"Igbo bu Igbo" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Keynote Speech, 7th Igbo Conference

[Music] hello good afternoon it's always a tremendous challenge to introduce a person to a group of fierce supporters for one you all know everything about her there's nothing I can tell you that you don't already know and for two you are all begging whatever gods you served I will stop talking and sit down so you can come talk to hear from the person you came to see but we all know that protocols must be observed and it's such an honor to be a praise singer when I was about 10 growing up in the u.s. I remember hearing a song by a white American band and I had a lyric it's another day in Nigeria the children begged for bread I remember going to my mother indignant saying these white people have made a song and they put Nigeria but they really meant Ethiopia I've never been any Nigerian children begging for bread my mother didn't correct me decades later I remember reading Purple Hibiscus in one fever sitting I have always been a voracious reader but this this was different who is this I thought as I read I remembered the Roberta Flack song the lyric strumming my pain with his fingers singing my life with his song killing me softly with his song that's what that book did for me I waited impatiently for her next book when half of the Yellow Sun came out I bought it immediately and it broke my heart by then I'd learned a little bit more about those children begging for bread those children were my people I learned that my paternal grandfather was killed during the asada massacre the story that I was reading was so deeply mine I'd never felt so seen in all of them by then thousands of books that I have read I bought copies for everybody I knew I bought if you were friends with me during that three-year period you got that book if you were getting married if you was your birthday whatever celebration you got that book but most importantly I gave it to my mother I was able to have a conversation with her that we couldn't have when I was 10 or even after my parents generation had born so much in silence since then miss adityas influence has only grown larger her work has been translated into over 30 languages Purple Hibiscus won the Commonwealth writers prize and half of a Yellow Sun one the orange prize her TED talks on the danger of a single story story became the most watched TED talk ever her talk we should all be feminists is both a socio-political and pop cultural phenomenon and her brilliant and always incisive commentary can be relied upon to elegantly clap back and up end assumptions about everything from motherhood to depression to toxic masculinity her voice is a voice of a generation has become truly global it is my great honor and my great privilege to introduce to you the person we came to see this human mind then Ghazi IDC [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] dialogue Adela Nene thank you thank you thank you for that wonderful wonderful introduction I want to say thank you to everyone who's involved with this conference but particularly to two remarkable women who is muniqi and Yvonne chairman bonito wealth and I know it hasn't been easy just that you would continue to do this year two years truly remarkable and and you proved what we know that evil women add them Bongo and so the last housekeeping thing I want to say is but I want to show you my trousers and I want to let you know that it is made from our puede by a Nigerian designer called Emmy Cosby sources it from afterwards but it's it's a quite say it's traditionally by material it's it's made in Abba and it just goes to show that we know okay so some years ago there was a bill in the Nigerian Senate it was spearheaded by the Senate Committee on women and youth and it wanted to pass a law that would criminalize what was called indecent dressing and this law was targeted at women and we were told that it was supposed to preserve our true African culture we were also told that immorality had become widespread because women have become westernized and we're no longer behaving as women did before colonization there were pictures and newspapers of women who were dressed in decently and they were wearing short skirts low-cut tops that showed a bit of cleavage so I went looking for pictures of women before colonization I wanted to find I wanted to find pictures of women who showed a true African culture and so when I found them I realized that these women were wearing skirts that were not just mini there were micro micro mini and the breasts were bare and so the irony of course is that women in most parts of southern Nigeria were close to naked before colonization so a challenge is this notion that somehow descent dressing is a way of returning to our real cultural values I've often been told by both men and women that what I stand for is not real African culture which is to say that I have often been told different versions of in the name of culture shuttle many other African women have experienced in some way or the other this invocation of culture as a silence in - and often the things that women are told are not our culture things that benefit women that make them happy that make them feel fully like themselves and so culture I think some of my sister so culture for me has become a contested and contentious award and this is one of the reasons why I think history is very important if appeals to the Past have been used as effective silencing tools then appeals to the past can also be used as effective D silence in tools one day not long ago a middle-aged man came to visit my father after he left my father told me that this man was a twin and that he and his brother were the first twins in our hometown of our bath who had not been killed for being born twins I remember being surprised because I had not realized that the ebo tradition of killing twins of taking them to the forest the minute they are born and leaving them there to die had ended so relatively recently we make culture and we can remake culture culture changes when people decide to change it in our popular imagination culture is something post aesthetic that has endured for hundreds of years but much of what we call culture is actually really recent I am from ABBA energy coke our local government area of Anambra