There Are Many Different Ways To Be

The Problem With Gender Is That It Prescribes How We Should Be Rather Than Recognizing How We Are. Imagine How Much Happier We Would Be, How Much Freer To Be Our True Individual Selves, If We Didn't Have The Weight Of Gender Expectations.

It Is Easy To Romanticize Poverty, To See Poor People As Inherently Lacking Agency And Will. It Is Easy To Strip Them Of Human Dignity, To Reduce Them To Objects Of Pity. This Has Never Been Clearer Than In The View Of Africa From The American Media, In Which We Are Shown Poverty And Conflicts Without Any Context.

Is Love This Misguided Need To Have You Beside Me Most Of The Time? Is Love This Safety I Feel In Our Silences? Is It This Belonging, This Completeness?

The Real Tragedy Of Our Postcolonial World Is Not That The Majority Of People Had No Say In Whether Or Not They Wanted This New World; Rather, It Is That The Majority Have Not Been Given The Tools To Negotiate This New World.

If I Had Not Grown Up In Nigeria- And If All I Knew Of Africa Were Of Popular Images- I Too Would Think That Africa Was A Place Of Beautiful Landscapes, Beautiful Animals And Incomprehensible People Fighting Sensless Wars, Dying Of Poverty And Aids- Unable To Speak For Themselves And Waiting To Be Saved By A Kind White Foreigner.