unlike those who lived on Victoria Island, and districts on the mainland such as Apapa and Ikeja, and estates such as Alaka and Palmgrove."

"The people who gave Ikoyi a bad name were the ones who rarely allowed other Nigerians into their social circles, except to serve and look up to them. Occasionally they were open to outsiders who had as much money and were equally materialistic. They were self-conscious but not particularly self-examining, and they were afraid to admit their vulnerability. As my protagonist Remi Lawal notes at the Dadas’ cocktail party in the novel, their lives are full of frivolous contradictions and, ultimately, they are replaced from one generation to the next. She is right about that. Ikoyi of 1976 is not the same as it is today. That society is gone now. The band and the song have changed."

"You know, I’ve also been called a Lagos writer and a feminist writer, but I just tell stories that interest me in ways that interest me. Growing up in Ikoyi, I had friends who used drugs. Friends who discovered their fathers had girlfriends, second wives and other children. Friends whose mothers were victims of physical and emotional abuse. Friends whose parents got divorced. I never thought any of those families were dysfunctional. To me, such things were just part of family life. But I always heard about them from third parties because appearance was everything in Ikoyi, most especially the appearance of respectability."

"I break that down in the novel, and in that sense it’s no different from novels I’ve read about suburban life in the United States, England and elsewhere, except it has moments of political intrigue and turmoil. I juxtapose these extraordinary national moments and ordinary domestic moments to give a realistic portrayal of how we lived. Perhaps my real motive is to depict Nigeria as one big dysfunctional family."

"No. I’ve never even read a Le Carré novel, but I slept with a few in a bookcase behind my headboard. My mother was a Le Carré fan. I studied Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory when I was at school in England, which turned me into a fan of his prose. I realise my novel ventures into white male territory by playing with the idea of espionage and satirising high society. When you do that as an African woman writer, someone is bound to ask, “Why are you here? Have you lost your way? Do you know where you are going?” But I was raised by a woman whose experiences were not limited by her gender or nationality."

"I’ll tell you a couple of family stories. The first is that my mother met Graham Greene in a shop on Bond Street. Neither of us can remember the exact year it happened and she says the shop has since closed down. The funny part is that she’d never heard of him. After he left, the shop assistant mentioned his name and said he was a famous author. To this day I wish I’d been with her, just to confirm it was him. The second story is that during the coup that brought General Muhammed to power in 1975, an expatriate woman befriended my mother."

"We’d never seen the woman before, but she came to our house in south-west Ikoyi for a few nights and talked to my mother about the coup. On her first night she had dinner with us – osso buco. I remember this because it was a rare treat I looked forward to eating. We had no electricity at night, so my mother reheated it on a kerosene stove and we boiled rice and fried plantains. We ate dinner at the table with a battery lantern. I don’t recall details of what the woman said, but she soon stopped coming over and my mother said she had to be a spy. Of course I made fun of my mother."

"It doesn’t matter whether Frances Cooke – the bead collector – was spying or not. It was enough to show there were allegations in those days, which may have been partly due to xenophobia. Ikoyi, however, was where business and political leaders lived, and the United States did have an interest in spreading neo-liberal ideas to developing countries like Nigeria."

"I’m never afraid when I write. I’m sometimes nervous after my books are published, by which time it’s too late to censor myself. When you write boldly, you get mixed reactions and I assume it will be the same with this novel. Not just because of its content, but because of the way I’ve written it. Much of what we’ve talked about may be overlooked by readers who want more to happen in an African novel, but I don’t write to accommodate their needs. Also, whenever you write about privileged Africans, someone somewhere will be upset with you."

"Lastly, as you know, we have a few critics in the Nigerian literary community who are caught up in the old Igbo-Yoruba rivalry, which doesn’t interest me, but their reviews reflect that. I’m used to having different responses to my work. I don’t expect everyone to appreciate what I write and I’m thankful to readers who do."

"Not even crocodiles eat their young...papa takes care of his children."

"If you prefer sitting in traffic to sitting at your desk, if you pass office hours waiting for closing time, if you spend more time on Facebook than you do attending to important emails then perhaps it's time for you to consider quitting your job."

"Be courageous, not brave. Bravery was to dash out of the bomb shelter and grab the child left crying on the veranda. Courage was to go to the stream the day after a bomb had scattered your friend on that path because water must be fetched to sustain the life that was left"

"There is no Muslim Nigeria and no Christian Nigeria. There is only one indivisible Nigeria. Kaduna belongs to all Nigerians. No religion endorses violence or gratuitous cruelty. Regrettably, some undesirable elements have incited these ugly clashes and those elements will be fished out and properly punished."

"People who are quick to pay compliments, baby-baby, are also quick to withdraw them."

"Blood is thicker than water, you hear. Ha! Let me tell you, some blood flows thinner. And some water is as thick as sludge."

"S is for sins. What is a sin? At Catechism, she was taught to repeat, 'Sin is an offence against reason, truth and right conscience.' But she could not tell what sins she was supposed to be atoning for. What were her mother's sins? Mma swallowed all the words she wanted to say and started eating the food she no longer tasted."

"S is for sir. It's what you called your father if you'd never lived with him. If you did not know where his medication box was. If you did not even know what he was taking medication for. No, sir. Yes, sir. S is for strangers multiplied by five. Ten eyes watching her, sizing her up, maybe wondering what she was doing there. What was she doing here? And all this talk of tradition, which had pushed her mother away in the first place. Roll. Dip. Swallow. She had met her father."

"A parent never apologises, even if he regrets his actions. It is the child who should apologise."

"Sometimes in life, we have to take a stand. It does not help to sit on the fence, even if we have to hurt the people we love-love. That is what I want you to remember. If I have taught you anything, I want it to be that."

"You children, you forget that no matter how high the okra tree grows, it's never mightier than the hand that planted it."

"No matter the size of your husband's penis, no other woman should know it."

"It is not the thing that we fear the most that crushes us but that which we have failed to fear."

"Determination makes one impervious to pain."

"Never give up if your heart and your head tell you are right. People can disappoint you, but your heart and your head will never. Make them your best friends."

"Life is like a set of false teeth. The world sees what you show it: Clean teeth wey white like Colgate. But you know for inside dat your real teet' don rot finish!"

"What can a woman do? You say everyday. In the end, a woman does something, and even then still you look down on women."

"There is no problem in this world that cannot be solved."

"There was nothing in me when I was in school that made me feel I was going to be a writer. It was one of those things that just happened. I didn’t have the ambition to say, “Oh, Flora, you are going to be a writer, so work towards it"

"We are well, Efuru replied. It is only hunger. It is good that it is only hunger. Good health is what we pray for."

"Efuru told him that she would drown herself in the lake if he did not marry her. Adizua told her he loved her very much and that even the dust she trod on meant something to him."

"I am sure you will like this gin. Nwabuzo had it buried in the ground last year when there was rumour that policemen were sent to search her house. When the policemen left, finding nothing, Nwabuzo was still afraid and left it in the ground. A week later, she fell ill and was rushed to the hospital where she remained for six months. She came back only a week ago. So the gin is a very good one."

"They did not see the reason why Adizua should not marry another woman since according to them two men do not live together. To them Efuru was a man, since she could not reproduce."

"If I am considered the doyenne of African female writers, the glory goes to the oral historians and griottes who mesmerized me with stories about the mystical powers of Ogbuide, the mother of the lake, my family members of industrious women and men who served as role models, as well as my penchant for service and the pursuit of excellence."

"I don’t think that I’m a radical feminist,”"

"I don’t even accept that I’m a feminist. I accept that I’m an ordinary woman who is writing about what she knows. I try to project the image of women positively."

"Women have always been powerful and striven to achieve financial independence. I wanted a politics that fought for expanding and nurturing the power that women already had. It is not that I believed that there was no such thing as gender inequality. I just did not want to see a woman as a victim but as someone who was always enterprising and looking for ways to undermine the systems of power that tried to put her down."

"Feminism was a politics of empowerment that assumed that a woman was a victim. I saw feminism as a politics that had to first position women as victims so that it can then empower them."

"As Adiewere and Efuru were eating, a troop of children with shining tummies in front of them were seen approaching. "These children are just in time. The way they time themselves is admirable."

"When Efuru went home, Ajanupu could not help admiring her character. "She is a woman among women. I like the way she is carrying her burden. She still loves that imbecile husband of hers and she is going in search of him."

"The novel captures the ongoing changes in Nigerian society where women strive for (economic) independence and personal happiness and growth rather than a life within the boundaries of an outdated tradition. In stressing the economic independence of women, Nwapa reminded me of Virginia Woolf and her essay “A Room Of One’s Own”."

"Contrary to Woolf, who I personally always found to be overly dramatic and elitist, and, thus, exclusive, in her viewpoints and demands to literature and feminism, Nwapa did not think of herself as a feminist. At the same time, she is crucially aware of the misrepresentation of women in literature by fellow male authors who tend to display women as prostitutes or mischievous creatures, all of which Nwapa counteracts in her own writing by displaying women as positive, independent and real as they are."

"Tweeting for me is a hobby and not what I do my whole life. I’ve had people ask me if I have a day job and if I go."

"It’s the number of people who don’t know me that I can join in to do a thing or two for those who need them even more than I do."

"Experts say most sexual abuse offenders are acquainted with their victims; approximately 30% are relatives of the child, most often brothers, fathers, uncles, or cousins; around 60% are other acquaintances, such as “friends” of the family, babysitters, or neighbours; strangers are the offenders in approximately 10% of child sexual abuse cases."

"Challenge is not forgetting who you are and what you stand for and also ensure that when you are a plumber you wear the hat of one and when you then become a mechanic the next day, you do same."

"We need men to look at what women can offer and to hand them the baton to thrive."

"I’d say I am lucky being married to a man who understands what I do and sure does appreciate me as a wife who sometimes moves from city to city."

"On the 5th of January 2018 scores of people went missing with 9 soldiers killed when Boko Haram attacked Kannama near Geidam. The likes of Falmata Shettima continue to live precarious lives in spite of the seeming degrading of Boko Haram."

"Monitoring elections. I mean the entire process of democracy and where we are today as a people and a nation."

"She condemned police and military “brutality” across the country, and a “generalised system of impunity."

"I take a deep breath and think outside the box."

"I think it was while I practised as a field reporter on television; I went for an assignment and I needed the speech."

"I also realised one thing, the reason I wasn’t sleeping was not only because I had chronic insomnia, but I was so busy thinking about not sleeping. The idea of me not sleeping engulfed me. By this time, I had stopped going to church or praying."

"He makes a way where there’s no way. He moves mountains and fills valleys. He makes the blind to see. He loves me unconditionally. His word never returns to Him void."

"Remain humble. Give back. Take care of you. Stay fab, don’t hate; hating takes too much effort."

"I have since learnt that there is a process to success and that process can break or build us depending on our beliefs and inner strength. Our thoughts can make or mar us so be careful what you’re thinking about."

"We have walked on that street called hope but having each other makes it bearable. It requires sacrifice & it takes effort & nurturing. You want a good marriage? Work at it!"

"Some people eventually die at 80 but the Truth is, they have been dead since they were in their 30s”"

"Life is too short to wear tight shoes”… so hey, come on!!"

"Sometimes you just gotta turn your back and walk away…your peace of mind counts the most."

"Life is Not a popularity contest…be your authentic self…"

"Just dance…it’s okay not to be such a hot stepper… everyone misses a beat now and again."

"Be mindful how you treat your staff, because if you treat them shabbily, they would not put their best."

"Anti-ageing should begin with de-clogging the body and the mind from years o f grime instead of covering it up with creams and makeup. Some of the bad choices we make in life can age us faster than calendar years."

"When you save the life of one woman, you save a generation who would otherwise be without a mother."

"Change begins with how we as women see, treat and fight for other women. Change truly begins when we do."

"Appreciating the moments with enthusiasm and a “can do” spirit separates the achievers from the rest."

"Don’t dwell too much on what you haven’t achieved, rather focus on how to achieve it. It’s never too late to start again even after starting again."

"I love what I am doing especially as it is impacting people. Genevieve changed my way of thinking from “what if I fail?” to “what if I succeed?”."

"No woman should be anybody’s fool. But if you say should a woman stoop to conquer, then why not."

"Celebrity couples should stop living their lives on twitter and Instagram; it’s ok in the real world for couples to disagree."

"Personally, I don’t think any woman is ugly. Beauty is as much in character as it is in the physical."

"make no apologies for who you are. adorn your life with roses… fragrances and yes, you can stay fab at any age as long as you don’t outsource your happiness… defy all ageing sterotypes…wear your heels, swirl and strike a pose. work that body!"

"No struggle or journey in life is a piece of cake… but the icing on the cake is when our tests become testimonies."

"Be a leader with a heart… don’t take all the credit for what it took a team to build. encourage your team to have bigger goals and appreciate everyone’s contribution."

"There will be days when you feel, “why me o” but they will come and go and you will be back on your feet.."

"Just because you are not where the society said you should be at this point in your life, doesn’t make you late. It makes you ‘YOU’."

"Giving up is what most people do when it gets tough, if you don’t go through hardship, what story will you tell when you succeed."

"I really wanted to inspire people to continue to pursue their dreams as I was mine, despite how difficult it was."

"Be kind. Be honest. Dream big. Be patient. Love yourself. Believe in yourself. Judge less. Speak well of others."

"Don’t pay attention to hate."

"“The way you spend, invest and manage ten naira is the way you will spend, invest and manage ten million.”"

"“Developing a wealthy mind-set requires the understanding of the concept that the way you spend, invest, and manage ten naira is the way you will spend, invest, and manage ten million.”"

"Confronting money fears is the right way to conquering them."

"“Money matters should should be a part of premarital counseling.”"

"“Ultimately, improving her net worth is more important than upgrading her wardrobe.”"

"“Becoming an entrepreneur means you are responsible for an enterprise and beyond the idea”"

"“In order to maximize your earning power and have the ability to invest, you need to pursue a career you are passionate about and create multiple streams of income.”"

"“Women have what is called ‘imposter syndrome’. We tend to rate ourselves lower than the rest of the world would rate us.”"