State which is to say that my father is from there now that that I'm a mother I'm increasingly resentful of this practice of a child's identity being completely defined by the father but since we cannot change things with respectively I am from ABBA my mother is from Wenatchee also in another state my family went to a bar often when I was growing up Christmas and Easter to visit my grandmother who would then take us to go visit her neighbors and to show of her grandchildren I loved going to ABBA I loved listening to the old people talk I loved to watch and learn I loved to ask questions and when I asked questions I always ask for detail for visual detail when I asked about my great-grandmother for example I often asked how did she look what did she wear what was her hair like and I really wish that Nollywood producers would do the same a lot of them a lot a lot of their representations of evil culture is not only spectacularly inaccurate but really close to comical so there's anybody involved in Nollywood please you know hope to the village and ask the real questions or even just look at archives and see pictures of what people were like before I mean there's just no need for madama daddy come on and I and I also wish I also wish that we would stop destroying the physical remnants of our past what's going on all across evil land in the name of a certain kind of Pentecostal Christianity is that we're destroying our past trees are being destroyed shrines are being destroyed now you don't have to like it you don't have to go through it but leave it alone it is our history I remember going to talk to you some years ago and and and went and and played tourist and went to see the the shrines and paid money to see their shrines and and all of it was interesting but I left feeling a little sad because I thought this is exactly what we have in my hometown and I'm actually paying money to the Japanese to look at theirs perhaps perhaps one way to preserve the little that has left in II Buland is by appealing to that famed evil entrepreneurial spirits so if we explain to people people that we can turn these things into tourist attractions for which people will pay money they might in fact stop destroying them years ago my father was telling me about his paternal grandmother who Minnie and I am said to be Oh Minnie come back and he said he remembers when she died and how her body was wrapped up and then carried to her own hometown to be buried and I was shocked by this I mean how my hometown I mean where she was born I was struck by this she wasn't buried in her husband's hometown I asked my father my father said no women were not buried in their husbands homes they were buried in their birth homes I found this very interesting in every family there is a child who is interested in the story of who they are in my family I am that child I wanted to know not only who we are but how we came to be who we are and that is why in 2007 after I had published my second novel half of the Yellow Sun I decided to go back to school to learn about African history my interest was in pre-colonial West Africa and of course particularly in will and it was a curiosity born of love I wanted to know my history in order to better know myself so I went to Yale and I want to start by talking about what what I learned I yield to first of all talk about how when I I would tell people that I was going back to school to learn about history and I was going to you which is a university in America that would often be a very stupid laughs and they would say how can you be going abroad to learn about seewer culture and I I often felt defensive and then I would have to go into a long story about how the best African archives are at you and also to point out that because our history is oral and because colonialism represented a violent amendable Greek in the transmission of this oral history the generation that went to school that became Christian and since Christianity and an education came hand in hand were now mostly cut off from the traditional ways of doing and remembering and so it's it's a little ironic that most of the documentaries of our past are not evil people that many of the archives that I looked at I yield were products of walk that we're done by colonial actors and so of course reading them one has to read them keeping that in mind and knowing that they too had their own agendas but they're interesting things that such as photographs not lie and so when the British missionaries came to me Moreland British women did not have property rights which is women were in fact property themselves and were supposed to be at home protected not seen as autonomous beings who could make decisions about their own lives in more women on the other hand were traders and they could own property and this was understandably alarming to many of the British and I think it explains many of the changes that followed in evil and so I yell I learned about the amo in our nature there are more of us was often translated as Queen but really the amo was neither the wife nor the relative of the king she was a person who had won a position that was contested and this position was open to any woman who had acquired wealth from trading at Yale I learned that women were the exclusive traders in our nature and they all played a central role in the markets no trading could begin until she had arrived and seated herself in a special seat and so in my imagination I didn't quite get to see a picture of a normal but my imagination and imagine this is a round woman who would sweep into the market and take a seat and then and then pontificate so everyone but how things should be done I think we need more of those in the markets and on each other I'd yield I learned I learned about the married women's associations how these associates associations punished women who had been found guilty of various crimes also how the judge disputes between men and women and if the men were found to be at fault these women's groups punished the man and used a system known as in order walking which is sitting on a man and I'm going to read a bit from a from the notes of one of the British observers who says that sitting on a man in order McKee involved gathering at his compound sometimes late at night dancing singing scurrilous songs which details