Queen of African Literature on the complexities of the feminism movement, raising our girls and the fragile male ego

"A feminist is who and what I am. It’s not a cloak I put on on certain days and take off on certain days." Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie asserted in her 90-minute conversation with chair Ted Hodgkinson to celebrate the 10th anniversary of her acclaimed novel Half of a Yellow Sun.

Adichie adds that she "wants to live in a world where men and women are truly equal. I want to live in a world where gender doesn't hold women back, as it does today, everywhere in the world. ”

20 years earlier, Mother of African Literature Buchi Emecheta in an interview with Julie Holmes  in The Voice July 9, 1996 also echoed Adichie's thoughts on womanism (her own brand of feminism) she said:"Women are capable of living for so many other reasons than men,"

Emecheta just like a few of other African women writers tend to deny any affiliation to the feminist movement, even though their writings espouse feminist aspirations.

One huge reason for this is, feminism is often been interpreted as being anti-male, anti-culture and anti-religion in its theoretical framework.

In a sentiment that calls to mind Zaynab Alkali’s enlivening meditation on feminism as not inherently bad or evil, Adichie in her commencement speech at Wesley College makes a well-argued and layered case on looking at how feminism is important in the world today: 

"I already knew that the world does not extend to women the many small courtesies that it extends to men. I also knew that victimhood is not a virtue. That being discriminated against does not make you somehow morally better. And I knew that men were not inherently bad or evil. They were merely privileged. And I knew that privilege blinds because it is the nature of privilege to blind. "

She adds:

"We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity is a hard, small cage, and we put boys inside this cage.

We teach boys to be afraid of fear, of weakness, of vulnerability. We teach them to mask their true selves, because they have to be, in Nigerian-speak a hard man."

Adichie considers the main obstacle to our ability to correct this blindness is because we have raised our girls to be pretentious:

"We do a much greater disservice to girls, because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of males.

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller.

We say to girls: You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful but not too successful, otherwise you will threaten the man.

If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man, pretend that you are not, especially in public, otherwise you will emasculate him."

"We teach girls shame. Close your legs, cover yourself, we make them feel as though by being born female they're already guilty of something. And so girls grow up to be women who cannot say they have desire. They grow up to be women who silence themselves.

They grow up to be women who cannot say what they truly think. And they grow up--and this is the worst thing we do to girls--they grow up to be women who have turned pretense into an art form."

Adichie adds this irreverent but incisive urgency in nudging us to reconsider our own ideas of what feminism is and should be:

"Some people ask: "Why the word feminist? Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?" Because that would be dishonest.

Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general - but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded. It would be a way of denying that the problem of gender targets women.

That the problem was not about being human, but specifically about being a female human. For centuries, the world divided human beings into two groups and then proceeded to exclude and oppress one group. It is only fair that the solution to the problem acknowledge that."

Interested in Adichie's position on feminism, watch her TED talk below.

Compliment this with Chimamanda Adichie on feminism and the Nigerian civil war,   Zaynab Alkali on Feminism and Buchi Emecheta on feminism and motherhood

ALSO READ: 10 of the wisest things Chimamanda Adichie ever said