The AWU later recorded membership of some 20,000 local women, later going national as the Nigerian Women’s Union. His brushes with the authorities earned him frequent detentions and beatings. Sozaboy is written in "rotten English" – a mixture of Nigerian pidgin and idiomatic English – from the viewpoint of a naive young recruit who discovers the horror of war. If I ever give up that fight, I will be giving up on myself.”. Kuti was a blunt supporter of human rights, and many of his songs are direct attacks against dictatorships, specifically the military governments of Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s. They are extremely wealthy, most have private jets and can afford all kinds of luxuries. The phrase made it onto Dior t-shirts (a collaboration with Adichie), a Beyoncé song, and has been adapted into a book of the same title. It's either a number "1" or "0" Her other children Beko and Olikoye Ransome-Kuti, would all go on to play important roles in education, health care, and political activism. After seeing the obstacles Nigerians must go through to succeed in America and Britain, he resolves to stay in Nigeria. Achebe also openly supported the secessionist Biafra movement and even took a position as head of the Biafra Broadcasting Service at great risk to his life and career. Back in 2017, she started an online petition to end police extortion and exploitation after some Nigerian policemen invaded her home and accused her and her boyfriend of being cultists, a crime which carries a five-year jail term. Julius, the fictional narrator of Cole's beautiful novel, has flashbacks to his Nigerian childhood as he wanders around Manhattan. ''Each rolled out tonnes of papers or promises only to settle down to the business, not of governance, but of serious looting, brigandage, perversion of values, ethnic politicisation, insensitivity, spurious economic and financial maladjustments, useless task forces.''. The memories float to the surface of his consciousness; they are part of his complex identity. True, but so many of Nigeria's brightest and best now live abroad, or at least with one foot abroad, so it's inevitable that more and more "writing about Nigeria" is from the diaspora and reflects its place in the wider world. Her "unglamorous, godforsaken motherland" will always be a place that angers and frustrates her but on her intrepid travels she also finds much to love. So he set about writing a tragic tale: of how a vulnerable society, and a flawed man, could not cope with the military superiority and crushing arrogance of the white invaders. Gani Fawehinmi, a Lagos attorney and opposition leader, is welcomed by demonstrators during a pro-democracy rally on Friday, June 12, 1998, in Lagos, Nigeria. Her first novel Purple Hibiscus, the coming-of-age story of Kambili, a 15-year-old whose family is wealthy and well respected but who is terrorised by her fanatically religious father, won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. There are few women in Nigerian history who are as commanding or accomplished as Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti. He wrote this caustic booklet in the early 80s, but it still rings true. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical "I just knew I wanted to find them at the very least, so that I wouldn't be by myself, because I felt really lonely.". Nigerian author Chinua Achebe holds press conference following his appointment as Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) on Jan. 7, 1999. The characters are played by Baaj Adebule, Ayoola Ayoola, Efa Iwara, and Daniel Effiong. It began when the Igbo people of the east formed the doomed breakaway state of Biafra, and ended more than a million deaths later. He gets his come-uppance, and we learn much about Nigeria along the way. Nigeria has had several coups, a civil war, pogroms, ethnic clashes, and the country is still dealing with corruption and a 10-year battle with the terrorist organisation, Boko Haram. In honour of Nigeria’s 60th Independence anniversary, here are 10 activists in Nigerian history whose impact on society is the very representation of Nigerian resilience: Nigerian playwright and poet Wole Soyinka, recipient of the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature, listens during award ceremonies for the W.E.B. Achebe died after a short illness in March 2013 in Boston, United States. Obinze becomes wealthy and falls into a superficial marriage with Kosi, but never falls out of love with Ifemelu. "Nigeria is not a great country", he writes. Fawehinmi sought to re-open the Dele Giwa case, and called on the present federal attorney general to be removed for his indifference to corruption; all from his sick bed. Please contact us at contact@globalcitizen.org if you would like to re-activate your account. Most notable of these was the still unsolved case of Dele Giwa, a magazine