the woman's grievances against him and often called his manhood into question banging on his heart with the pestles that the women used for pounding yams and perhaps demolishing his heart or plastering it with mud the man I like what this is the objective recording of an Englishman I learned about the SWAT yield I learned about that picture in nature of selecting world Chiefs in II Buland so in the southern village of a he'd say for example an influential village elder was asked by a British officer to bring somebody who would be the word chief and and you know in that sort of clever slavery of evil people this elderly man brought his slave because he thought he was outsmarting the British and before he knew it his slave had become enormous ly powerful as the world chief and these weren't Chiefs were invested with so much power that the traditional rural methods in Ibelin were outlawed the women's associations for example could no longer sit on a man so sitting on a man went from being a valid way of dispensing justice to becoming a punishable crime women were not chosen as warrant chiefs women were not members of the native courts women were not court clerks of these recruits or interpreters at Yale I came across very interesting little quotes and I want to share one of them with you British observer who's name was border rights that he bore women traverse the country to collect palm oil and ivory and sometimes their exchanges display surprising intelligence so now if we can look past borders unfortunate ETF see what we learn from it is that women were economic decision makers in pre-colonial in Buland women win positions to acquire well most of the Republican villages in the interior of Ebru land were agricultural and the major economic activity of women was farming and also trading farming was a gendered activity so the yam which was considered the king of the crops was was farmed by men and then the women did the cassava the vegetables Coco yarns and so while the symbolic importance of women's crops was not higher than that of men the practical importance was because women drew much of what was actually eaten so that gave them power to decide who got to eat and who didn't at Yale I learned that there were many beautiful myths about evil origins but one of them is associated with the town of no be the the evil myth was that was that that it associated hard walk with the female gender and that praise of women depended on their industriousness and the economic achievements at Yale I learned that the colonial governments native authorities declare that women could not all no inherit land according to native custom and this is native custom that was in fact invented by the British because we all know that actually before the British came women could own property and I think that this decision was clearly influenced by that 19th century European ideas of citizenship in which a citizen was a property owning man also as a result Land Registration in in Poland in colonial times could only be done in the name of men so you had wealthy women who then registered their lands under the names of their sons or husbands and these sons and husbands then gained the titles to those lands and we all know I think that many of the stories did not end up well at Yale I learned about a deep way marriage in which a woman would choose to have children with a man and the children will be counted as part of her family rather than part of his this situation benefited the woman because children much valued in society would belong to her kin group eg B marriages were very common and we're not perceived as outside the norm but rather as an evil alternative that a woman had at Yale I learned about woman woman marriage in which a woman would become male and Mary wives these wives would take lovers and give birth to children who would be part of the woman husbands kill group and sometimes when I brought this up with mostly evil men the response the first responses but they were not gay but how do we know we know that it was a woman woman marriage they lived in the same cloud how do we know we know that female we know that human love and human connection happens despite gender so how do we know but what we do know is that women in it will and married women at Yale I learned about my arirang which is a swift divorce in which a woman simply left her father's home and when her husband's woman went to a new man's home and I learned about a jewelry where a girl who was betrothed would often visit her husband-to-be and his family and the understanding was that things happened when she visited him and I also learned at you that all of these things were banned because the colonial government considered them immoral did we were so I'm not trying to suggest that men and women were equal in pre-colonial it will land because they were not men as a group still had more power but what I am saying the power was more diffused that women had more rules more access to power and that gender was not as rigidly defined as it is now history can inspire learning about evil women before colonialism I was inspired because I now knew that my feminism my discomfort with injustice based on gender my discomfort with rigid ideas of what a woman should and should not be until did not come from reading any western book it was in my cultural DNA history and lights and me it also led me to make my own conclusions such as that every EBU culture is amore which is to say that our eyes I like to put it it will be more as I read of the similarities between the cultural practices of emo peoples those around the niger those to the south those to the north I came to see that the contemporary distinctions we make today are not cultural identities they are political identities and political identities especially those based on denial of cultural roots and ties can often be limiting so what today we call Delta move for example it's a political identity it's not a cultural identity it will be boom I am increasingly interested in cultural identities perhaps because of my deep disappointment in our political leadership but even those who believe in a political identity as being sort of the paramount thing must realize that a cultural identity will give rise to a more organic more wholesome and therefore more resilient political