This is a modified version of a talk I delivered in December 2012 at TEDxEuston, a yearly conference focused on Africa. Speakers
Things started to fall apart at home when my brother, Jaja, did not go to communion and Papa flung his heavy missal across the room and broke the figurines on the etagere.(Opening page, 3)
They went to a fraternity house on Chestnut Street, where everyone stood around drinking vodka-rich punch from plastic cups, until Ifemelu accepted that there would be no dancing; to party here was to...
They fascinated him, the unsubtle cowering of the almost rich in the presence of the rich, and the rich in the presence of the very rich; to have money, it seemed, was to be consumed by money. Obinze...
They expected certain things of her, and forgave certain things from her, because she was foreign. Once, sitting with them in a bar, she heard Curt talking to Brad, and Curt said blowhard. She was str...
They do not doubt their presence here, these students. They believe they should be here, they have earned it and thay are paying for it. Au fond, they have bought us all. It is the key to America’s gr...
They believed. They truly believed. It often came to her as a sweet shock, the knowledge that there were so many people in the world who felt exactly as she and Blaine did about Barack Obama. On
They avoided giving direct instructions: they did not say Ask somebody upstairs; they said You might want to ask somebody upstairs. When you tripped and fell, when you choked, when misfortune befell y...
There were, on a window ledge, photos of Emenike squinting in front of the Sistine Chapel, making a peace sign at the Acropolis, standing at the Colosseum, his shirt the same nutmeg color as the wall...
There was a certain luxury to charity that she could not identify with and did not have. To take charity for granted, to revel in this charity towards people whom one did not know -- perhaps it came f...
The male gaze, as a shaper of my life’s choices, is largely incidental. Gender
The second tool is a question: Can you reverse X and get the same results? ... If the answer is yes, then your choosing to forgive him can be a feminist choice because it is not shaped by a gender ine...
The real tragedy of our postcolonial world is not that the majority of people had no say in whether or not they wanted this new world; rather, it is that the majority have not been given the tools to...
The pioneering American journalist Marlene Sanders, who was the first woman to report from Vietnam during the war (and who was the mother of a son), once gave this piece of advice to a younger journal...
The biggest problem in this country is not corruption. The problem is that there are many qualified people who are not where they are supposed to be because they won’t lick anybody’s ass, or they don’...
Tente não usar demais palavras como misoginia e patriarcado com Chizalum. Nós, feministas, às vezes usamos muitos jargões, e o jargão às vezes pode ser abstrato demais. Não se limite a rotular alguma...
Teach her to question language. Language is the repository of our prejudices, our beliefs, our assumptions. .. Try not to use words like misogyny and patriarchy too often with Chizaleum. We can someti...
Teach her that to love is not only to give but also to take. This is important because we give girls subtle cues about their lives – we teach girls that a large component of their ability to love is t...
Take cooking, for example. Today, women in general are more likely to do housework than men—cooking and cleaning. But why is that? Is it because women are born with a cooking gene or because over year...
Something about the way Chinedu said his name, Abidemi, made her think of gently pressing on a sore muscle, the kind of self-inflicted ache that is satisfying.