Nwando Achebe Quotes

I want to do it; 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All of us have accomplished what we can in our unique fields. So, there is no push in my family to be like my father. Everybody is like an individual and you follow your own calling.

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.

Honestly speaking, I don't want to publish another book or article that does not have an advocacy purpose to it. I want to use my work to potentially change lives.

For me, growing up when I was young, I thought everybody’s father was famous because that was my norm. But my father still writes with long hand and whenever I was with him, I type his notes and in that way you might say I was helpful. But now, it is a different kind of relationship. We talk about issues now that we are older.

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

Sitting on a man is the most extreme sanction that Igbo women have when they want to punish a man. For example: if a man continues to ill-treat a woman, the women groups Otu Umu Ada, Otu Ndi ama Ala, the title societies, the market women, the woman can go to one of these groups to report him and there, they will decide which punishment to mete out on him. They can decide to boycott their matrimonial duties or sit on the man. In one village, the women asked the men to clear the path to a stream and the men refused. The women got together and declared a boycott. They boycotted cooking, so, men could not eat for few days. They went to their mothers’ houses and their mothers told them they were not cooking, the same with their wives. Again, sitting on a man is the most extreme sanction; it only happened if other sanctions have failed.