Women Academics From Nigeria

"I decided not to become a doctor – my mum and dad are doctors, my three younger siblings are doctors. I loved the science, but not the blood and pain. It wasn’t going to happen."

"When you have more than you need, build a longer table—not a higher fence."

"Studying law was a real break from what they expected of me. It was a big deal to choose an alternative career to medicine, so I had to make a real go of it."

"I was absolutely stunned when I received an official letter from the Cabinet Office informing me of this in early May but have had to keep this news confidential until now."

"I have experienced both racial and gender-based discrimination in the workplace and was angry about this for many years. Instead of staying angry, I decided to do something about it! My aim is to level the playing field by empowering the next generation (and, indeed, others) to maximize their potential with a view to seeing an end to all forms of discrimination in the work place and in wider society. This challenge is huge but, to me, is worth pursuing and making sacrifices for."

"I have experienced bias and situations where, being a black woman, I was judged more harshly over other colleagues. You are more likely to be noticed and are far more likely to have negative judgements made about you if you are part of an ethnic minority."

"At that interview, the head of legal (who is English but whose partner is of Asian descent) asked me if I thought my race had been a factor in me not getting interviews with other organisations. That was, honestly, the first time I had even considered race as being something that could inhibit my progress. Thankfully, I was offered a role by her and was able to qualify as a solicitor in-house."

"With that in mind, I do hope that you will be inspired and motivated to join me on this exciting journey."

"Staying focused, determined and tenacious, being brave enough to stand out from the crowd and be my own person, constantly learning from my mistakes and getting constructive feedback to help me improve, giving back to others and maintaining my faith have all been key to my success."

"I remained an invisible diversity campaigner for several years and shied away from the exposure and vulnerability that comes with raising your head above the parapet. I later realised that my influence and impact would be much enhanced if I was more visible. A friend once told me that "a world of opportunity awaits the visible". Since making the decision to become more visible a few years ago, I have been able to drive more impactful change."

"However, I want to be absolutely clear and say that I do this work for a cause and not for applause. Improving diversity and maximising potential is my calling and I would still make sacrifices for this cause even if no recognition was forthcoming. I am visible about what I do not to brag, show off or self-promote but because research has consistently shown that there remains a severe lack of visible, accessible role models in our society, causing fundamental issues for those looking for an example to follow. This is particularly acute within the ethnic minority community."

"I have been honoured to receive several award nominations and other recognitions for my work which is truly humbling. I deeply cherish every single one and I am greatly encouraged and uplifted by them."

"It would be impossible for me to do everything and I mean no offence by declining your request."

"Please understand that I must prioritise what I devote my time to. I am extremely mindful of the importance of my own wellbeing and I am careful not to over-commit, often saying 'no' to various opportunities and approaches for assistance as a result."

"Juggling all this is not at all easy and I do decline most requests for my assistance due to time constraints."

"In a male-dominated world, you have to work as your male counterparts in order not to give them reasons not to promote you."

"Civic education has been re-introduced into the school curriculum. So the curriculum has already taken care of that. All aspect of human behavior, such as respect, proper conduct and the like are already embedded in it. Whatever we need to do, civic education is important. However, we need to look at the curriculum, to see if there’s anything we are missing concerning all the social issues, and if anything is mission, we need to include it and then begin to actively profess the solution."

"We need to stop our children, we need to counsel them; we need to know the website they browse and as mothers we should be our children’s friends. We should know what our children are going through. Let us talk to them, let us feel what our children are feeling. These children have bullies in the classroom, they may be fat and the bullies in the class will continue to harass them. And that’s why they begin to visit websites where they find friends, friends that would lure them into suicides."

"Wait for your appointed time. When it is not your time, you will see that it is not your time. But when it was my time and somebody was trying to stop it, God insisted because it is God’s appointed time,"

"To maintain peace is easy. You only need an all inclusive governance; don’t introduce policies without the people’s knowledge. They will have to be aware. Don’t just bring in something midway, that is when they will resist it. They must be part of the decision making. One must not be high handed because once you do that, you are creating problems for yourself. We will have regular meetings with the staff unions, student unions, among others."

"They should be focused and hard-working and never feel inferior to their male counterparts. They should always be decisive. Once a woman is decisive, she would reach her goal because no one would be manipulating her to get it."

"To maintain peace is easy. You only need an all inclusive governance; don’t introduce policies without the people’s knowledge."

"Women need to participate in politics and when women are in government because they are mothers, they are caring, and they will ensure that our hospitals will work and our schools will function properly and everyone will be happy."

"Let’s Put Politics Aside And Embrace Peace,"

"Life has taught me to be determined, to be focused and to rely on God. Everything I have passed through is a lesson. I don’t think I regret any part of my life because I saw it as a lesson to prepare me for greater heights. Again, when you have God, you have peace of mind because no matter the life challenge, there is always hope because with God all things are possible. So, nothing really bothers me. I have gone through a lot to let anything bother me because I have God who is always by my side."

"During normal ageing, there are physiological changes especially in high energy demanding tissues including the brain and skeletal muscles. Ageing may disrupt homeostasis and allow tissue vulnerability to disease"

"“They have achieved what will make them succeed in life; go and explore the world, do not limit your capabilities, be focused on whatever you do and involve God in your endeavours."

"We will also create Radiotherapy and Radiation Sciences to meet the demands of the new world. And under Environment Sciences, we are going to have departments such as Building, Architecture, Quantity Survey, Urban and Regional Planning, Fine and Applied Arts, among others."

"We will create more faculties to boost the image of the university on the world map. We will create the Faculties of Pharmacy, Environmental Sciences, and Allied Health Sciences for programmes such as Physiotherapy, Medical Laboratory Science. The existing Nursing Sciences department will also be moved to the appropriate faculty unlike what currently plays out"

"Welfare of the workers and students would be our priority. We will provide their welfare. It is very important to us"

"“Have a goal from the beginning of your life journey, and acquire the skills and educational certificates you need for your goal.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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!"

"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."

"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!"

"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)."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."