"“The business or job opportunities you’ll have access to will come from your ability to harness your network and learn how to convert that network into opportunities.”"

"“Having an extensive network allows you to maximize your potential.”"

"“A strong personal brand that visibly demonstrates your work experience as an intrapreneur, your achievements, and how you are able to overcome challenges, ultimately speaks for you before you enter a room.”"

"“Anyone who makes you feel bad for prioritising your financial health isn’t someone that should be in your life.”"

"“The key to guilt-free spending is setting up financial systems that allow you to know what you can afford when you can afford it.”"

"“A woman identifying as feminist and striving for financial independence doesn’t mean she hates men. It just means she wants equal access to opportunities that can generate enough income to look after herself and pay her bills.”"

"“One of the most significant stress tests in any relationship is how people deal with financial problems. Who they are and what they do first in a financial crisis.”"

"“The reality is there are only two levers that control wealth – earn more or spend less.”"

"“Invest in your circle of friends because the sort of people and relationships you surround yourself with have an impact on your ability to make, keep and grow money.”"

"“Your mind is your most powerful asset, if you harness it, it will be your most useful tool even in the worst of times.”"

"“If you walk into a room thinking you offer nothing, others can smell it and they’ll think it too.”"

"Royal Arts Academy will contribute to the transformation, development and growth of Nigeria and the African continent as a whole, by offering first class training to students who would go on to produce excellent films that would place Nollywood at par with the international community. This training will be provided by industry professionals within and outside the country."

"I’m very happy doing what I’m doing. I have strong passion for it. And whenever I finish a movie and come across people who are enjoying my movies, I always feel elated."

"This is my first time to do a true life story. It was challenging for me. We spent weeks doing research in the creeks of Bayelsa, learning the culture of the people. My choice of cast fit the character in reality."

"Every country should respect its own local industry. We must look for ways to help Nigerians who put in a lot of hard work whether as cast or crew members. Their hope is to be able to earn a living from the sacrifices and efforts they put into supporting the production of the movies the Nigerian audience consume."

"As a way of saying thank you to my people, I have decided to film my next huge project in Uyo to continue in our contributions towards the development and growth of the movie industry in Akwa Ibom and indeed Nollywood."

"Enjoy the little things in life, because one day you’ll look back, and realize they were the big things."

"Special Jollof is just a love story set in the background of immigration, the problems immigrants go through and this preconceived notion that every immigrant is involved in illegal activities. This movie is actually different from what I normally do and because it is a well talked about issue worldwide at the moment, causing concern for world leaders."

"Remuneration for creatives in Nigeria is a far cry from what their counterparts receive abroad. Hollywood and other established film industries are much older and sophisticated than Nollywood and therefore would reward their practitioners better.""

"Shooting this movie was very challenging but also fun. One of the major challenges we faced was finding foreign actors, so, I had to hold an audition but thank God, the turnout was really impressive. Another challenge was finding locations and getting people to open up to you. I was new to that terrain, so, it was quite challenging for me.”"

"Take every opportunity you get; you never know which one will help you accomplish your goal."

"Stop comparing your life to others. There’s no comparison between the SUN and the MOON. They shine when it’s their time."

"I have learnt to be patient. I have learnt to understand that people’s destinies are different. I have also learnt to understand that not everybody will appreciate your style, not everybody will understand where you are coming from. All you need as a person is focus."

"There is this rush in me, it is there, and you can feel it inside you, knowing that somebody is going to make use of it. It comes at the end of the script you write knowing you have been able to come up with something that someone else will make use of what you are doing. Then, knowing that not everybody can do what you are doing."

"Growing up in the slum helps you to find yourself. It’s either you are defined or you are not. Growing up as a child in Ajegunle, it’s either you get lost or it helps you find your way."

"As a child I have always known what I wanted. In my room I had a write-up that when I become eighteen I would rent my own apartment."

"You don’t decide when you find the right person, so wherever you find yourself at whatever point in life, it’s important to be happy at that stage."

"Both writing and acting, I don’t see myself trying to compare them. It is my duty to do my job and it is people’s duty to analyse it. Success is getting to a point where you are comfortable with what you have and you are happy with it and this is exactly how I feel."

"One Nigeria can truly not work, except these excesses can boldly and truly be checked."

"Wealth and assets have no hiding place."

"Stop trying to replace your ex. What’s gone is gone. Trust yourself to make better choices and make corrections from your initial error. If you still haven’t healed, give yourself time to."

"What’s gone is gone, what’s lost is lost. Trust in your destiny, you will find love. and it will find you."

"Acting was actually my first love, but for some reason, that part of my life never really took off; so, I went back to film school, London film academy, studied film production/screenwriting and my whole film making career kicked off. What spurred me? I had always wanted to tell and share my story with the world."

"It’s both. I think one of my biggest fears is accepting money to shoot a movie though I do get several offers. In as much as content is king, the demand for it is getting higher but the remuneration is getting lower. Producers, who have made huge box office returns, check out what they have put in and their returns. If you say you make N100 million in cinemas, split that in three ways first before you start considering returns on investment from the one-third that comes to you."

"“I’m a writer, producer, director and sometimes I want to be an actor because my original dream since I was a teenager was to act but life directions didn’t really take that course. I studied Philosophy in OAU and when I graduated I went into radio. I was on Star FM for a while as a newscaster. I then moved to MITV to be a TV presenter and then I went on to Insight Communication Agency to be a copy writer and afterwards went back to radio, Rainbow FM for about 4-years."

"My husband is a young man and very conservative and he had one worry which is quite valid. The trend of people getting married and breaking up was his worry. And also the African perspective to how people will be ‘touching his wife’ and all that but by the time we crossed that bridge, there were lots of rules like ‘ don’t let them hug you’ and the likes. He’s comfortable now that I am the producer and so I’ll know how to write it to soothe our conditions; and by the time he even agreed the flair was gone. So it was more of me just wanting to be a film maker and I found peace."

"You can count on two hands the films I’ve made. That is to tell you that it is not as lucrative as it seems. What makes it lucrative is also spending a lot of money on making the film, promoting the film and making sure everyone hears about it. So, small screen film makers like me (because there are some filmmakers that only come out to make films for cinema) bank on the numbers. As long as you keep working, you’ll be able to balance out. But if you’ll be going to the cinemas, you’ll need money to go in the first place and you’ll also need to wait a long time to be paid and to be licensed. It’s not a return that comes at once, it spreads over time"

"No matter how ambitious or intelligent you are, your plans may not turn out exactly as you’ve envisioned."

"Try and be the best version of yourself. Work hard and never stop learning."

"Trying To Be Like Someone Else Betrays Who You Are"

"When I submitted my film to the Afrika Film Festival, all I wanted was my film to be seen by a wider audience it was amazing being nominated and ultimately winning the UNESCO prize."

"A pure documentary that encourages active participation in the process of emancipating women in Nigeria, but also globally."

"I say to myself that my goal if I never get married, I tend to look at myself as the other Theresa of Nigeria, having so many children that are not even born to you but living your life for others and making sure that you create value for those you will leave behind to be able to carry on the work."

"That experience was a breakthrough for me and, having conquered that I saw the possibility of having to use my voice for the first time and then I started voice coaching. I did internship with Channel 4, did internship with BBC Online, did a lot of auxiliary training and then I decided to just go freelancing."

"I believe and understand that there is misogyny in the system, a lot of women want to be part of it, but there is stereotype and so there is a lacking principal of inclusion of women at the grassroots. For me, it is grassroots first because if we can bond from bottom to top what we can deliver is the fact that more women will be included, more voices will be heard and then the role play will slowly begin to change."

"Getting into the field was a totally different experience and ball game. And I am like, ‘Ah ha, we have come here now, what do we do? How do we re-engage?’ Trust me, the more you look when you get into politics, the less you see, because the narratives you thought were shaping or were supposed to shape those who are in power was not the case scenario in real time."

"And as per my role as the SSA, it was not about the title or about the office; it was about the activation for service for those who my principal called to serve and my admiration for his wife, Ebere Ihedioha, who was very visible and also very passionate about the plight of women in Imo State."

"The Women and Gender Affairs Cluster committee is tasked with the responsiibility of leading, guiding, defending and coordinating the AU Ecosoc efforts on gender equality and development and promoting women’s empowerment by ensuring that African countries comply with the AU Solemn Declaration on Gender Equality."

"Today as the social call mounts on the development of Africa, sustainability is key and requires deliberate actions such as this passion, fairness and dexterity will be my guiding charge towards ensuring the gap for women’s role is brought to the fore and activate innovations and policies that mainstream women across all sectors."

"The records show that hitherto illicit drug consumption used to be among the male youth population though expanding to now include teenage girls, young women and older married women. But to intentionally segregate the consideration to just single women even when the higher percentage of consumption is amongst men and boys shows a complete lack of appropriate gender mapping on this issue across the states in Nigeria."

"So at 16 I decided to be a journalist, that way I could tell the stories of people and bring it to public attention. However now I think I am still telling stories but just in different mediums. For me it is still a way of helping people seek some kind of justice or resolution or at least it will be the beginning of it I hope."

"Getting to host the Airtel Touching Lives television show has to be one of my high points. I can’t really think of any low points because I tend to just see every experience as something to grow from. I am also a person that rolls with the punches so I don’t have very much time to notice low points as I just keep it moving."

"In all the challenges women face in this environment, feminism means way too many things to me, but two words that encapsulate all those things would be freedom and choice."

"I worry about myself because I have too many dreams and ambitions. The future includes writing and creating plays, films and documentaries, touring the world as a performance poet, curating contemporary art, hopefully presenting more television and more journalistic work as well. I hope to continue supporting the work of the Mirabel center and hopefully start my mentorship workshops for teenage girls."

"I don’t do macho, hard man, inexpressive, or dictatorial. Partnership is important to me."

"It is always very easy hide with poetry. The bones of some of the poems were written as part of a month-long challenge that I was part of in a closed Facebook group. Everyday we got a prompt and had to produce a poem before midnight. It was quite grueling, and I don’t think any of us finished the thirty days but it really opened me up emotionally. I also wrote many of the poems traveling."

"There are a lot of incredible artists doing amazing work. Unfortunately, there aren’t many spaces for them to showcase the incredible work they do.I wanted to create something that would illuminate the works of these individuals and their creative process. So as a lover of all things art and culture, I thought it was time to have a go at a video interview series and thus Culture Diaries was born."

"My work is also very minimalist aesthetically, which is an extension of me. I think as an individual I am constantly living and dealing with a myriad of complexities, so I crave and need simplicity to function and I think those same principles drive my work."

"Energy is a real thing, so whether it’s with people or what you read it comes with the spaces you enter. You allow yourself to absorb those things and they will have an impact on you. If you are consuming a diet everyday of negativity and danger, and thoughts that everyone is out to get you, this is all that will consume you. Even when you are saying your prayers this is all that is going to consume your prayer pattern. You are going to keep fighting demons in your prayers."

"I hope to use this form of story telling as a way to humanize, educate, highlight some of the healthcare inconsistencies and stigmatization of people living with various illnesses."

"I think hosting events are a side hustle but everything else part and parcel of my career. I think when you see things as a side hustle then they become that. Journalism, poetry and documentary film are all full time careers I juggle and I put the same soul, energy and resources into each and every one."

"I think, when you grow up as a black person or an African in a black and African country, identity isn’t something you are particularly concerned about. I only became conscious of racial identity when I moved to the UK and started to understand the subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways in which this compounds the way you are seen and how you move through the world."

"I am inspired by the different ways that women stand up for themselves, and are constantly navigating through the waters of patriarchal traditions to take up space."

"As women, regardless of our class, geographical location or educational status, we should be aware that we do not operate in a vacuum. We function within a context of patriarchal norms and values, which have been firmly entrenched over time, and which continue to be validated through culture, traditions and religious beliefs."

"Ekiti State became the first State in the country to domesticate the National Gender Policy."

"It is about squandering the commonwealth of the people, ostensibly for the benefit of the people but ultimately for the good of only a select few."

"Sadly, the combination of poverty and ignorance is toxic and deadly."

"Ultimately, it is the fabric that binds us together as a community of people that will unravel, when we can no longer talk to one another in civility, when young people can abuse their elders at will in the anonymity of cyber space, and when reputations built over years of hard work and service get tarnished with one stroke of the keys."

"We need to keep mentoring young women in ways that nurture them and prepare them for the harsh world of business, politics and public life. In doing this, we need to be able to set an example for them because they will practice what they see and not what they hear from us."

"All of us here have a sphere of influence we can operate from. Let us use our spaces wisely and purposefully. Let us all rise and set our sights on all the great things we know we can accomplish. Let us stop being complacent. Let us move out of our comfort zones. Let us stop passing things on to the next person. You are the person. You are the change."

"I have always held the firm conviction that Africans has the most generous communities in the world, and our culture of local philanthropy is very strong. It is not what we acquire a result of influences from elsewhere.The very rich tradition of indigenous philanthropy therefore should be nurtured to enable us create lasting Institutions and structure for the sustainable growth and development of our communities."

"To some women, marriage is an achievement, to me Laura, it isn’t. Life isn’t that serious. I wanna achieve so much in my life, to be a Nigerian Zara, with stores all over the country and across Africa. Be a household name in fashion, have my own reality shows, so much to achieve."

"From knowing that you are alive and that you can see tomorrow as you are seeing today. Knowing that you are alive is a privilege. To be alive is a huge privilege."

"I plan to own the biggest fashion store in Africa, to empower the youth by creating different life changing opportunities for them. I also plan to create a shelter to care for the old in the future. I am planning on introducing my Jeans line, Laura Ikeji Jeans and 2018 is not over yet."

"It has been great so far, God has been great. I have been able to overcome my fears and I have discovered my abilities."

"My husband is my biggest obsession. I’m just so obsessed with him and I can’t help it. He inspires me a lot and I love him more than any other thing in the world."

"Incomplete as the name implies is a Cologne which makes your fashion statement complete. You can’t be complete without my Incomplete. It was born out of the need to always smell good."

"Being a mom, I can say is my greatest achievement. I love being a mommy. Never take any moment for granted."

