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 stu… - Nwando Achebe

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.

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.

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

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.