When We Realize That There Is Never

The Novels I Love, The Ones I Remember, The Ones I Re-read, Have An Empathetic Human Quality, Or 'emotional Truth'. This Quality Is Difficult To Fully Define, But I Always Recognise It When I See It: It Is Different From Honesty And More Resilient Than Fact, Something That Exists Not In The Kind Of Fiction That Explains But In The Kind That Shows.

There Are People Who Think That We Cannot Rule Ourselves Because The Few Times We Tried, We Failed, As If All The Others Who Rule Themselves Today Got It Right The First Time. It Is Like Telling A Crawling Baby Who Tries To Walk, And Then Falls Back On His Buttocks, To Stay There. As If The Adults Walking Past Him Did Not Crawl, Once

In Primary School In South-eastern Nigeria, I Was Taught That Hosni Mubarak Was The President Of Egypt. I Learned The Same Thing In Secondary School. In University, Mubarak Was Still President Of Egypt. I Came To Assume, Subconsciously, That He - And Others Like Paul Biya In Cameroon And Muammar Gaddafi In Libya - Would Never Leave.

Culture Does Not Make People - People Make Culture. So If It Is In Fact True That The Full Humanity Of Women Is Not Our Culture, We Must Make It Our Culture. [...] A Feminist Is A Man Or A Woman Who Says, 'yes There Is A Problem With Gender As It Is Today And We Must Fix It. We Must Do Better.'

Show A People As One Thing, Only One Thing, Over And Over Again, And That Is What They Become.