editor killed by a parcel bomb in 1986. As a 33-year old graduate in 1967, he was imprisoned by the Nigerian military government for 22 months for speaking out against the Nigerian civil war; and in 1994, he fled the country after the dictatorship in power charged him with treason for criticising the military junta. His passport was confiscated several times, and on one occasion his books were seized and his library set on fire. In his speech, then prime minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa said: "When this day in October 1960 was chosen for our Independence, it seemed that we were destined to move with quiet dignity to our place on the world stage.”, “Recent events have changed the scene beyond recognition, so that we found ourselves today being tested to the utmost,” he continued. No one can understand Nigeria today without some knowledge of those events, and John de St Jorre – a British journalist who covered the war for the Observer – wrote a brilliant account soon afterwards: a readable and scrupulously fair history of a conflict that aroused great passions across Africa and in Britain. You can describe parts of me, but who I am — and what I need — is something I have to find out myself.”. “Our community has become a lifeline. Why ruin a good thing? Du Bois Medal on the campus of Harvard University, in Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 2, 2013. Touka Kirishima - Tokyo Ghoul "You don't have to agree but it is her story, she can say it.". The hashtag #BringBackOurGirls trended across multiple platforms worldwide and it sparked physical protests in various countries. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his masterpiece, is the most widely read book in modern African literature. Its real-life hero, Isaac Fadoyebo, was only a teenager when the British took him, and tens of thousands like him – "cannon-fodder" one British officer candidly told me – from west Africa to the jungles of Burma to fight the Japanese in the second world war. He was also a social commentator, and often criticised Africans (especially the upper class) for betraying traditional African culture. Cunliffe-Jones is a British journalist who lived in Nigeria during the transition from military to civilian rule at the end of the 90s. Bring Back Our Girls activist Aisha Yesufu speaks during an interview in Abuja, Nigeria, Oct. 14, 2016. Howards End study guide contains a biography of E.M. Forster, literature essays, a complete e-text, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis. Noo's family history gives her an unusual take on Nigeria; she's both intimate with the country and an outsider. The campaign was one of the biggest Nigeria has ever seen and attracted global attention from people like Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a host of celebrities. Since his death in 1997, Kuti’s legacy lives on and has birthed a new generation of activists who idolise his resilience in fighting the tyranny of the system. igeria has a terrible image – as a land of email scammers, obscene corruption and religious bigotry and violence – but the stereotypes only tell part of a more complex, and often more attractive, truth. Do you know what God thinks of money? His poems, books, and other works such as his long-running satirical TV series Basi & Co simply told the story of Nigerians being Nigerians. Through his work as a writer and as an educator (he lectured at more than 10 universities in his career), Achebe remained a resilient champion of the ordinary person and equality in Nigerian society. For everybody.”. Saro-Wiwa spoke out against the Nigerian military regime and the Anglo-Dutch petroleum company Shell for causing environmental damage to the land of the Ogoni people in his native Rivers State. “Once we begin to see women as humans with as much right to occupy spaces as men. He believed in media freedom, contributed avidly to newspapers, and often took on journalists’ cases. Bestselling author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Howard County Library System, HCLS, Miller Branch in Ellicott City, Maryland. The documentary tells the story of the inhabitants of Tarkwa Bay and the survival and struggles of their women as they faced eviction from government authorities. Sign in to start taking action. In both instances, Soyinka continued to criticise the undemocratic governments of the day and call out the oppression of Nigerians. But the country was already part of his family folklore; his grandfather had been a colonial official there for 30 years, and helped write the 1960 independence constitution. In 2014, after 300 girls were kidnapped from a secondary school in Northeast Nigeria by the terrorist Boko Haram group, Yesufu, alongside Oby Ezekwesili, launched the Bring Back Our Girls (BBOG) campaign to demand the release of the girls. 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