Your Life Belongs To You And You

I Live Half The Year In Nigeria, The Other Half In The U.s. But Home Is Nigeria - It Always Will Be. I Consider Myself A Nigerian Who Is Comfortable In The World. I Look At It Through Nigerian Eyes.

It Is Easy To Romanticize Poverty, To See Poor People As Inherently Lacking Agency And Will. It Is Easy To Strip Them Of Human Dignity, To Reduce Them To Objects Of Pity. This Has Never Been Clearer Than In The View Of Africa From The American Media, In Which We Are Shown Poverty And Conflicts Without Any Context.

About 52% Of The World's Population Is Female. But Most Of The Positions Of Power And Prestige Are Occupied By Men. The Late Kenyan Nobel Peace Laureate Wangari Maathai Put It Simply And Well When She Said 'the Higher You Go, The Fewer Women There Are.'

She Rested Her Head Against His And Felt, For The First Time, What She Would Often Feel With Him: A Self-affection. He Made Her Like Herself. With Him, She Was At Ease; Her Skin Felt As Though It Was Her Right Size.. It Seemed So Natural, To Talk To Him About Odd Things. She Had Never Done That Before. The Trust, So Sudden And Yet So Complete, And The Intimacy, Frightened Her.. But Now She Could Think Only Of All The Things She Yet Wanted To Tell Him, Wanted To Do With Him.

I Write From Real Life. I Am An Unrepentant Eavesdropper And A Collector Of Stories. I Record Bits Of Overheard Dialogue.