identity which is in other words is my way of saying oh boy let us unite a boy in Delta I believe as a boy named no gwinin it's time for us to unite I do not believe that people should be excluded from a cultural identity into which they have been born just because they do not speak the language which is really a false that is their parents rather than theirs [Applause] but I do believe that language matters when I had my daughter I made the conscious decision to speak only evil to her she is now two and a half and she speaks evil I also love the English language and sometimes I miss not speaking it to her this young age but I know that she's growing up in a world that is not steeped anymore and even when we're back in Nigeria her relatives in Nigeria don't speak you me auntie why I must speak English and I know and I know that she will learn English and that I can speak both languages to her when she is older but what I'm always struck by is the surprise that people show evil people in particular sometimes shock when they realize that my child speaks evil why I grew up speaking both languages quite easily there are evil parents who when asked why they don't speak Hebrew to their children they say it will confuse them and then they go on promptly to sign up their children for French lessons so so so it is not a question of a second language confusing the child it is not a question of whether a child can learn to speak evil it is a question of how much value we give our language and by extension our history our culture our identity when did our language become something to be ashamed of some people [Applause] some people have said that Evo has no global power or as one parent puts it to me on where a B G where G this is not true it was speaking opens you up to a new way of seeing the wall because language involved your so closely intertwined Eber also happens to be a particularly beautiful and wise language but even if it wasn't even if it wasn't the simple fact of being bilingual benefits a child's intellectual development I think it is a gifts that a parent can give a child and it cannot do any harm to the child but here I do not mean it was speaking as performance I don't mean word child says one word in EBU and we applaud or when evil parents both of them it will speak in talk about wanting to find evil classes for their children why don't you just speak people to them in everyday conversation why don't we normalize it why don't we make it ordinary language matters because language is the continue to culture all over ball and the practice of speaking Hebrew is in decline even in the villages now one of the centrum would save some people life as we know is the color modes the kilometer best only anymore accordian Louisville so if we lose the language of EBU then what becomes of this part of our culture and speaking of the color not I've always found it absurd that if there is any meal present in a gathering of women even if that male is two years old and they want to bless the colon of it to bring out the little child the colon odd is a small knot and quite bitter but its symbolism is enormous it is the symbol of blessing of goodwill of prestige and so it matters I was once told a story by an academic in the US whose father is a titled evil man an elderly titled man and who was father he had many daughters and maybe this is why he was a bit more sensitive to these things but at gatherings when they would bring the : note and sometimes you know they go around showing the : note and they all only show the color nuts men but this titled elderly man will show it to every adult in the room men and women and at first the men were scandalized but because this man was elderly he was respected he was titled they kind of went along with it but what's interesting that this academic is telling me is that now there are few other men in the village who do that who go around showing the color not not just the men but to women as well as some years ago in in my hometown not bad they had they organized a reception for me and one of the things that moved me the most was that all the traders close their shops to come to the reception and we all know how evil people are about their shops now now afterwards and an old man came up to congratulate me and shoot me in the train bell on our meter and so this is sort of for the non ebu here this is the sort of traditional greeting that again it's supposed to be only for men and I remember being thrilled when he did that it was like being allowed into this hallowed wonderful special secret room but it also made me think of the unfairness of it but one group of people are allowed into this special secret room merely by being born and then the other group have to achieve something remarkable in order to be allowed in what if we change this and made it only by achievement and I remember a friend telling me then you're now like you man now this friend and you know this friend did not understand why I did not want to be considered like a man well for one because I was not more like a man but also because I was a woman and I had achieved something and I still remained a woman the point was that maleness should not be aspirational it was not a compliment to me to be told that I was now like a man and my friend did not understand either why it was not for me about me being allowed in as an exception but about women as a group not being excluded but in the end to know where you come from to know how you came to be from where you come from it's truly a great gift some people don't have it we're fortunate to have it and I think we need to appreciate it more history is storytelling all history storytelling is the history we learn in school about you know the English kings for example is all storytelling actually the case of the English kings I think it's 3/4 myth and 1/4 facts but but even for histories that are documented that are not primarily oral like ours there are always gaps and it is people who fill in those gaps who through storytelling creates history we evil people need to create and recreate our history this time not in the service of colonialism but in the service of our dignity [Applause]

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Length: 30min 28sec (1828 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 02 2018