"When I think of what literature can do, and I think of the ways that literature has changed minds and opened imaginations, I want to say that we African writers must centre the African gaze."

"A reader comes to the page and essentially learns the rules of this world, not because the rules are being told to them but because the rules are being broken. Via the consequences of the rules being broken, the reader comes to understand what the rules are."

"There is nothing inherently wrong with not knowing as much as people think you should or not knowing everything. There is no need to feel any sort of shame."

"There needs to be something that matters to you, even if you’re inventing this impossible world filled with raffia babies."

"A world where women must remain naked until they are married; there are complications."

"So why not be as deliberate in creating myth as those who came before us, so that those who come after us can better understand our concerns and our cultural obsessions"

"So it’s not motivation to continue, but reward for work already completed. That’s the most important thing to keep in mind, that the work comes first."

"For too long, the voices and visions for our future have been provided, for the most part, by and from a culturally European (if not Eurocentric) perspective. However, there is change afoot. The works of Octavia E. Butler are becoming mainstream, and names like Nnedi Okorafor and Lesley Nneka Arimah are bringing much needed flavor to the narratives that help shape our future."

"When Enebeli Okwara sent his girl out in the world, he did not know what the world did to daughters. He did not know how quickly it would wick the dew off her, how she would be returned to him hollowed out, relieved of her better parts."

"Girls with fire in their bellies will be forced to drink from a well of correction till the flames die out."

"There is this thing that distance does where it subtracts warm and context and history and each finds that they are arguing with a stranger."

"I would never ask a person who hasn’t tasted a dish whether it needs more salt."

"....The talent is here. The opportunities aren't. And it is the opportunities that foster growth."

"Poetry has been an instrument of change and revolution since it existed. It is protest and defiance and celebration and a love anthem. It is how we communicate so of course it is also how we enact change."

"It is the poets who tell the stories in a rhythm that forces the masses and the aristocracy to listen."

"Poetry, and art in general, allows us to take what is around us and set it on fire. It is the tool we use to enact and document change."

"I don’t profess to be any one religion, I think all religions are flawed because people are flawed. But we have the potential and capacity to be bigger than our flaws."

"There is a new discipline that is called Fundamental Studies and this is an area where you think deeply about the origin of things. You don’t deal with effects; you deal with causes."

"I am a humanist, and as a humanist, anything concerning the human condition, the progress of man, civilisation, the human thinking, knowledge especially, are some of the things that I take very personally."

"After the publication of the book, I was sponsored to visit the U.S. as part of the international visitors program. The USIS (United States Information Service) in Nigeria organised for me to travel to several U.S. universities to give lectures and do readings from my work."

"You have to plant all the seed, give them all the knowledge you have, and all the love you can give; make sure that they know love from you so that they can extend it to others in their life."

"I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist. Being in Women studies and being in African Studies and being a woman, you often find this discussion coming to you."

"The thing is that any work of art that has something in it will always challenge people: Some, in one respect; the others, in another respect. But you will find out that people keep on going back to that work because there is always something challenging in it."

"Because thinkers are those people who are able to pierce into the future and catch glimpses of light and bring it down. Many people do not often see what you are seeing until years and years later."

"The new thing I want to add to knowledge is: I want to connect culture and education, science and technology. I have seen the link between culture and science, culture and education, culture and technology, and that’s what I think I can establish."

"Yes, the gods knew what they were doing. They always joined together in marriage people of opposing qualities and thus ensured harmony."

"Women should be allowed to play their role, their role is to help the men to rebuild the society in any form or shape."

"That is why I said other countries have found that women are agents for development."

"If you overlook the women and their contributions, you are going nowhere, it seems as if you have two legs and you are running with just one; you won’t go anywhere."

"One leg is the male, the other leg is the female but in our society, it seems as if it is only one leg we are running with, that’s why we are where we are now."

"Any nation that realizes that women constitutes the other leg, you will see the impact, the country will grow and develop, it is my area sociology of education and gender studies; It has been proven that without women contributing, if you still believe in patriarchy, you are going nowhere."

"The patriarchy is still in men; it’s like some men are afraid of allowing women to come up; they feel a woman should not be competing with a man, I feel advocacy is needed, that please, men, we are not coming to compete, there is no way a woman can be a man, I have my role to play, due to biological parts, a man has his own role to play, but if it comes to development of the society, both of them should work together."

"There is need for advocacy which we can do through our traditional rulers, people need to come together to advance this course; to assist the women to play their role, everybody was born with a potential, God created all of us equal."

"I have never heard any research that say the brain of a man is bigger or smarter than that of a woman, it is the society that made the woman not to develop her potentials. Men hold grip of positions and they believe it is the best for the society"

"When I had my first degree, he wrote Mrs Uche Azikiwe B.Edu, to show you how he valued it. When I got master’s degree, he would write B. English (Education), M. Education (Curriculum) on the envelop. He did the same thing when I had my PhD. When I was able to achieve all that, he was so happy because he had asked if I would be able to combine everything. I am happy he was alive when I got my PhD in 1992."

"Personally, all I want is the best for Nigeria. Anyone who will stop insecurity, poverty and all sorts of indices that often make people avoid Nigeria, I am totally in support of the person."

"That is why I will stand on behalf of Azikiwe to pray that whatever happens, Nigeria will never disintegrate. Please let us come together. It will make him happy and make some of his other contemporaries happy that Nigeria is one. Please, let our current leaders do something to make sure that Nigeria is one. One Nigeria is what we need."

"Why Nigeria is crawling."

"The country was standing on one leg and would hardly make any movement under such condition."

"It was regrettable that the men were still hiding under culture and traditions to relegate women to the background."

"Fortunately for me, I came into his life when he had made everything one would need in his life as a human being and a man. In 1973 when we got married, he was already everything; he had run his newspapers, been a Premier, Senate President, President and all that. I wouldn’t say I contributed anything at all because he had already achieved all that before I came into his life. So I will not claim that; the only thing I will claim is that I gave him comfort when he was at the age of 60, 70 and when he was old and in the latter part of his life. That was my contribution to his life. He was already successful when I came into his life."

"I met him through his scholarship scheme. I danced in my hometown – Afikpo – during the electioneering campaigns of the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons in the 60s; there were four of us. We were there to receive politicians coming to Afikpo for campaign, so we danced. In the end, he gave me a scholarship to go to secondary school and other things. My elder sister, who was the leader of the group, was given a job in Lagos. I don’t know what was done for the other two because there were four us. It was before the war, so the war disrupted my education as it did to everybody in the East."

"After the war, he resumed the scholarship scheme for all of us because there were many of us that were beneficiaries. After the war, I completed my secondary school education, but no longer at Nsukka but at Holy Child Secondary School, Abakaliki. It was after my West African Senior School Certificate Examination in 1971 that he asked what I would want to do and I said I wanted to be a nurse. He said, okay, I will send you to London to be trained as a nurse; that was where I sent my sisters in the 50s. My niece was also going for the same training. He said, I’ll send both of you; that was when he came back after the war. So it was while I was preparing to travel to London for nursing that the story changed and we got married."

"My father was a Sergeant-Major in Nigeria Police and I think around that time, the rank was the highest position for Nigerians except if you had gone to secondary school. My father did not complete his primary school education, so when he joined the police force, the highest position he could be promoted to was Sergeant-Major. I grew up in the barracks and to know my father as a big man being the Sergeant-Major in charge of the whole barracks. Nobody dared come near our house. Other families were living in one room each in the barracks but we had a complex like when we were at the police barracks along Ogui Road, Enugu."

"I got home and told my husband that I wanted to go back to school. He said fine but that I should bear in mind that I was his mother, the mother of our two children and in charge of the home. He asked if I would be able to cope and I said yes. Then he said go ahead. That was when universities were organising examinations separately as there was no Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board. So I bought application form, did the examination but I was not offered admission."

"My friends were shocked; they said, why can’t your husband talk to the university’s vice-chancellor so that you could get admitted. I said I would not do that and he would not do that either because I knew him very well. So he (my husband) asked me about the result and I said it was out but I wasn’t taken. He said okay. Then in 1976, I sat again. I think what affected me the first time was that they said for me to read geography, I must have one science subject. I was not good at sciences and mathematics. I failed mathematics in WASSCE because I didn’t like the subject. So, in 1976, I changed to English (Education) instead of the geography that I had initially chosen because I did very well in geography in WASSCE. So the first time, the reason was that I didn’t have mathematics. So the following year, I got admitted to read English (Education)."

"After my National Youth Service Corps programme, I became hungry for more education. I had a master’s degree in curriculum education, development and planning. It was around that time in the 80s that gender issues came up, so I got interested in gender issues. I wanted to do my PhD in something related to gender issues and they said no, because my master’s degree was in curriculum education, development and planning. They said I must do something on gender issues before doing PhD in the same field. So I went to get a second master’s degree, this time in sociology of education and gender issues and my PhD in the same field. I will tell you how my husband appreciated my going to school. Every Christmas, he would give me a card and on February 4, my birthday too, he would give me a card and a letter."

"When I got married in 1973 and came to Nsukka with my husband, one day I came across one of my classmates in secondary school. Her name was Sharon and I asked what she was studying. The next day, I met another person and another one after that. We were all in the same class at Abakaliki. I saw them at the time I had my second child, Uwakwe, and it just occurred to me that I had to do something. These were my classmates and they weren’t brighter than me in secondary school."

"I had it very easy because I was not brought up to be proud. I hope I am not blowing my trumpet but I think I am very humble. Nobody will say that I crossed their path but if you cross mine or take me for granted, I won’t take it lightly, I would bring out police barracks life. Growing up in police barracks will make you tough."

"I think he knew my father in Lagos. The story I heard was that when my father was in Lagos, he had something to do in the Government House, Marina, where the President lived. I think my father also worked there, maybe to help secure Marina or whatever. I don’t think my father had any problem with who his children chose to marry; although, he was very strict. When we were young, we couldn’t just go out to play; it had to be done based on his rules."

"Frankly speaking, as my benefactor, who was paying my school fees, I saw him as my father. He was like a father all through the time I was having my education; the only time I saw him was when I went to tender my report (card) or collect my school fees if he didn’t pay through the reverend sisters. When the issue of getting married came up after the war, I was already 26 years old."

"Let me emphasise on that because people always say Zik married a 16-year-old girl. I wasn’t 16 when I got married to Zik, I was 26 years old in 1973; that was when I got married to him. When I was going to school, there was nothing like marriage on the agenda; that was from 1965 to 1972, and I wasn’t the only person that he offered scholarship. There were many boys and girls that were sponsored by Zik. So the issue of marriage came late 1972 after I had finished from secondary school. I was born in 1947 and got married in 1973. 26 years."

"He didn’t spoil me or anything; he didn’t have the money because he was giving scholarships to many people. Many people enjoyed his scholarships through to the end except you dropped out of school, got married or did not continue. I can’t say I had no knowledge of the Zik of Africa, no, but to say that that was what attracted me to him, I just don’t know. I know people from everywhere, including Yorubaland, enjoyed his scholarships."

"From 1973, there was no relationship with Chief Awolowo, but my contact with the Balewas was through the office handling the affairs of former heads of state. I think it was the late Chief Mrs Stella Obasanjo that invited former First Ladies to Abuja; that was the first time I met one of Tafawa Balewa’s wives. I think it was the surviving one then. The relationship is cordial. I wasn’t on the scene during the political era, so I don’t know what happened then but the meetings we have had recently have been cordial."

"From what I know or what I read or what I have been reading, even recently on some of the platforms, the killing of the Igbo people was not acceptable to anybody. It was unacceptable to Zik the way Igbo people were killed in the North. When Ojukwu declared Eastern Region as separate nation, we all know that Zik supported him because he felt that he could not live and see our people – Ndigbo – being slaughtered for no just cause but as time went on, it didn’t work out. I even read on one of the platforms that an extract from a book written by the late Gen. Philip Efiong, who was second in command to Ojukwu, stated everything and why it seemed that people like Zik decided to leave Ojukwu."

"It is like when you think you know all and don’t consult those who will help, but consult those who will tell you what you want to hear; that was the problem of Ojukwu, according to Efiong in the book. I think that was when it went to the level that Zik now left and went on exile in London. He got all the recognitions for Biafra – he was responsible for four recognitions that Biafra got during the war; it was because of him. And consider the fact that Zik was in the same age bracket with Ojukwu’s father, so they were close friends. He was older than Ojukwu, so the fact that someone wanted to work with you shouldn’t mean that you would disrespect anyone. So I think the story has it that when he told somebody like Nnamdi Azikiwe to do something, then you would go behind and not accept the suggestions he was giving to you, how would that person continue? That was why he said since my contribution is not appreciated, there is no need staying, so he left."

"We used to eat every meal together except when one of us was not at home. It’s something that bonds the family together. After eating, we would relax and chat. We argued and disagreed to agree. I had fun arguing with him even though I might not be correct and he would always caution me. He would say you have to be diplomatic, you are not diplomatic and I would say, why should I be diplomatic when I know that this is what it is. He would say, no, there is a way you have to put it, so it doesn’t just come out like that. You know these are fond memories and as I told you he was very protective of his family, but to me, it was a sign of love and care. He wouldn’t want anything to happen to any member of his family. That was why if you went out and didn’t return by 6pm, he would start worrying. I am happy that he is resting in peace because he did a good job for Nigeria and Africa."

"I have an NGO, Widows’ Lifeline, that I want to focus my attention fully on now that I have retired. It is an NGO that takes care of widows and provides opportunities for skills acquisition for them. And after graduation, we give them start-up grants so that they take off and become economically and financially independent to some extent, considering the problems that our widows go through, especially in this part of the country. But the problem I have is that the number of widows swells or increases every year and it is not easy to accommodate everybody. I have to cut down on the number to at least 40 – 50 every year, which is not very easy for a retiree like me to be sponsoring."

"It's never too late to be a good person!"

"“Value your energy. Value your time. Time is a finite resource you can never get back or buy. What are you doing with the 24 hours you get each day? Stop waiting for the right moment. The time is now. I’m really out here trying to live my life to the fullest these days. Who’s joining me? ”"

"At the end of the day, you may as well try and fail than not try at all."

