• An image showing the outline of women in some of their diversities.
    Thoughts

    Miss, Ms., Mrs.

    When I was in secondary school, majority of my classmates were born in either 1993, 1994, or 1995. When I thought about that a few days ago, I thought, “Would you look at that? The new class, if you may, of the third decade of life.” Now, I started thinking about all of these because of the video of a Chinese woman I watched on X on the precipice of saying goodbye to another year. In China, she said, if you’re a woman, single, and over 30, you are called a “left-over woman” in Mandarin. In Cantonese, they have a few choice phrases including, “orange at the bottom of the…

  • Thoughts

    When is a Body deserving of having Violence visited upon it?

    I had a spirited conversation (read: argument) with my driving instructor and another student yesterday. No, it wasn’t about my reverse technique (which is atrocious, by the way. Wish me luck next class). What was it about, then? We were on the road doing a test-run when he suddenly blurted about a mad girl, followed quickly by a tirade of words. I was confused; “did something happen?” “Ahn ahn, didn’t you see that girl we just passed that her whole belly is outside and her short is barely covering anything?” I didn’t. I had been minding my business. So, I said, “Oh, I didn’t.” It would have ended there, but…

  • Thoughts

    DRENCHED IN CONFUSION THIS NEW YEAR?

    Yesterday, I put up a question on my Instagram Story, asking people to share their 2020 ask in one word. My word was ‘Courage’; I am asking the universe for an abundance of it. When the answers came back, I noticed that for a lot of people, ‘Clarity’ is their word for the year. Hours ago, I had a conversation about how dreams become heavier the older we become. How, if we’re not careful, they lose that shine youth possesses in abundance and begin to take on a dull hue that threatens one’s sanity. The price for failure becomes steeper. I studied Microbiology at the University. It was a course…

  • Thoughts

    Notes from IdeaCon Enugu

    I absolutely enjoyed Enugu, and my 3 day stint in the city…but I almost didn’t go. IdeaCon is short for Idea Conference, our community of thinkers and talkers, that gives us a platform to engage young people and their ideas, question old truths, examine new ones, and build human capacity in a way that uplifts not only the individual, but also adds up to national development. It was an idea that was birthed through a Facebook question in 2016. Now, IdeaCon has held physical conferences in Abuja, Lagos and Enugu. Next month – September – the IdeaCon train will move along to Kaduna State and later in November, it will…

  • Thoughts

    Love Yours

    It’s hard, isn’t it, to truly love yourself in a world that is so fixated on your body parts, the way you should look, talk, walk, dress. In a world that is bent on defining you. The beauty industry is worth billions of dollars globally, a lot of it built on our insecurities with one or more parts of our body. They set up a standard and say “look, this is what you should aspire to.” You say “what nonsense! I’m not about that life.” But then these messages don’t stop; they creep up on you until one day, you wake up and everything about your body is exactly everything…

  • Thoughts

    What Do We Do With Different

    The Armenian Genocide began in 1915, during World War 1, when the Armenians were murdered and displaced from their cities. At the final lap of this atrocity in 1922, it was reported that between 700,000 and 1.5 million Armenians were murdered. In the space of over a decade from 1933 when the Nazis came to power in Germany, over 6 million Jews and 6 million non-Jews – Blacks, Roma, Slavic groups – were killed during the holocaust. And barely 24 years ago, the world bore witness to the Rwandan Genocide, which took place between April and July of 1994. The death toll is put at between 500,000 to 1 million…