My mum is a great woman. She is like a mother to many Hausa movie stars and she is the best thing that has happened to me. We are best of friends and there is nothing I don’t tell her about me.

My mother had always believed in my performance skills and she had always been encouraging. So somehow, I felt like it connected me to her. Like she was watching me from the Heavens above, cheering me on.

My mum was a strong woman but she didn’t really understand what the sport is all about. She was there for me whenever she can and whatever she could do for me, she tried her best.

Her trust makes me faithful, her belief makes me good.

Yes. Some people feel me and my mother are unhealthily close. I look like my father, but I am my mother; like, this is her character! She is my best friend. She is the best antidote. By the time I leave at 9:30, I feel like I’m Superwoman.

My mother inspires me because my mother never gives up

I miss everything about her. My mum was my best friend.

My mother and I have this really strangely close relationship. No other relationship can come close to it. It's frightening. Even when I'm in a relationship with a man, I compare it to my relationship with my mother. She is a friend, but she is still a mother, and everything a mother needs to be, she is. She is really observing and caring and doesn't want anything but giving because it's her joy. Even when I can't bear anybody, not even myself, she 's like the sun coming up to me. She dedicated all her life to me. Sometimes I feel that she gave her life to me and now it's my job to maybe take her somewhere. But what is it she doesn't know? She knows things I couldn't begin to know. Yet she is so fresh with ideas which I already take for granted. She sometimes wakes me up and says, 'Don't you see?' and she makes me see and feel things again. Nobody, not my father, not anybody, has done that for me, except movies.

She’s my role model, my idol, my legend. She taught me to be a strong, independent woman. I grew up watching how hard she worked. She made me realise that if you want something in this life you have to work hard at it. You’ve got to make the effort. Because of her I was never afraid of hardship. After witnessing all the hardship my mum had been through for us, I was more determined to make it so I could give her a better life. (~2015)

I watched my mother do what she did best, and realized there would never be a way to cut myself from her entirely. No matter how strong or weak I was, she was a part of me, as crucial as my own heart. I would never be strong enough, in all my life, to do without her.

As a woman, I was very much influenced by the Japanese culture. My saving grace is that my mother was an extremely strong woman, a person in her own right; she took no guff from anybody, including white people, and I think that helps…

A mother is the truest friend we have, when trials heavy and sudden fall upon us; when adversity takes the place of prosperity; when friends desert us; when trouble thickens around us, still will she cling to us, and endeavor by her kind precepts and counsels to dissipate the clouds of darkness, and cause peace to return to our hearts.

And you mother still close to me,

I had a very strong mother and I learned from both my parents’ intellectual rigour, to have the courage of my convictions and to speak the truth.