"It’s more like a feeling; a sense of peace I don’t seem to feel with anyone else. It’s feeling like you have found your best friend, your own person and also your soulmate. I really don’t know how to describe it. It feels just like home.”"

"You and I, we have a role to play in that. We’re the ones who share the content. We’re the ones who share the stories online. In this day and age, we’re the publishers. And we have responsibilities. In my job as a journalist, I check and verify. I trust my gusts but I ask tough questions. Why is this person telling me this story? What do they have to gain by sharing this information? Do they have a hidden agenda? I really believe we must all begin to ask tougher questions of information we discover online. Research shows that some of us don’t even read beyond headlines but we share stories."

"What if we stop taking information that we discover as face value? What if we stop to think about the consequence of the information that we pass on and its potential to incite violence or hatred? What if we stop to think about the real-life consequences of the information that we share?"

"The Chibok girls are a symbol; a symbol of the women; of all the girls that have been stolen by Boko Haram."

"Every journalist has a story that defines them. For me, it’s one of the stories I would find very hard to let go as long as the girls are in Boko Haram captivity."

"Sitting in a developed country and complaining about Nigeria is not really going to make things happen. I have to be here do what I can, to help it develop, I feel my role is to highlight the story that needs to be told; shed light on things that needs to be exposed. These are things that drive me."

"My role is to say, there are problem here like everywhere in the world, we need to show a different tide, and we need to show people who are making impact, people who are making great things here."

"In the Uk, people wear jeans and top, sometimes, no make up, and off they go. But here, everybody pays attention to what you wear and how you look. Here, people take pride in how they dress. Here, it is dress how you want to be addressed but in the UK there is nothing like that."

"As a woman, you can’t limit yourself, the ages of limitations are definitely gone so, do it."

"Nigerian women rock! The can-do spirit and general tenacity in the face of adversity is something to be admired. From the market woman selling her wares to the women at the height of their careers, I am full of admiration of how Nigerian women manage to make things happen, sometimes with very little."

"There’s something about this place that just grabs you and sucks you in. The energy is off the charts and I think that is what attracts people here."

"Practice your craft daily. Watch those you admire, follow their steps, and emulate them. But you must start. Create your own opportunities."

"We want to engage with the audience where they are, on mobile, on social, and also for those who are not connected online, on television. So it’s a multi-faceted, multi-platform approach using digital storytelling tools to tell African stories in a new way."

"We are a news network and we report the news as it happens. We must tell the stories we find."

"I came to Nigeria determined to make the most of an amazing career opportunity in a place that is home in my heart. You have to roll with the punches."

"Everything is about the mindset, I find. I choose to remain positive, even in the face of challenges. It’s not easy but it’s an attitude I find gets me through tough times."

"People share things innocently believing that it is true but that is how fake news is spread, through inattention and lack of verifying. Check that it is from a credible news source before sharing something online."

"Your life journey will take you on many different paths but you will end up where you are supposed to in the end. Trust the process. Pray always and don’t lose your humanity or compromise who you are in a bid to get to the top."

"Parents have their own timeline for your life. You must create and embrace yours and BE HAPPY with your choices."

"The sadness of an unhappy marriage and home seeps into your soul. It is crushing and turns you into a shell of who you are."

"Some men have funny ideas of how you should act on a date."

"Even if you don’t feel like you belong, you have to keep going. Don’t let the feeling of insecurity hold you back."

"There’s no sliding scale of equality. We are all humans and deserve the same level of humanity."

"“We have many young persons with stories to die for. There is brilliant writing from everywhere. It’s a renaissance.”"

"“We need to have a group of writers who will form a watering hole for writers to bounce back on, a group that can serve as a link between the publisher and a good writer.”"

"“One of the things you must be is confident and well researched. Know a little bit about everything. And although I did not plan to be a Journalist as a young girl, my socialisation helped.”"

"“Don’t do your body, it can only take you as far as the bed. Do your brain, it can make you the President of Nigeria. You need to have a functional brain in your head. Pay attention to all you can learn. Work over and beyond the call of duty. Research to be on top of your game. Read. Research. Read. Take up every assignment with dedication, passion, deep-seated hunger to learn. Be tried, tested and proved by your superiors. You can make your space matter.”"

"“Be ready at all times. Think small but look at the bigger picture. Understand whom you are. Dress the path and turn up for respect so you can be taken seriously. Act the path. Be the Boss. Do the job. Choose your battles and be kind to your staff and colleagues. Hold on to your Faith and your God, keep your family front at peace and be ready when the opportunity knocks.”"

"‘We want to hear about your values as a political candidate. What are you doing that is newsworthy? Have you learned to write press releases? Learn how to write a copy. Learn how to request for press coverage. This is how to get votes, by appealing to the people.”"

"“People are looking for headlines and it doesn’t matter whether Nigeria burns.”"

"“I got into media by accident.”"

"“My toughest challenge was with the toxic environment, strange fellows, and the poor camaraderie in a lot of instances.”"

"“Every woman who works must find creative ways to ensure she is doing her best to juggle them well.”"

"“Women issues are not as hot on the front burner as they ought to be. I doubt that it affected the increase in the number of women writers. Most literary men do not tell out stories well. It is time for the women to pick up the gauntlet.”"

"“You will fail miserably! If you’ve not been reading, you can’t write well.”"

"“If you speak well, and have great communication skills, you’re half way there. However, someone with great communication skills may be a disaster at customer service.”"

"Ah…the admission system is faulty, as far as I’m concerned. Students are admitted and nothing is known about their background…where they are coming from. Many of these students have been through the system of forgery; many of them cannot pass five credits in WASC. Yet they pretend to have scored 275 in JME; it’s absolutely deceitful."

"A great deal has to be invested as a way of correcting the system. There have been so many wrongs arising from bad management; we all now know that the same people who complain about student violence might actually be fueling that violence to avoid attention being paid to their own non performance. There is no water, no light, no accommodation, and so on and so forth. The environment is not conducive for studies. There are no books in the library, so the students are idle, and there is nothing to occupy them. Some students really want to study, but all these things I’ve mentioned are immensely discouraging."

"Anywhere in the world, if you create a good environment, people will excel. But our country continues to provide insufficient funding for nearly everything that is necessary. So it’s a vicious circle. We began to notice a decline when successive Nigerian governments no longer felt that education was important, and therefore gave it the least attention. And I say this with all seriousness. With the military governments in power it was not considered all that important to have education. Many in the government itself were in fact young and did not value education, because they viewed their more senior colleagues as poor, and preferred to become millionaires."

"The corruption we see in the examinations is a ‘carry-over’ effect of the overall moral and ethical decay in the larger society. It does not help that the Nigeria nation believes in, and insists on paper qualification, rather than the possession of actual knowledge. I have argued it again and again that, as long as we believe in the paper and not the knowledge; that we want students with second class upper division (even if they have cheated to do so), the students will go all out to get the paper qualification. At interviews, it is obvious that many of the certificates being paraded have not been merited by the people laying claim to them."

"Now what we need to do is to teach them to use their power to their own advantage. We tell them that they should not continue to queue behind the men; when a woman comes out, line-up behind her for a change and wait. Do not look at her as that little child whose naming ceremony you attended, and who now wants to become a governor. Rather, look at her positively, because she knows where the shoe pinches. And when it comes to women’s empowerment, look at them as individuals who can perform rather than a member of a class that has to be kept behind. It is when we have succeeded at this experiment that in the next election, we shall do better."

"We believe that every word of adoration on the exploits of the departed heroine is well earned. Indeed, every lover of education should be thoroughly grateful to Mrs. Ogundipe for her contributions to education."

"Ogundipe’s life was defined by her passion for education and uncommon dedication to serve others, stressing that her legacy would live on."

"Mrs Ogundipe through her books imparted generations of Nigerians of my age. In my personal interactions with her, she was passionate about Nigeria and hoping that things would get better."

"All Nigerians, who drank from the fountain of knowledge of the endowed English teacher."

"In my personal interactions with her, she was passionate about Nigeria and hoping that things would get better. Unfortunately, like many compatriots of her time, the Nigeria of their dream remains a mirage."

"As a recipient of the National Honour of Officer of the Order of the Niger (OON) and other numerous awards for her works on education."

"Her autobiography, the Up-country Girl, should be a must-read for every aspiring young girl."

"“There is time for everything. I realized, long ago, that great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of doing anything that is great.”"

"It is usually not easy getting the big men and women to enroll in our programmes, even when they have strong penchant to do so. But where the heart is willing, it finds a thousand ways. Where it is unwilling, it finds a thousand excuses.""

"Leaders are learners, if you stop learning today, you stop leading tomorrow"

""I make bold to say that there is nothing motivation cannot do in the life of a child. It works like magic." An interview with Prof. Joy chinwe Eyisi"

"There are so many dissimilarities, so many unique points of difference between this one country in Africa and the rest of the world."

"Parents have a lot of professing power over their children. Praise and admonishments are crafting tools like names."

"When CNN does not reciprocate with simple engagement with our hills and valleys, our romantic ideals, often only with our traumas. And everyone in the world has trauma. If you know where Naples is or Mount Vesuvius, then you are clever."

"The more handling of a wide variety of food that one can manage the more open one’s mind and palate."

"Investing one’s own disadvantage in words: Opening an artery onto the page, that kind of thing, apart from a love for the theme being written on."

"There are many things that happen in the human being that bypass the brain."

"We don’t have a Nigerian culture of cooking and monologuing. It is coming along now with social media and Nigerian food celebrities."

"If one wants to be a good essayist, one needs to connect and do it at the level of the gut, infiltrate the blood–brain barrier and lose prestige or the footing of pride. Or shall I say, you have to give something of value away to gain the investment of the reader’s time and attention."

"One of the greatest ironies of writing is that you can write for a hundred years, write reams, but until you have something that resembles a book, you are never allowed to call yourself an author."

"I come from a society where the default is conformity. I don’t know how to conform and I find myself putting question marks against everything"

"There is a need to speak on something and I don’t agree with the status quo. The self-deprecation probably comes from not fitting in no matter how hard I try."

"What better way to spend one’s time in the country of fringe dwellers than capitalising on one’s failures? Why wallow in failure? If you can’t beat them, or join them, then you write about them. Yes, it does end up as a kind of power and advantageous positioning in standing out from the crowd because most people don’t want fringe-dweller strength"

"There is nothing any of us can do about the fact that the world is shrinking so we need to learn how to speak more languages, not fewer."

"In Nigeria, we have given ourselves no other option than the institutional use of the English language. We haven’t, in addition, provided the necessity and the resources of mastering the use of multiple languages. And that opportunity is so pertinent."

"I am writing all the time on being Nigerian and living in Nigeria but I have been accused of being stylistically un-Nigerian. My direct address of taboo objects, subjects and descriptions of people are supposedly un-Nigerian."

"Attitude hardly counts at all when we are attempting to determine what foods nourish the body. A lot of intolerances and allergies as they concern individual bodies are life and death issues and toxicology issues."

"The pandemic has forced a balance in the nation’s perspective where food writing is concerned."

"The truth is you have to get on top of the reading as soon as possible and you have to keep in mind that this is the sum of people’s YEARS of hard labour, sweat and pain that you hold in your hands. Without being able to meet all the people who make that thing in your hand possible, you have to conjure up their presence, interact with every single book with great reverence."

"Children orientation, mind shifting programme, These projects have greatly impacted on the lives of many children and youths in the society."

"Taming our speech, mind and heart would contribute in achieving peace in the society, thus promoting it at a global level"

"Women should take advantage of technology to secure good health, improve their finances, and foster personal development."

"Research has shown that where women’s inclusion is prioritized, peace is more probable, especially when women are in a position to influence decision making."

"Restorative Practices are about focusing on capacities rather than deficits. It is about holding circles and talking to generate solutions and build valuable abilities in students."

"Social emotional skills are very important skills, they need to be developed and showed."

"The truth is that restorative practice is a proven approach to discipline in schools that favours relationships over retribution, and has been shown to improve behaviour and enhance teaching and learning outcomes."

"Reading clubs in school were important because it encourages critical thinking and increases the ability of understanding and advised students to have deeper engagement with stories in their communities and beyond."

"India is a country where great influencing personalities of the world have born and are remembered for their teachings."

"Mahatma Gandhi is the father of the nation who preached and practiced peace. Living for others and selfless giving is taught by Swami Vivekananda. They are icons of the world and there is so much that one can learn from their way of life. Peace is achieved from within ourselves. Caring for others is what makes a society with human beings."

"Words are dangerous than a nuclear weapons which affects mankind and can cause a destruction. There is great printed inspiration in our world that is available a click away but people should realise that poetry and literature cannot change the world. They are high source of inspiration to bring peace in a nation. Suppressing people or communities will only lead to revolt and gives rise to anti-social elements."

"There is a strong connection between hands-on, participative creative arts and the creation of non-violence as a key element of peace building. The nature and meaning of peace and non-violence is synonymous to that powerful aspect of creative arts that build peace and promote non-violence. The arts’ has capacity to help develop skills for peaceful problem-solving through the comprehension of fundamental principles in conflict resolution, and violence prevention."

"Artists work in war zones, refugee camps and conflict ridden communities using their creativity to stimulate and deepen knowledge in violence prevention and ultimately support peace building through building resiliency, conflict resolution and reconciliation from the community level. This chapter will explore the traditional art concepts and creativity in the past and the current understandings of peace as seen in our literature, poetry, mime, drama, dance, songs, paintings, sculptures, graffiti’s, stories, adages and from social psychology that has been great ways of building peace, non-violence and positive social development."

"It will show how the creative arts stimulates and support peace building and non-violence particularly in Africa. The impact that violence prevention goals of community-based art program has are enormous, the production of art supports and expand non-violent conflict resolution skills. It the artworks that educates and advocates for peace and non-violence plays a critical role in learning the concepts of non-violence and peace building in Africa."

"People misunderstand my designs because they don’t understand the strength it takes."

"People in your family can betray you."

"When I started my entrepreneurship business, many people told me that it wouldn’t work."

