Flora Nwapa: Finding the erased naughty girl within the African human rights system

‘They say Lagos men do not just chase women, they snatch them…This is Lagos. Lagos is different from home. Lagos is big. You must be careful here. You are a mere child. Lagos men are too deep for you. Don’t think you are cleve. You are not. You can never be cleverer than a Lagos man. I am older than you are, so take my advise’

-An excerpt from ‘This is Lagos’ by Flora Nwapa 

in Daughters of Africa(1992)

My name is Nnanna Ikpo. I am a Nigerian lawyer and storyteller. My research interrogates the place of narrative fiction and story telling as tools for human right advocacy, the teaching and learning of law. Particularly, the human rights of sexual and gender minorities in Africa.

Stories matter. Stories are how we engage with the world and with each other. Stories are how we question the world, disrupt and reconstruct it. The stories of Flora Nwapa and the stories that she told are some of those that have reconstructed the world. Flora Nwapa’s stories can still do more ‘damage’ if brought into the right spaces and unpacked in the context of expedient things.

Flora Nwapa, Nigerian author and publisher

Flora Nwapa is quite synonymous with, to put it safely, cultural feminism. At a time when only a few where she was could put a word to it. After Deh Onyeka told me about his aunt, I asked my mum about her.

‘Hmmm’, ‘Flora’, my mum said, ‘Flora kpakwara ike o. Mgbe umu nwanyi bu umu nwanyi. Mgbe unu nmunyi ne me ihe. Owuro kita. Onye puta okpo owe ya feminist’. My mum went on to name Flora Nwapa among the cadre of other Nigerian women such as Magaret Ekpo and Funmilayo Ransom-Kuti. The naughty girls that shook Nigeria post-independence.

Flora’s writing is steeped in her culture and the events of her time. Although she is generally considered as one of those who wrote back to negative perceptions of Africans by colonialist, she was also considered one of those who reconstructed Nigerian femaleness quite differently from what many at the time considered safe, proper, believable. She and her writings were erased from among the lot of what the world expected or thought, expects and thinks of Nigerian women.

Flora Nwapa's female characters make choices, change theirs minds, run away, steer families and make money, are influential, look men in the eye and just are. Her characters hold men by their hands, initiate running away and elope leading the way. Her female characters insist on trading and leaving it to their men. The women firmly believe that they are more effective in sustaining their families by buying and selling than cultivating the soil. Ma Flora, although the naughtiest of them all, was real, very real. Her realness has paved a way for a lot in terms of how Nigeria and the world engages with feminism. Our perceptions and expectations, the things that we allow ourselves to be shocked by.

Last year we celebrated the 15^th anniversary of the emergence of the protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (The Maputo Protocol). Feminism is a hot topic again. Yet within it, there is great difficulty in coming to terms with ‘Who is a woman?’, ‘Who is a feminist?’. I won’t join the hassle because ‘it is all politics’ like Ma Flora would say.

The women’s’ right framework has refused to come together on the continent effectively, because we insist on erasing certain types of issues and certain types of women from the core workings of things. We still erase the naughty girls: women who have sex with women, women with unconventional gender expressions, women with ambiguous chromosomal and/or physiological makeups, women who transitions into womanhood as opposed to being born, older women, women who are not the stereotype.

It was all politics. But now these politics have become unfortunate. These politics have become dangerous.

Flora Nwapa’s message was clear. Among other things, I believe that she also demanded and still demands that we make room for everyone. Representation matters, visibility of every kind of women matters and is powerful. Make room for the naughty girl, in how she lives, how she loves, works, eats, travels, dreams and what she chooses to dream about, what she chooses to stand for, provided she does not endanger anyone. Provided endangering is contextual and critically engaged with.

The stories of the naughty girls matter in conversation around the human rights of Women. Especially stories ebe ona kpa-ike. Especially stories where naughty girls are strong, where they cross the line.

‘One innocent igbo man wrote an appreciation of you...He said you are not a Feminist, not even a feminist with a small ‘f’. How those of us who knew you well had laughed. How was he to know that most of your last visits to London were funded by the Feminist movement, and that your last talk at the Feminist Bookshop in Upper Street, London, had a strong Cultural Feminist message? How was he to know that what us Africa women writers resented In the Feminist movement was the fact that the name was from the west, and that we still cherish our families, that we value most our relevant cultures?

This is why some of us claim to call it by other names: cultural feminism or feminism with a small ‘f’, some say womanism, but at the end of the road, we are all working towards the same end- the dignity of the woman.

I think you are having the last laugh over all of this. That bell-like laughter with one foot in the air and your elegantly arranged head-tie thrown backwards, saying, “Let our men believe what they like Buchi, what does it really matter? It’s all politics”’

-       An excerpt from ‘Nwanyi oma, biko nodunma’

a tribute by Dr Buchi Emecheta to Flora Nwapa in Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa: Critical and Theoretical Essays.


