Nwando Achebe Quotes

I have written and published two books, the first: Farmers, Traders, Warriors, and Kings published by Heinmann ; the second book is called the Female King of Colonial Nigeria and other numerous journals and articles and chapters but my area is women history.

Advocacy work is hard, and at times, it is thankless and even dangerous. But, it is the work that I choose to do - to use my voice and my scholarship to attempt to make a difference

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.

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

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.

If you want to be an ally, you have to listen and truly hear what it is that African people are saying. We are equal partners. It is not one group dictating the way the relationship should be. It is a partnership where we listen to each other and truly hear each other. We can learn from each other, but it has to be an equal relationship.

In fact, the men don’t have Supreme Court of arbitration. What we have is supreme court of Umu Ada. So, if men have an issue in Igbo land, they can go to their lower courts, if not , they must appeal to the women in the Otu Umu Ada court. The women in Igbo land collectively have a lot of power. That is why we begin to talk about the Women War in 1929. It was not a riot; it was a war by women. It was the colonial government that called it a riot.

It goes back to childhood. My father like I said earlier, he’s just a wonderful dad to me. When I was growing up, I didn’t know he was famous, but I could count on my father. Anytime I needed him, he was always there for me. He is a very present father. When I was little, he was the one who would wake me up at nights, take me to the bathroom so that I don’t wet the bed.

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

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.

Because I wanted to see myself in writing the history of the African woman. I started off as a Theatre major in my first degree. (Theatre, Music and dance) and after that, I decided to do documentary and film making. I wanted to do the kind of documentary that tells our story and in order to do that, I felt that I needed to do history, although I didn’t like history. I didn’t have a good history teacher, but when I went to University of California, where I did my Masters and PhD, I met a professor who later became my mentor who turned me around. He told history as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. A story that I could relate to and I remember. I looked at him and said this is exactly what I want to do.

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.

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.

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.

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.