"There is not enough variety to cater to the sheer range, kaleidoscope & palette of human experience and feeling. No sense of what music is in appropriate for certain settings."

"It’s a relatively new platform offered by technology for us to continue to express ourselves; for us to continue to reach out to others and to facilitate conversation. And so, we have to embrace it. It’s the way the world is going. We have to embrace it."

"When it’s your goal to bring more people into the life that the art can spring, what do you do? You have to find other ways of giving expression to that side of yourself."

"We are not short of talents in this country. We are not short of art practitioners who give a lot of thought to what they do."

"We have to realize that the time one is giving to writing reviews is time that could be devoted to personal work."

"There’s a kind of generosity about pushing the works of other people, even when there is no reward."

"I am a woman of faith and l find the Bible inspirational for living and writing."

"People are always looking for labels, boxes, compartments, a so-called easier way of dissecting what you write and I think in that process, they miss out on the real wealth of engaging your imagination. Having said that, I am a woman who is writing from my varied experiences (as a citizen of the world, Nigerian, daughter, sister, mother, wife, and mentor) and those of other women in my society. I see myself as a voice for woman, child and man. I advocate for woman rights and human rights. I am not inferior to anyone and I never hesitate to take my place. How does that describe me?"

"I do not see how it is possible to live in Nigeria or be Nigerian and write art for art’s sake. I think a poet should be the voice of her society. It has been so from ancient times. Contemporary Nigerian poetry still reflects the pulse of the society, the disappointment with our poor leadership and a voice for the common man. There is a lot more innovation now, the use of multimedia, fusing music and drama, a marriage of the arts. Admirable efforts to actually make a living from writing."

"I was working with the poems as visual imagery, how it impacts the reader on paper and how it can be read in different directions with various layers of meaning, reflecting the many-sidedness, the enigma that an individual is. I think, often times, the poem decides how it wants to take life. Sometimes, you try to develop it in a certain direction and you see that’s not working, so you just let it be."

"Poetry is always my best friend, a ready platform, when l need to testify for myself and society."

"I started out writing poetry and it’s the bedrock on which my work rests. So yes, my primary identity will always be hinged on that. For prose, you need to do more research. Obviously, it’s not as spontaneous as poetry can be, at least for me. You need to do character development, get their voices right, immerse yourself in the context of the story, invoke the atmosphere and engage the reader to stay with you. A writer needs to be well read. Alertness and an eye for detail are essential in your toolkit."

"Song of a first born daughter to the beats of gangan. I am the first fruit of your loins. Seasoned with grace. Seasoned with salt. I stride to drumbeats. Flywhisks attend my hands. Like anklets of brass, joy encircles. I am the consolation, born for the day of affliction. I am the vigour, the virgin seed, roosting under coverlets of aso-oke. Down the winding road, I nurture the handkerchiefs for champions who cry... Behold the daughter, your blessed harvest. Your basket of plump yams. Your scented one."

"Sometimes its blood and tears; at other times, it falls easy like rain. I have note books, filled with the scraps of words. I try to catch the moments… a flock of birds on the wings of twilight, the moon majestic on a tableau of darkness. I am a scribbler. I go back to weave the various scraps into the cloth that becomes a poem."

"I am a poet. Poets take the beauty from ashes."

"I infuse influencing into my lifestyle, I make sure I take every brand like it’s my first and I try to create content that flows naturally and can be related to my followers in the best way possible"

"Knowing that I can achieve more is what inspires me"

"Boko Haram is a curse to humanity and all Nigerians at all levels should reject it in its entirety, knowing fully well that it is an issue that does not affect only the Chibok girls but affects the entire Nigerians."

"The fact that this bad precedent has been repeated by a government that espouses respect for human rights is dangerous. What it implies is a deepening belief among the military that journalists can write a coup."

"The information support of IFEX has really helped press freedom NGOs around the world to lift advocacy work to new heights so that there was pressure everywhere Abacha’s government reared its head...Without the work of groups like CCPJ, the tyrannical grip on Nigeria would have been tighter. The widespread negative publicity and the groundswell of consciousness it raised neutralized the millions of dollars they spent laundering the image of a sick regime."

"What I saw in the days of incarceration is a long story but to me what is important are the positive things that came out of it...I now appreciate life more fully. I have learned the true meaning of freedom. I value it and will fight for it both for myself and others."

"The Nigerian press won its own freedom without relying on the courts or enjoying their cooperation. Our freedom has been won at very high cost. We value it and fight to keep it every day."

"We in the independent press who have borne the brunt of the onslaught are in a state of physical and financial exhaustion. Repression has caused us to retreat into stone-age operations so that publishing now amounts to miracle-working."

"The Nigerian press, the human rights groups and the few vocal individuals and politicians have been alone in the war on the home-front and they have been clobbered by the massive force of repression. While they remain willing to fight on, they need the power of the people behind them for the battle they fight is for the true emancipation of the people. A man who cannot speak out, cannot express his opinion in his own land is not free. Freedom, total freedom should be the goal of every Nigerian now."

"Senator Anyanwu has no moral justification to run down Governor Rochas Okorocha, whose achievements in less than eight years have surpassed the achievements of all those who had governed the State before him put together”."

"Simply put people first, prioritize the response to victims and ensure that communities are supported in rebuilding their lives."

"Women hold the key to any peace building initiatives as they experience the conflict in a totally different way from men. They have been silently bearing the brunt as mothers, wives, sisters, participants and saviors, yet they are still excluded from the solutions table. We have found that when women are included in decision making there tends to be more focus away from military solutions. I feel that women when they are called upon it is often at the local level but we need more women at senior levels in government particularly the security sectors."

"Finance is the blood of the business. FINTECH is driving access to finance and helping to boost aggregate demand and investment."

"Nigerians are not looking for a handout, what they need is the space and they will do the rest. People are really entrepreneurial, so for us as a country, it’s not for lack of human assets or the passion or desire to progress, it is about lack of good policy, good governance around economics, and making the environment conducive so that all Nigerians can prosper, no matter what positive endeavour they decide to engage in."

"Government should incentivize production, provide enabling environment for businesses to thrive, ensure locally produced goods and services compete in the International Market and ensure that necessary infrastructures are put in place with these Nigeria will be self-reliant. In other words, there is need to Identify areas where we have competitive advantage, then develop required and necessary policies and most importantly ensure proper implementation of developed policies."

"… a flexible gender system … meant … certain women could occupy roles and positions usually monopolized by men, and thereby exercise considerable power and authority over both men and women."

"As men increased their labour force, wealth and prestige through the accumulation of wives, so also did women through the institution of "female husbands.‟ When a woman paid money to acquire another woman, the woman who was bought had the status and customary rights of a wife, with respect to the woman who bought her, who was referred to as her husband, and the "female husband‟ had the same rights as a man over his wife."

"Man seems to have wanted… to give the universe his own gender…anything believed to have value belongs to men and is marked by their gender…he gives his own gender to God, to the sun."

"“Since women were basically seen as producers, the principals of control and protection applied to them throughout their productive period, whether as daughters, wives, or mothers. It is said when a woman outgrows the question, 'whose daughter is she?' people then ask, 'whose wife is she?' Only as matrons were women no longer valued in their sexual or reproductive capacity; matrons were, therefore, beyond control."

"A woman at this stage of her life no longer sought to be sexually attractive to men, and was no longer in sexual competition with other women. Matrons, in order to succeed economically and wield power, had to free themselves of 'messy' and 'demeaning' female domestic services, which included sexual services. Woman-to-woman marriage was one of the ways of achieving this. The younger wife would then take over the domestic duties."

"In the traditional society, a flexible gender system meant that male roles were open to certain categories of women through such practices as nhaye, 'male daughters,' igba ohu, 'female husbands. These institutions placed women in a more favourable position for the acquisition of wealth and formal political power and authority. Under colonialism, these indigenous institutions – condemned by the Church as 'pagan' and anti-Christian – were abandoned or reinterpreted to the detriment of women."

"“The fact that biological sex did not always correspond to ideological gender meant that women could play roles usually monopolized by men, or be classified as 'males' in terms of power and authority over others. As such roles were not rigidly masculinized or feminized, no stigma was attached to breaking gender rules. Furthermore, the presence of an all-embracing goddess-focused religion favoured the acceptance of women in statuses and roles of authority and power."

"She is said to have had about 24 wives… the qualities attributed to her were hard work and perseverance. She was … a clever woman, who knew how to utilize her money."

"Extremely powerful and assertive women were able to dominate their husbands."

"The men were no longer known by their own names, but by reference to their role as husband."

"It was with pride that Nwokocha Agbadi returned the twenty bags of cowries to his former son-in-law and he even added a live goat as a token of insult."

"This fine collection of poetry on love, nature and Sufism bursts forth with pure humanity and elegance of language. Dominated by the presence of beautiful, dignified womanhood that is tough but loving, giving and grateful, the poems peel off layers of time to reveal memories that refuse to dissipate. A celebratory voice singing the beauty of fall colors and the magic of Africa's star-studded sky and enchanted moonlit night is interlaced with a strong, unyielding moral voice that speaks against the injustice and bullying of the powerful, and the pillage and greed of empire. Amadiume's beautiful, moving, and well-crafted collection returns to nature what belongs to it--simplicity; and reminds humanity of what it has lost--the love that is divine. Love is Great!"

"Ifi Amadiume's Circles of Love speaks with passion of love gained, love lost, love desired. These are poems which embrace the pains and joys of exile--memory, sweetness, history and a sense of peace with the landscapes of home wherever these may be."

"Love is a many splendored thing and Ifi Amadiume spins the wonder of love in circles of memory, humor, joy and even political satire with a lyrical and often intimate voice that describes family, friends and special places. Here are poems you will want to read and remember."

"Read for my Anthropology of Gender class. This is an incredibly thorough ethnography that traces the history, colonisation, and modern traditions of a small area in Nigeria. Amadiume doesn’t just reclaim, explain, and evaluate the customs of the Igbo people from the town where she was born, she also demonstrates the long history of how colonialism has distorted, misconstrued, and tried to erase them. It makes me wonder how many indigenous religions we’ve completely lost due to the efforts of colonisation trying to either mould them to the “White Christian ideal” or wipe them out completely. It’s a sad thought, but I’m still glad Ifi Amadiume is here to speak for herself, taking back the fierce power of anthropology from those who would use it for ill."

"I bought Male Daughters, Female Husbands on the title alone, expecting it to be an anthropological study discussing how an indigenous society had made space and roles for queer people. I was very wrong. Instead, Ifi Amadiune presents a brilliant study of how the Nnobi of Nigeria made space and roles for women, and how the Christian patriarchy took those roles away. Amadiune challenges her fellow anthropologists and western feminists about their assumptions about African societies. (Namely, that colonialism helped African women get out from under the thumb of bad African men, yet they still need western feminists to save them further. Amadiune clearly demonstrates how neither of these things are true and how these kinds of simplified views of any indigenous society are steeped in racism."

"My novel came before the story: I decided to write a novel before I knew what to write about. The story wasn’t burning in my heart or bursting to be let loose on the page. It didn’t feel like there was this one story that I had to tell. But I have always been fascinated by why people do the things they do. While trying to come up with ideas for my novel, I decided on a story that explored that."

"It would have to be one of those dangerous pieces of advice that people dish out all over the place. A particularly popular one is: Follow your heart. What if the person’s heart is leading them into a dungeon of doom? What if the person’s heart is filled with foolishness? ‘Follow your heart’ is not just unwise counsel; it is a recipe for anarchy. Imagine a world where each of us followed our heart to wherever it led us, without caring for the people around us or the laws of the land."

"Everyone can tell a story, but the skillful use of words is what I usually find captivating when reading a piece. The imagery. The alliteration. The emotion. The quotable quotes. Think Shakespeare. Think the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The skillful placing of word against word is what builds the masterpiece and turns a story into a memorable work of art. I often tell people how fascinated I was with Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. But while I have absolutely no recollection of the plot, I still remember how struck I was by her use of words. Her writing was pure art."

"I spit out everything onto the page, from beginning to end, and then go back and edit. I’m one of those people who like to tick off things on my to-do list; so, it helps me psychologically to get to the end first, and then settle down to revise."

"I Do Not Come To You By Chance is set in the world of Nigeria’s 419 scammers. It was a world I was very familiar with having grown up in South East­ern Nigeria. There were lots of people, lots of young men I knew who were going to, who were 419 scammers. So I wanted to write a story of how people from good homes, people from the kind of home I came from could become international financial terror­ists."

"If it was authoritarian for the Nigerian government to ban the use of Twitter, it was even more problematic for an American swivelling in a chair in Silicon Valley to poke their finger into the internal affairs of a sovereign African state."

"Although his position on the family tree could not be described in anything less than seven sentences, Odinkemmelu was introduced to us as our cousin."

"He brought out an it-was-white handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped the sweat from his brows."

"Dear Friend, I do not come to you by chance. Upon my quest for a trusted and reliable foreign business man or company I was given your contact by the Nigerian chamber of Commerce and Industry, I hope that you can be trusted to handle a transaction of this magnitude."

"Is honesty an achievement? Personality is one thing, achievement is another thing. So what has your father achieved? How much money is he leaving for you when he dies? Or is it his textbooks that you’ll collect and pass on to your own children?"

"Odinkemmelu took his body odor away to the kitchen and returned with a teaspoon of salt."

"My tender triceps started grumbling"

"My father was a walking encyclopedia, and he flipped his pages with the zeal and precision of a magician."

"Cash Daddy’s cheeks were puffy, his neck was chunky, his five limbs were thick and long."

"Make una come see o, Graveyard don begin dey use perfume."

"At age seven, when it was confirmed that her right hand could reach across her head and touch her left ear, Augustina moved back to her father’s house and started attending primary school. Being long and skinny had worked to her advantage."

"Boniface — aka Cash Daddy — is an exuberant character who suffers from elephantiasis of the pocket. He's also rumored to run a successful empire of email scams. But he can help. With Cash Daddy's intervention, Kingsley and his family can be as safe as a tortoise in its shell."