'If Chinua Achebe and Flora Nwapa and Emeka Ike had not written the books they did, when they did, and how they did, I would perhaps not have had the emotional courage to write my own books. Today I honour them and all the writers who came before me. I stand respectfully in their shadow'
-  An excerpt from 'Adichie, Anambra and the Core of Igbo Society' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
https://nollyculture.blogspot.com/2018/02/adichie-anambra-and-core-of-igbo-society.html

For further engagement with Floro Nwapa and her works: 

'House of Nwapa' a documentary by Onyeka Nwelue

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZT5_YeTPos

Photo sourced from: https://www.sahistory.org.za/archive/biography-flora-nwapa-emily-coolidge

The bad boy and his pink ubuntu

Good evening everyone. I feel so gifted to be here this evening, speaking to and sharing in the reality of this very important part of South Africa’s pink past, Simon Nkoli.

I also feel very gifted to connect with some of the most inspiring parts of South Africa’s pink present: Noma Pakade  and everyone else who has worked really hard to make today happen. When, I was  informed of this speaking opportunity, I leaped in my seat, while maintaining a very professional demeanour, as is expected of good boys.

But then, I am not a good boy.

My name is Nnanna. I am a firm believer in the potency of the word, written, spoken or performed. And the word Simon is so heavy with baggage. In the Bible, he was the rock, a very strong person who was one of those who championed the early church. But in South Africa, he was the fabulous rock queen,  one of those who championed the early queer rights movement. Now these two Simons are worlds apart. Ask the pope.

But their lives are very important lessons in team work. Particularly, intergenerational team work and connections.

Tonight, we are looking for the South African Simon, and in fact finding him. Trying to distill nuggets from his very godlike legacy. Most of us here are South Africans. A good number of us where gifted enough to have shared time and space with him. We should know that Simon was not a good boy either. In fact he was a very very bad boy. (look up. wink)

I may  not be certain about this. But I know him nonetheless because the queer rights movement matters in South Africa to me. I am learning to call here home. Besides work and study where I learned that Simon owned both his queerness and his blackness as inseparable struggles, the thought of such inseparability also keeps me up at night. The murkiness of identity and relationships and movements.

In the Igbo tribe, the art of personhood is a deeply complicated craft pegged in the availability of persons, as persons, to their family, culture and course. And two strips of this craft is intergenerational team work and connections. Men learn to men by mirroring available to men, women learn to women by mirroring available women, people learn to people by mirroring other people; healers learn to be healers by mirroring available healers and cultures grow by mirroring other neighbouring and available cultures. With one force binding this practice, you are deeply responsible for whoever mirrors you. You are to be held accountable for anyone who learns from you, who feeds from you, who walks with you.

In other words- Ifele onyeala na lafeh umunnaya.  

The mad man’s shame is his kinsman’s preserve.

Although my manhood was learned in this manner, my queerness took me by surprise- as is usually the case.  These are both inseparable parts of my identity. And they come with conflicts so stalling. Yet, I arrived South Africa hoping that I could learn to be queer in the best way. I believed that In Africa’s first pink country there should be opportunities for intergenerational mirroring and growth. Because here there is a word for a culture, we do not have a word for. A person is a person through another, Ubuntu.

Here in SA , I found that although, there is the constitutional pinkness, we are yet to engage with the culture of the pink ubuntu. My queer humanity is enabled by your queer humanity. And this means that in turn you are accountable for me, responsible for me.

If Simon walked in here today, he would be a lived queer man in his 60s nearing retirement unable to walk half the distance he did with his customary vigour strutting in and out of the Delmas treason trial or the first African pride. Simon is not here, and may not be walking in tonight, but there are hundreds of people who worked and walked with him, by him who are equally now retiring and going home.

The question is have they lived out the pink ubuntu intergenerationally. Or are they going to leave their shoes empty. It is true that the struggles are different today but resistance will always demand are a formidable doggedness that does not think twice about crossing the line, whatever that line is. If we are really looking for Simon tonight and finding him because we need him not because we want to honour him, then the South African pink movement has failed itself, deeply.

We need the pink ubuntu intergenerationally. We do. And how do we approach this? If it’s okay, I suggest. Be available. Be reachable. Be accessible. Take off the veil of exclusivity, you will die. You are mortal.

For the hot pink person, understand that when you connect with the  grey pink person who are in the presence of greatness. It is important that you learn, but more important that you question with respect, because she who questions never loses her way.

For the grey pink person, when you connect with the hot pink person, understand that you connect with a splint capable of being sparked to flames. And this splint may just be tomorrow’s sun. So approach with love but also respect. Be careful,  young splints can be ‘crazy’ but we need loving.

In this intergenerational pink ubuntu, there will lots of murkiness. You will cross lines from teacher, supervisor, director to friend, father, lover, soulmate or all of the above. There is a Kanga of Simon from Kenya with the quote that says ‘Black and white are not the colours of love’. It is important that we smear ourselves and our magic across the spectrum of possibilities. But it is important that in all these you do not lose sight of what is important for the big picture.

That in every intergenerational connection, there should be a transmission of love, wisdom, fire and magic. So that you can be queer human through my queer humanity, and that I can brave enough to be responsible for you, because I am you and you are me, whatever that means.

I dare say that the best legacies of Simon Nkoli are not his contributions to the queer rights movement but his relationships within the queer rights movement. It is the reason that we are here today. He was such a bad boy so I can be as bad as I want. Oh please try to stop me.

(Delivered at the Simon Nkoli Memorial Lecture 2019)

Image sourced from https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/375839531397314578/