Nwando Achebe Quotes

None ever did and in fact, I haven’t seen it in my life time, but my father talked about this, telling a story about a man who committed suicide after this thing happened to him.

The Igbo people have a saying that a child who is carried on the back does not realize that walking is a painful activity

It has everything to do with the nature of the culture. The areas you talked about are centralised societies which also have centralised structures that allow individuals to rise. In Igboland, we have egalitarian society; it is not a centralised society.

My parents want us to live the best way we possibly can and that is what I have been doing in terms of my education. I am doing the things I want to do. Again, it is not just my father’s achievements; my mother was also one of the senior professors in Nigeria from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. So, I have two extremely phenomenal role models who have brought us up to be the best of what we can be.

I want to write the story of my people especially women. That story has not been written. Women have been silenced in historical study. If you pick up a book, if women were mentioned at all, they were mentioned in footnotes. So, I want to change that and write a story that other women can pick up and be proud of.

For me to be a creative writer? That is not my calling. I write only history books because that is my calling.

I try to use whatever voice I do have to speak out against injustices, and that’s what I hope I continue to do in this part of my career. When I see bad things happening, I can’t just pretend I didn’t see them. I want to use my voice for good

It is the worst abomination. That is the strategy women used to punish the colonial government during the Women’s War of 1929. They also used nudity as protest. We know from the colonial document that at a particular point when soldiers were trying to open fire on women, women lifted their skirts and the soldiers dropped their guns because you could not view the nakedness of your own mother and survive.

So, the Igbo believe in a very egalitarian system where no one is superior to the other but it is leadership in the group. So, where women express power in Igbolandis in the group, Otu Umu Ada. They are the group of daughters and one of the strongest and powerful groups of women and it is a political organisation.

That is called family planning. (Laugh) We don’t have the mechanism over there (US) that women in Nigeria have in terms of helping them in house work. You find out that a lot of professional women there don’t have as many children as the Nigerian women.

If the aggrieved woman let out a cry of grievance, once women hear it, they know that things are not good. All women will then gather, dress in war gear. They smear their bodies with ashes and cover their bodies with palm fronds.

So, nudity at protest is an abomination. That is the way women have evolved strategies on the pre-colonial period, through the colonial period and after colonialism.

But if you look back to the pre-colonial period, women were very active. It is something that slowly we have to come out of . We have not gotten there yet.

In Igboland, there is a proverb that says: Igbo enwe eze which means Igbo have no king. We do not believe in kings. If you want to be a king, you can be in your mother’s backyard; don’t think you can lord it over us.

Women generally have lost a lot of powers during the colonial period. You find out that what the British system did during the colonial period was to introduce a male-central system that pushed women to the background.