"For much of his young life, Kingsley believed that education was everything, that through wisdom, all things were possible. Now he worries that without a 'long-leg' — someone who knows someone who can help him — his degrees will do nothing but adorn the walls of his parents' low-rent house."

"Being the opara of the family, Kingsley Ibe is entitled to certain privileges — a piece of meat in his egusi soup, a party to celebrate his graduation from university. As first son, he has responsibilities, too. But times are bad in Nigeria, and life is hard."

"When a tragedy befalls his family, Kingsley learns the hardest lesson of all: education may be the language of success in Nigeria, but it's money that does the talking."

"Unconditional family support may be the way in Nigeria, but when Kingsley turns to his Uncle Boniface for help, he learns that charity may come with strings attached."

"When we bury ourselves in a story that is well told, we can’t help but go away with an understanding that we may not have had before. We go away with being able to see things perhaps a little more clearly, a little more humanely."

"what would be considered a middle-class setting, where women seem to have power, but they are living in a particular context that requires them to contort themselves into different things. And so they make choices that are not necessarily the kindest choices for others or choices that we would consider to be good."

"A true-bred Nigerian will always have a million and one things going on at the same time."

"One advice I always give to young people is that no experience is a waste. Try your hand at whatever your heart leads you to do."

"Motherhood is not about you and your desires, it’s about the children that God has gifted to you. Children are not jewelry around your neck, neither are they meant for you to fulfill all your unfulfilled ambitions in your children."

"The quality of a mother determines the quality of society. We need to take motherhood and mothers really more seriously. It is not something that should just be left to chance."

"My best advice is whatever you put your hand to do, do it to the best of your ability. Everything you do eventually becomes part of your skill set and ends up being part of who you eventually become."

"Anything can come up at any time, and you are constantly revving up your defenses."

"There is always that fear of being dominated by others who will not yield their ground even if you yield yours."

"It’s an enormous challenge because even if you want to step away from tribalism, you cannot always trust that others will reciprocate."

"I want equality and justice for everyone."

"Don’t let anybody intimidate you. Just ask yourself “what is it about me that I want to share with the world? What is my mission on earth?"

"Though there are situations that can make you not shine and that’s when you have a lot of dust on you and it has to be polished so what do you do? You polish yourself."

". I don’t believe that women actually have to fight for anything, they have it. A diamond doesn’t struggle to shine, it just sparkles."

"Nobody gives it to you, give it to yourself. Watch movies, read books… formerly or informally educate yourself."

"I often say there is a huge difference between loving a Black woman versus taking directions from her as your boss or CEO."

"Many personal experiences were sprinkled throughout the book."

"A lot of the feelings of isolation, lack of belonging, and exclusion Muna feels are real and raw for me."

"Brittany was the most challenging character for me because, as the author, we don’t share the same values, but she is completely valid."

"The trauma she had endured often manifested itself as quiet tears once she was locked in her room, staring at her graveyard of photos."

"Being different doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you or that you aren’t perfect as you are. It simply means getting special support so you can live your best life."

"She needed balance. Her own moon that would rise and fall with her, keeping her equilibrium, loving her unconditionally."

"We are in fact all perfectly different, and what makes us different needs to be fully celebrated within society."

"Remember that if you do not take care of their welfare/education, they will grow up to become the hooligans that will torment you forever."

"Life has taught me to give without expecting anything in return."

"I think my early challenges prepared me for what I do now. I can empathize because I have been there. I can relate because I know that pain."

"We’re all different and I think it’s important to do what’s best for you."

"For many, agriculture can represent deep pain because of the history of slavery, but also because of current land loss, forced migration and oppressive farm labor practices. But I remember thinking, “Could this be enough to keep us from picking up the plow again?” I think, for some people, possibly it is. But I’d like to think we recognize that our legacy with the land is so much more than that"

"I’d like to see African America lifting up our black farmers, chefs and community food leaders. Our priorities need to be putting our dollars directly into our communities so that black farmer and that black-owned restaurant can keep their doors open, allowing them to keep feeding our communities and keep food culture alive. We need to get better at telling our stories to make that connection with our community."

"I want to say that Africa’s history and brilliance is there, and I want to say that Black people can be magical and fantastical creatures, as well as anything else."

"As there were more books coming on the scene, there tended to be less about Black people as magical beings or creatures in fantasy, and I definitely wanted to see more of that"

"Enslaved Africans refused to be stripped of their spirituality, their stories, and in essence, their humanity, and so they took them with them. You can see these connections across the diaspora, from similar tales, a Yoruba speaking community in Colombia, to the deities worshipped in the Caribbean and beyond. Even when it came to religion, Africans showed ingenuity and tenacity in holding onto what mattered to them."

"I think it’s very important to show Black characters as main characters and to chart their journeys of vulnerability and strength. That was another major highlight of writing this novel."

"Mo gbà yín. Ní àpéjọ, àpéjọ yóò rí ìbùkún àpéjẹ̀ẹ Ìyá Yemoja tí yóo ṣe àpéjọ̀rùn ìrìn àjò àpéjẹ. Kí Olodumare mú ọ dé ilé ní àìléwu àti àláfíà,’ I say, and then repeat the prayer that will glean the woman’s soul. ‘I welcome you. Gathered, you will be blessed by Mother Yemoja, who will ease your journey. May Olodumare take you home to safety and peace. Come forth.’”"

"“‘It’s just…’ But the words won’t come and instead I find myself saying nothing, trying to keep my lips from trembling. The sapphire is cool in my grip as I look down at it, remembering the woman. Folasade floats nearer as my hair waves in front of us. ‘May I?’ she asks. Nodding, I let Folasade sweep my curls away so that we can see each other’s faces clearly. Her eyes are almost black in the water, but they shine with a reverence I know is missing from mine.”"

"One that captures the true essence of the reality of life from diverse perspectives; merged into one piece to paint a beautiful picture."

"Poetry is a literary art that deploys the aesthetic qualities and brevity of language to stir meanings that are literal and implied or imaginative through deliberate form and structure."

"You do not wake up one morning a bad person. It happens by a thousand tiny surrenders of self-respect to self-interests."

"If you get all your schoolwork for the day done in, say, three hours, you can spend the rest of the time reading or making up stories or whatever else."

"Having morals in this economy is tough but to God be my glory."

"It's so unfair to see the way some countries discuss sanctioning international students through crazy immigration policies like they go to these schools for free. If you don't want them in your country, just stop giving student visas rather than constant humiliation."

"IN SOCIAL JUSTICE, ACTIVISTS WHO RAGE IN THEIR SMALL TWITTER AND FACEBOOK CORNERS, WHO HOLD UP PLACARDS IN THE FACE OF INJUSTICE OR A NEED ARE REBELS."

"I WOULD CHANGE HOW THE WORLD PERCEIVES WOMEN”"

"A woman who will break barriers will break barriers, whether she has many other responsibilities on her shoulders or not."

"There is nothing wrong with being a presenter or an actor, but if you are interested in other tech aspects of the job, you need to embrace that thing you are afraid of."

"As a girl child, you truly believe yourself to be weaker than your male relatives, friends, class mates."

"Fortunately women who have gone before me have made that something I no longer fear."

"The first thing I figure out is the plot, and as it develops, the characters take shape. I believe the characters tell me their own stories."

"Playing with words, making up new ones, gifting your audience with a well written story is nothing short of magic."

"Turning an empty page into stories, making something out of nothing."

"Our mothers and grandmothers exerted influence and control over our fathers and grandfathers. But they knew how to do so gently and respectfully. That way, they had their way while the man remained in charge, unchallenged. And everybody was happy. This is what I will tell the women in the boardroom today. Women being in positions of authority is good, because they will bring a different aspect and approach to the way things are being done. Women are not stupid and they have a lot to offer the society too. We don’t look at things the way men look at things. As mothers and wives, we are most likely to give a deeper consideration to things before taking actions."

"I have an unending problem with ladies who expose their bodies online in an attempt to ‘slay’ and be ‘trendy’. Hey, girl! Keep that body to yourself! You really think that man will accept you for being nude online forever? You can’t have your cake and eat it."

"Dear young ladies, maybe men are more sensitive in this age. You want that ‘good’, calm, sweet, honest and responsible guy for a life time yet your appearance speaks of ‘nudity’, ‘wordly’, ‘nonchalance’, and ‘irresponsibility’. ARE YOU A MAGICIAN? Wake up! You don’t usually get a second impression from a wise man after the first."

"I have seen it all in the film industry. You don’t want to know how depressed many upcoming and established Nigerian actors are. The average Nigerian actor is under immense pressure to live the good life and meet up with expected standards. In the process, there is no love for one another anymore. It is all pretence, and anyone can be sly and manipulative for the selfish glory. The culture is very individualistic now, and I can confidently say that things may be getting worse."

"You don’t need to go to the village to see village people anymore. Village people are now in the industry. If you have a tested and trusted friend, keep them, hold them tight and don’t you ever let them go! The world is crueler than you can ever imagine!"

"They (up and coming actors) should work on their God given talent first and then try and train to understand the business, they should also remain focused. It is much easier to make it in Nigeria as an actor or actress; of course they should go to the right places and hang out with the right crowd. Hard work is also part of the game, they shouldn't get tired of auditions even if they are not landing the parts, they should try harder, and eventually the producers and financiers will take notice."

"Let me share with you a short story about STRETCHING FURTHER. I have always been an ardent lover of knowledge since childhood. I have always wanted to acquire enough knowledge as I could not not because I saw them as a means to getting the best life opportunities, but because I wanted to unravel developments as much as possible in various fields of human endeavours. I have always wanted to know something about everything."

"You may think it's too late but it isn't. Time is such a natural referee. It blows the whistle of motion for you at the right moment. You only have a job when this referee (time) blows the whistle. MOVE. Then, you move."

"They (up and coming actors) should just be themselves. Believe in what they are doing and can do. One day they will get good roles and if they play them properly, they will be made."

"It has never been easy to reorganise or resist social norms and beliefs, but among the most difficult ones to reject are those at the root of the social system known as patriarchy. This system relies on a few core ideas to perpetuate itself, two of which are that gender is a fixed binary, and women are the inferior parties within it."

"Transgender and gender non-conforming people know things about gender that most cisgender folks are light years away from realising. To survive unequal realities, marginalised folks often cultivate deep knowledge of how these realities actually function."

"Unfortunately, hierarchies of human value also create hierarchies of knowledge. The people most likely to be marginalised by unjust social systems – and thus best placed to really understand them – are also those least likely to be considered credible “experts” on the subject. This is particularly true because the knowledge gleaned from marginalisation is invariably threatening to the system that produces it."

"To create hierarchies of humanity, we must distort people. Dehumanisation thrives by making it difficult for those considered less than human to know themselves, or be properly known by others. The systems that produce racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and classism are built on such distortions. They are then maintained by ensuring that the distorted version of the dehumanised group is framed as “who they really are”. This type of misinformation is necessary for maintaining injustice. As long as we remain wilfully ignorant of who marginalised people are, we can claim legitimacy in denying their rights, dignity, and humanity. It’s the perfect vanishing spell."

"Luckily, we don’t have to know everything about everyone’s realities to respect them, not tell lies about them, or believe that they know best what their needs are. We just need to do our bit to ensure they are able to lead dignified, free and safe lives, even when that bit is simply getting the hell out of their way. The root of respect is not the full understanding of other people; it is the recognition of people’s non-negotiable humanity. Regardless of our identities or how we navigate our different worlds, we all have the same rights to self-determine, live in community with others, enjoy access to the opportunities we need to survive, and write our own (magical) narratives. It can never be anyone’s place to tell another person or group of people that yielding space for their needs to be met is a danger to others. Only unrepentant bigotry results in such claims. By making respectful space for one another and learning from those who have the kinds of knowledge that we could never gain on our own, we become able to see all the different worlds that exist in this one that we share. And isn’t that the strongest magic of all?"

"Money is good. Imagination is better. Giving yourself permission to create a life that sustains you *no matter what others think* is best."

"Freedom is the many faced god and queerness is its first born."

"A good place to start as an artiste or employee is to know your worth, have integrity, and know that your destiny is not in the hands of someone, who is happy to take advantage of you in any way."

"A lot of abuse happened to a number of children not because their mothers didn't care, but in fact because they were going through something of their own and on this occasion postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis."

"When your motherland accepts you, that’s the ultimate."

"There’s something about the Yoruba traditional regalia, it takes you from ground zero to a hundred."

"Everyone is not the same. So, don’t expect the other person to be like you. There is the need for patience and tolerance with the understanding that backgrounds are different."

"Women need to understand that when you get married, your husband is actually your mother’s first love, while the mother in-law also needs to understand that her beloved son now has a new love and life partner."

"Mothers-in-law should give their daughters-in-law a chance to love their husbands and enjoy their home."

"Love and marriage is a personal thing, it is not who people choose for you, but the person your heart desires."

"No matter how talented you are, a bad character will take you nowhere."

"Travelling has taught me that people are the same all over the world – some irritating, some helpful."

"The soul (spirit) finds respite in books."

"I visit Africa as much as I can and all my books have an African setting. I get my ideas from reading, listening to people and observing people too."

"I don’t have a formula, or a place I can go to get ideas from, for a new book. Usually, ideas come when I least expect them. I could be doing something so boring, like washing up, and bingo, a voice pops up in my head."

"As black, they themselves suffered as victims of a white patriarchal culture, as women, they also face racial, sexual harassment, and class discrimination by white men. Within the framework, most of the black women writers...deal mainly with the black woman as a victim of black patriarchy"

"Womanism is black-centred; it is accommodationist. It believes in the freedom and independence of women like feminism; unlike radical feminism, it wants meaningful union between black women and black men and black children and will see to it that men begin to change from their sexist stand. It is also interested in communal well-being."

"People create social conditions and people can change them."

"Onwueme’s creative works continue to influence and generate significant interest around the world, as they are widely produced/staged, studied, taught, and written about in scholarly books, dissertations, theses, book chapters, journal articles, and international media. Onwueme’s works have a wide range of social, political, historical, cultural and environmental concerns of the masses in the global community today, with emphasis on women, youth in continental Africa and the Diaspora."

"Tess Onwueme's play is a spellbinding theatre work! It is written as if Dr. Onwueme is composing a symphonic work... Along with her other masterwork, The Missing Face [this drama] places Tess Onwueme in the ranks of Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, and Derek Walcott."

"In her work, Onwueme has shown daring in her exploration of ideas even if they lead to subjects and themes which may seem taboo. Onwueme is eminently a political dramatist, for power affects every other aspect of society. She explores these themes with a dazzling array of images and proverbs. Her drama and theater are a feast of music, mime, proverbs, and story-telling...[thus] Onwueme consolidates her position among the leading dramatists from Africa."

"Through the voices of women, Onwueme draws out universal themes of conflict. She uses the dramatic form to express an optimism for the future, for change and challenge to the repressive powers over people’s lives."

"Internationally renowned for her award-winning plays, Dr. Tess Onwueme is the literary soul-mate of Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o. She is the first African woman dramatist to break into their ranks, so that What Mama Said, Tell it to Women, Shakara: Dance-Hall Queen, The Missing Face, The Desert Encroaches and the Reign of Wazobia become staples of international college and university curricular in the 21st century."

"I am motivated by human problems that confront us all. It depends on the spirit of a problem before I get the kind of inspiration which makes me want to write about it. Then I do my research."

"Most of my writing questions the 'isms' that have been superimposed on the African people."

"Music was my original interest. But when I was studying in the United States, I had to select another subject in addition to my main line. That was what landed me in drama. But I found that in dram I was also in music because I could produce plays with a musical background and I could use music for the mood. So it was through music that I got into writing."

"Education is one of the most important means to give women the knowledge,skills and self-confidence necessary for emancipation"

"Mere woman"

"Sofola forges a link between her religion (Christianity) and her culture, seeking to interweave traditional practices with Christian doctrines. In the play (The Disturbed Peace of Christmas), Titi, who is playing the role of Mary for the community’s Christmas play is pregnant by Ayo, who is playing the role of Joseph. The entire Christmas programme for the community is threatened by the adolescent’s “sinful act” which in turn threatens the message of peace for the period as both families are initially tense and poise for conflict."

"...a male-dominated world where the voice of women seemed unheard and under-appreciated, 'Zulu Sofola stepped forward and distinguished herself as a literary icon and an excellent dramatist."

"Her (Sofola) plays are largely traditional and instructive and they tell tales of love and royalty through tragedies and the various experiences of human life in such a way that readers and audience alike are both entertained and informed in one scenario or the other."

"She (Zulu Sofola) was a mother in the true sense of the word and went beyond the call of duty as the head of our department. My personal connection with this woman makes me really proud and hungry to put her work here in this space for everybody to see."

"To be able to honor the legacy of Zulu Sofola and everything she’s meant to Nigeria and Africa and to bring that to our stage and enable our students to have the experience of working on a play like this is really important. The mission of the School of Dramatic Arts is to change the face of the entertainment industry, and that includes the stories that are told on our main stages."

"Professor Zulu Sofola, my elder sister, was a great lady. I was very little when she travelled overseas, so we never met until after a very long time. I first knew her through pictures. I must say that she laid a solid foundation for us, the younger ones. She actually took a lot from our parents; our parents were very hardworking and loving. They helped the community, training young people and providing solutions that were within their power."

"The essence of instituting the yearly Prof. Zulu Sofola‘s Day, which has commenced today in Issele-Uku, is not only to celebrate this erudite scholar, prolific writer and matriarch of Nigerian Theatre, but also to join her (Zulu Sofola) with other world’s great people, whose remarkable achievements have earned them special days when people and nations gather to recall and mark their immense contributions to humanity."

"I figured that it would be better to make all my rookie mistakes on More Cake rather than on Imagine."

"the most important thing is access. Access to finance, access to decision-makers who can greenlight projects and access to top talent who can help bring your project alive."

"The toughest challenge is to keep going in the face of overwhelming odds."

"It was mean of him to expel her just because she didn't keep her legs closed. Maybe if I kept my legs open I'd also get expelled and Daddy would have to find me another school for me to go in Lagos"

"I went into the bushes to do a number two… I thought I had finished, but I could still feel something there so I used some leaves to wipe my bottom and there it was – a giant worm sticking out of my bottom! I screamed and started running with the worm dangling behind me… I stood there crying with my pants down, dress up and worm sticking out."

"If someone dies every week or so for the next five years then I'll never go hungry again…"

"If hunger forces a farmer to eat both his yam tubers and his seed yams, the years to come will have no yams to eat and none to plant"

"The time has come for me to start my life"

"Why, why, why, why? I hate them all, I want to go home. I don't want to live with my Auntie, I don't want to live in Idogun. I want everything to go back to the way it once was, with Daddy, Adebola and me living at number 4 Egbecombe House."

"Whatever the dead man see in the burial ground is caused by death"

"It is a pity i don't have long hair or live in tower, I could've left strands of hair along the way, which my prince could have followed after to Idogun and we would have lived happily ever after"

"I was going to live with her and no amount of sobbing and begging was going to change his decision"

"Just get it out there and learn everything you can along the way."

"do the thing that you want to do and don’t sit in perfectionism."

"You have your own path, and you have to stick to your own path, because everybody's Chi is different."

"You also need to know that you're on your own - even when you’re surrounded by people doing the same thing, you need to understand that you're not the same."

"And so you will do whatever you can to achieve your goals. I mean, look at Killmonger, for heaven's sake."

"You believe that your purpose is pure, is more refined, sophisticated, and more important than everybody else’s."

"You treat people with reverence because you don't know who you're talking to, you could be greeting an ancestor that you've never met."

"You can look for help later down the line, but you have to do the toughest bits of this gig yourself, read everything, even if it's niche and nobody else is interested in it, read it anyway."

"If there’s a fear of confronting who you are and what you believe, you're never going to be a good writer because you need to be able to see through the eyes of people who are not the same as you."

"Don't be afraid to read things that will shake you and will shake your faith."

"Don't be afraid to read things that are controversial."

"Do what you're supposed to do, and the rest will fall into place."

"But you try to listen to the other person’s point of view as “The Black Lady The” does."

"Simply by believing in God and leaving it to God to change things. Which is again not to say that you don’t do anything on your own part."

"You hear another person’s point of view. You may agree with it or not but you are all achieving to some vision."

"you cannot negotiate truth: truth is truth because it is truth. You can’t talk around it you know. Whether one sees it as a perversity or not I believe it is a perversity."

"When you are criticising or analysing something it is different to when you are writing it and sometimes you can see more than the person who is sitting writing it ‘cos that’s the job of the critic."

"Anyone going into any form of creativity (in this case, writing) should only do so for the sole purpose of improving their own lives."

"It is unprofitable and unnecessary to bother oneself with trying to reshape another’s attitude."

"We believe in reincarnation and that life is a circle. We go and come back."

"When you delve deeper into these anxieties, you realize that it is always about power; the fear of losing power when the feminist is allowed equal footing in society."

"Without freedom, there can be no love,”"

"change is manifesting and it is so beautiful to watch."

"feminism is not new, especially not on the continent. Maybe the word itself found its way lately into the Nigerian vocabulary, but at its core the struggle for the social, political and economic equality of the sexes; ideologies which aren’t any different from what my late grandmothers fought for—is not new"

"But I would like to point out that many women in my community are no longer afraid to tell their stories; they no longer seek for anyone’s permission before they call out their abusers on social media. They no longer accept bullshit from men, from the society, and the treacherous system that insists on relegating us to the background"

"Social media is the major win here; it opened new frontiers for women’s rights conversations, and feminists have utilised the digital media to advance ground root political and cultural movements in Nigeria, for example. It is an amazing organizing tool—social media, and I think of it as the revolution the world had been waiting for"

"There is a dark side to everything and many things can be true at the same time"

"I was not so confident about my writing and I needed that validation. It was sort of a confirmation that I was treading the right path. It was a gift and also a challenge, because afterward I began to pay more attention to what I do with language, how I craft my stories"

"Ogadinma is my love letter to the women in my life, who were married off to much older men in the 80s, when they were only teenagers. I thought it was important to tell this story because it was an opportunity for me to understand why my aunts didn’t leave their abusive husbands and how society punishes the woman who chooses to walk away from a toxic marriage. It is always so easy to ask why a woman stayed with her abuser. Ogadinma was an education for me; researching it, was a necessary education"

"The challenges were many, but my colleagues at home continue to soldier on, and I think they deserve all the accolades. They are powerful, and I cheer them on every opportunity I get"

"Read, and don’t ever stop. Read across genres. Read non-traditional literatures, like manuals and brochures. You could learn a thing or two; you could attempt a non-traditional story form, like Chikodili Emelumadu did with her exceptional short story, What to do When Your Child Brings Home a Mami Wata"

"With whatever reasonable amount of money we can get, we will achieve a lot once we use it judiciously.”"

"You Do Not Have to Mention Names, No Matter Whose Ox is Gored”"

"that ordinary folk can prevail despite the heavily stacked odds against them."

"When We Speak of Nothing, seems to indicate a blossoming of things to come."

"evil thrived when men do nothing."

"Not scheduling your time will be one of the biggest mistakes you can make."

"You need to know that if you do not treat it like a job, then you will set yourself up to fail."

"the incredible value of failing, that it – failure, can bring innovation and then success."

"There’s a falseness about the division between the ability for science and the ability for art. We’re born capable of doing both, and then we slowly unlearn—a gradual loss of curiosity. And we don’t have to give that up."

"Write what you love to read and hopefully someone out there will love the too."

"However, writers also have to keep in mind that you will never please everyone. Some people will love your stories and some will hate them."

"Literary criticism has its place in a writer’s growth, whether they come in the form of publisher rejections or book reviews."

"Read. Read. Read. Read widely. Not just in the genre you want to write."

"The simple answer is life. Life inspires ."

"So you can see wealth around you, but you can also not have much, so I was just obsessed with the idea."

"staying home does not necessarily mean staying safe for women."

"If you can create an opportunity for someone – who would otherwise be marginalised – to get an equal chance at the prize this is what matters."

"Racial stratification will demand you “stay there” – do not stay there. If this door won’t budge, try another."

"But the huge problem here is that it is up to the victim of discrimination to do all the work to fight it – and you become exhausted. They wear you down – if you let them."

"Don’t feel guilty for being white – do something with it’"

"You must first identify the advantage of white skin, before you can see the disadvantage experienced by those without it."

"The system breaks every conceivable human right and history will judge us on this. It must end"

"You can’t do anything about the colour of the skin you were born into but what you choose to do with that inheritance is very much up to you."

"To keep reading. And write, despite the convenient excuse of 'life'."

"There’s no formula to a beautiful story. But you’ll feel it. Honesty."

"I wanted to write about extended family systems. You have people you can fall back on, and it’s good. But what if you don’t fit into what is expected of you? If you’re a man, there’s support. If you’re a woman, like Yejide, there’s the expectation that you marry into a family and after a couple of years you have children, and you have a measure of power. I wanted to look at what would happen if you could choose to be what you’re supposed to be, and how the community, in trying to help you become what you think you should be, turns on you."

"I wanted to look at the subtle ways that Nigerians interacted with the Nigerian state. One of the ways we survive darkness—and there’s a lot of darkness in this book—is to find reasons to laugh. Laughter in those kinds of situations becomes essential. It’s not a luxury. It’s not just something you do because you feel like laughing. It’s been one of the ways I’ve coped myself. I wanted to bring that to this book because it would be miserable if there was no humor…"

"There is a strong view in Nigeria, as in many other cultures, that a marriage is not complete without children. I don’t agree; I’m wary of the idea that people have to have some particular functionality in order to be full members of society. I think it’s a very dangerous idea. Humans are humans and they are worthy of respect…"

"I am interested in the idea that people should be able to define their own happiness. It’s not just about fertility; we are often told that we need this or that to be happy. We need to be thin, rich or whatever. But maybe we should decide for ourselves what happiness looks like."

"“If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But when it's in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn't mean it's no longer love.”"

"“Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone who can explain who we were to the world when we are gone.”"

"“So love is like a test, but in what sense? To what end? Who was carrying out the test? But I think I did believe that love had immense power to unearth all that was good in us, refine us and reveal to us the better versions of ourselves.”"

"“I understand how a word others use every day can become something whispered in the dark to soothe a wound that just won't heal. I remember thinking I would never hear it spoken without unravelling a little, wondering if I would ever get to say it in the light. So I recognise the gift in this simple pronouncement, the promise of a beginning in this one word.”"

"“OK, we'll tell her you dug the grave." It's the truth - stretch, but still true. Besides, what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits, without those better versions of ourselves that we present as the only ones that exist?”"

"“Before you call the snail a weakling, tie your house to your back and carry it around for a week”"

"“It would take a while for me to realise that each of my children had given me as much as they took. My memories of them, bittersweet and constant, were as powerful as a physical presence. And because of that, as a bus bore me into the heart of a city I did not know, while my last child was dying in Lagos and the country was unraveling, I was not afraid because I was not alone.”"

"“I loved Yejide from the very first moment. No doubt about that. But there are things even love can’t do. Before I got married, I believed love could do anything. I learned soon enough that it couldn’t bear the weight of four years without children. If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break. But even when it’s in a thousand pieces around your feet, that doesn’t mean it’s no longer love.”"

"“The reasons why we do the things we do will not always be the ones that others will remember. Sometimes”"

"“I had expected them to talk about my childlessness. I was armed with millions of smiles. Apologetic smiles, pity-me smiles, I-look-unto-God smiles - name all the fake smiles needed to get through an afternoon with a group of people who claim to want the best for you while poking at your open sore with a stick - and I had them ready. I was ready to listen to them tell me I must do something about my situation. I expected to hear about a new pastor I could visit; a new mountain where I could go to pray; or an old herbalist in a remote village or town whom I could consult. I was armed with smiles for my lips, an appropriate sheen of tears for my eyes and sniffles for my nose. I was prepared to lock up my hairdressing salon throughout the coming week and go in search of a miracle with my mother-in-law in tow. What I was not expecting was another smiling woman in the room, a yellow woman with a blood-red mouth who grinned like a new bride.”"

"“what would be left of love without truth stretched beyond its limits”"

"“But even then, I could trap those thoughts and keep them caged in a corner of my mind, in a place where they could not spread their wings and take over my life.”"

"“I was overwhelmed with the urge to fill every silence with words. Silence to me was a void in the universe that could suck us all in. It was my assignment to block this deadly void with words and save the world.”"

"“But the biggest lies are often the ones we tell ourselves. I bit my tongue because I did not want to ask questions. I did not ask questions because I did not want to know the answers. It was convenient to believe my husband was trustworthy; sometimes faith is easier than doubt.”"

"“Already, I was coming undone, like a hastily tied scarf coming loose, on the ground before the owner is aware of it.”"

"“I was armed with millions of smiles. Apologetic smiles, pity-me smiles, I-look-unto-God smiles—name all the fake smiles needed to get through an afternoon with a group of people who claim to want the best for you while poking at your open sore with a stick—and I had them ready.”"

"“I would learn later that Akin could keep himself neatly folded in while he drew out other people. He was the kind of person that many claimed as a dear friend. Many of those people did not even know him, but they never knew they did not know him.”"

"“there is no god like a mother”"

"“Even the tongue and the teeth cannot cohabit without fighting”"

"“The reasons why we do the things we do will not always be the ones others will remember. Sometimes I think we have children because we want to leave behind someone who can explain who we were to the world.”"

"“A mother must be vigilant. She must be able and willing to wake up ten times during the night to feed her baby. After her intermittent vigil, she must see everything clearly the next morning so that she can notice any changes in her baby. A mother is not permitted to have blurry vision. She must notice if her baby’s wail is too loud or too low. She must know if the child’s temperature has risen or fallen. A mother must not miss any signs.”"

"“If the burden is too much and stays too long, even love bends, cracks, comes close to breaking and sometimes does break”"

"“Didn’t think it was possible for the world to change so suddenly. I was aware of other people moving up and down the corridor: I heard heels clicking, people speaking, felt some bodies push past mine. But I felt so alone, as though within the space of time it had taken Yejide to say, “They have taken Olamide to the mortuary” I had been transported to a planet with no human life.”"

"“There is nothing stopping a beautiful girl from facing her books”"

"“Now hear me well—what is not yours is not yours o, even if you marry the person that has that thing. If it is not yours, it is not yours o.”"

"Time was unforgiving, it didn’t stop, not even to give people a chance to scrape themselves off the floor if they’d been shattered."

"“He stared back at her, unconcerned. She had always marvelled at his calm assurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.”"

"Maybe she was one of those people for whom satisfaction lay only in the future, forever slightly out of reach."

"“My mother had become a obsession for me, a religion, and the very thought of referring to another woman as Mother seems sacrilegious, a betrayal of the woman who had given up her life for me to live.”[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/52027766-stay-with-me?page=2"

"“Di we ever really know what we will do in any situation until the situation presents itself?”[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/52027766-stay-with-me?page=2"

"“The road stretches before us, shrouded in a darkness transitioning into dawn as it leads me back to you.”[https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/52027766-stay-with-me?page=2"

"Life is an ambivalent lover. One moment, you are everything and life wants to consume you entirely. The next moment, you are an insignificant speck of nothing. Meaningless."

"Death is only a doorway."

"It’s something about being in love looking like all the things you’ve lost finding you once more."

"I don’t want to write trauma for trauma’s sake. I want to write it in a way that leads to empathy. To action."

"It is so critical to understand that speaking up transcends the ability to help just the person speaking up, but knowing that whenever we use our voices, we are doing so for many others who have suffered the same experiences or injustices. It is about starting crucial conversations that would hopefully lead to positive change. It is about refusing to be complacent, to accept what is seen as the norm."

"It’s so heartbreaking that we’re killing talent. We’re killing intelligence. We’re killing future leaders. We’re killing brains, inventors. We’re killing so much by not allowing these girls to be educated."

"When you get up every day, I want you to remind yourself that tomorrow will be better than today. That you are a person of value. That you are important."

"You must do good for other peoples, even if you are not well, even if the whole world around you is not well."

"We all be speaking different because we all are having different growing-up life, but we can all be understanding each other if we just take the time to listen well."

"Not his-story. My own will be called her-story."

"“My mama say education will give me a voice. I want more than just a voice, Ms. Tia. I want a louding voice,” I say. “I want to enter a room and people will hear me even before I open my mouth to be speaking. I want to live in this life and help many people so that when I grow old and die, I will still be living through the people I am helping.“"

"I want to tell her that God is not a cement building of stones and sand. That God is not for all that putting inside a house and locking Him there. I want her to know that the only way to know if a person find God and keep Him in their heart is to check how the person is treating other people, if he treats people like Jesus says--with love, patience, kindness, and forgiveness."

"Now I know that speaking good English is not the measure of intelligent mind and sharp brain. English is only a language, like Yoruba and Igbo and Hausa. Nothing about it is so special, nothing about it makes anybody have sense."

"Who knows what else tomorrow will bring? So, I nod my head yes, because it is true, the future is always working, always busy unfolding better things, and even if it doesn’t seem so sometimes, we have hope of it."

"“Your schooling is your voice, child. It will be speaking for you even if you didn’t open your mouth to talk. It will be speaking till the day God is calling you come.” That day, I tell myself that even if I am not getting anything in this life, I will go to school. I will finish my primary and secondary and university schooling and become teacher because I don’t just want to be having any kind voice . . . I want a louding voice."

"I feel a free that I didn't feel in long time. And when I smile, it climb from inside my stomach and spread itself on my teeth."

"If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than men?"

"Write your truth, Ms. Tia say. Your truth."

"“Your dead mother and me, we are age-mates. God forbid for me to share my husband with my own child. God forbid that I am waiting for you to finish with my husband before I can enter his room. Ah, you will suffer in this house. Ask Khadija, she will tell you that I am a wicked woman. That my madness is not having cure.”"

"“When you begin to born your children, you will not be too sad again,” she say. “When I first marry Morufu, I didn’t want to born children. I was too afraid of having a baby so quick, afraid of falling sick from the load of it. So I take something, a medicine, to stop the pregnant from coming. But after two months, I say to myself, ‘Khadija, if you don’t born a baby, Morufu will send you back to your father’s house.’ So I stop the medicine and soon I born my first girl, Alafia. When I hold her in my hands for the first time, my heart was full of so much love. Now, my children make me laugh when I am not even thinking to laugh. Children are joy, Adunni. Real joy.”"

"She open her eyes, give me a sad smile. “I wish I am a man, but I am not, so I do the next thing I can do. I marry a man.”"

"I am leaving Ikati. This is what I been wanting all my life, to leave this place and see what the world outside is looking like, but not like this. Not with a bad name following me. Not like a person that the whole village is looking for because they think she have kill a woman. Not with one half of my heart with Kayus and the other half with Khadija. I hang my head down, feeling a thick, heavy cloth as it is covering me. The thick cloth of shame, of sorrow, of heart pain."

"When she come out, she draw deep breath and her chest, wide like blackboard, is climbing up and down, up and down. It is as if this woman is using her nostrils to be collecting all the heating from the outside and making us to be catching cold. I am standing beside Mr. Kola, and his body is shaking like my own. Even the trees in the compound, the yellow, pink, blue flowers in the long flowerpot, all of them too are shaking."

"I didn’t tell Ms. Tia that I ever marry Morufu or about all the things he did to me in the room after he drink Fire-Cracker. I didn’t tell her about what happen to Khadija. I didn’t tell her because I have to keep it inside one box in my mind, lock the box, and throw the key inside river of my soul. Maybe one day, I will swim inside the river, find the key."

"I tear to pieces the paper, and throw it to the floor. Then I swim deep inside the river of my soul, find the key from where it is sitting, full of rust, at the bottom of the river, and open the lock. I kneel down beside my bed, close my eyes, turn myself into a cup, and pour the memory out of me."

"“Fifteen years ago, I was selling cheap materials from my boot, going from place to place, looking for customers. I wasn’t born into wealth. I have worked hard for my success. I fought for it. It wasn’t easy, especially because my husband, Chief, he didn’t have a job. If you want to be like me in business, Adunni, you will need to work very hard. Rise about whatever life throws at you. And never, ever give up on your dreams. Do you understand?”"

"But there are words in my head, many things I want to say. I want to tell Ms. Tia I am sorry I made her come here. I want to ask why the doctor didn’t come too. Why didn’t he come and get a beating like his wife? If it takes two people to make a baby, why only one person, the woman, is suffering when the baby is not coming? Is it because she is the one with breast and the stomach for being pregnant? Or because of what? I want to ask, to scream, why are the women in Nigeria seem to be suffering for everything more than the men?"

"Trees, they die dead like people too. They need care too. The earth around us needs care. We come from earth, we eat from earth, and one day we must go back to earth, so why are we treating it so bad?"

"Kike picks up her basket, sets it on her head, leaves it to balance by itself. The girls in our village learn how to do this from when they are first growing two teeth. They know how to use every part of their body to work so that their hand can be free to do even more work."

"“In our land, a sad wife is better than a happy woman with no husband.”"

"That’s the disgusting reality about the human ability to adapt. At first the shock, the repulsion, is all in 3D — sights and sounds and smells. You recoil and gag and wish for a bath and cry at the devastation. Time passes. You live in it. You spend time in it. You blend, and everything fizzles to normalcy, and that which once repulsed slowly becomes natural, acceptable if you do nothing. That, I realize, is what culture is: doing things a certain way until you get used to it."

"“But you were blind to your wife’s depression and silent resentment. She hid it from you because she loved you. And you were blind to it because society offers you that blindfold, that thick cloth of entitlement, patriarchy, at birth.”"

"What's the difference between a Yanmirin and an animal? Can the offspring of a hen be a duck?"

"Our father and our God, are ask that you cure Anjola of her Yoruba stubbornness! Our merciful father, we know that Yoruba Stubbornness is a serious disease; it is a disease that is difficult to cure but we trust in your supreme power, oh God, because you are the God of Possibilities."

"Inter-ethnic marriage [I]s a weapon of peace and harmonious co-existence among the numerous ethnic groups in Nigeria."

"Don't look at your travails as a north-west problem. It's a national problem. The country needs help."

"You are a fresh graduate with little knowledge of the dynamics of your country. The northerners are good people but you've got to be ready to identify with them, demonstrate that you are a part of them, before you can benefit from their kindness[...] You have to claim to be a northerner to get a job in the north."

"Is it true that Igbo people in Imo are better than those in Anambra? That they are more hospitable, better organised and generally more elevated?"

"The Anambra Igbos are not just good, they are far better than the Imo Igbos.The Anambra people are the genuine and authentic Igbos. Besides, look around you, nearly every great Igbo person in this country is from Anambra - Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chinua Achebe, Odumegwu Ojukwu, Emeka Anyoku; the list is long. You have spent close to one year in Anambra and you have tasted their hospitality. What further proof do you need?"

"When I arrived home... [I] met my mother sitting on the cement slab outside the kitchen door, looking agitated. She said my father had gone out with Ify because Dayo, my immediate elder brother, wanted to make trouble. She said Dayo was categorical in his rejection of Ify because he was Igbo and had threatened to ensure that the marriage never happened... My mother said there was something disturbing about the way he spoke; she said she detected a level of vehemence that was troublesome... Finally, everybody was home and all hell was let loose. Dayo's vituperations astounded me."

"I took a firm decision also not to share my misery with any of my mates because I knew what advice most of then would proffer. They would tell me I had no option but to succumb. They would give me a thousand and one names of students, past and present, who had succumbed; that I should be 'realistic'. And so I kept the matter to myself. I was suffering internally; I was going through agony trying to think of a way out. Nonetheless, I managed to maintain a calm exterior as I went about my other academic activities."

"there are only two things that 'qualify' an individual to even nurse a political ambition in our country... They are money and the strong backing of a godfather."

"When a man is looking... happy..., the woman in his life deserve commendation."

"“hellish” to travel to work in the morning and a “nightmare of intractable traffic and bad roads” in the evening"

"It was home of the legendary CMS Grammar School, the oldest secondary school in the country, as well as Methodist Boys’ High School. It was also home to some movie stars and music icons like Obesere, Olamide, 9ice and Lil Kesh. Prominent tertiary institutions such as the University of Lagos and the Federal College of Education, Technical were just down the road."

"The unfortunate class of homeless Lagosians"

"“‘Oga mi, wole kanle, eleyi gbomo,’” – “My boss, you need to park properly; this passenger has a child with them"

"Last year, on Saturday, 14th September 2019, at approximately 5:52 pm, a fire broke out in my house at No 15, Justice Lawal Uwais Street, Asokoro, Abuja. Many of my documents were lost in the fire, including which was my NYSC certificate. Therefore, I am writing to apply for the replacement of my NYSC Certificate that was lost in the fire incident."

"I don’t know what you have heard. There have been so many different accounts of that particular situation. The fact that I am sitting here means that I didn’t do anything wrong. But I have not come out to set the record straight as to what happened. The social media has just run rife with different accounts."

"The matter had been adjudicated and one day, I will come out with my account. I have probably done more NYSC than you (presenter). I have done at least two NYSCs in my life."

"I think what I owe Nigerians is to say that I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t break the law. The NYSC I did and finished. That is the much I can tell you. Everything I did was by the law."

"work on every genre of literature from fiction to poetry, non-fiction and drama. I do work more on some than the others. My dominant focus, for instance, is mostly fiction and poetry. Recently though, I compiled a non-fiction anthology called Blessed Body: The Secret Lives of LGBT Nigerians. Of all the genres, I enjoy poetry the most. It gives me a space to condense my words and say a lot in a very limited space. It challenges me to utilize figures of speech, imagery and mood to capture my thought and ideas. I also like non-fiction because there is urgency about it. It almost feels as if I am documenting narratives live, as they happen. At the moment, I am working on a critical paper about how films/documentaries can be used as an effective tool of activism for the African LGBTQ activist. Additionally, I am editing and polishing my second collection of poetry collection entitled Brutal Bliss."