My Iranian friend usually makes the mistake of referring to a male as 'she' and vice-versa. As usual, she offers an apology (which I do not consider necessary) and corrects her mistake. She had shared with me in the past that the Persian language had no gender designation and it got me thinking about the Yoruba language as well. As we sat down over coffee yesterday with our Chinese and Indian friends, I realised how related my local Nigerian language was to theirs. One thing stood out for us - none of our local languages had any gender differentiation. 'He' or 'She' didn't exist in our languages, rather we had words to differentiate between an older person and a younger person as a sign of respect - a trait completely absent in the English language. The French language is even more complicated and interesting on the gender qualification as even things needed to be qualified as female or male. We realised that languages had their different idiosyncrasie...
I recently read a post online where the best graduating student from Bells University of Technology, Ota, Nigeria (CGPA 4.89 out of 5.0) had been interviewed. The content of her interview or her responses to the questions asked is not what I intend to discuss on this post. Rather, it is the responses of people to her success that I would like to address. There were many comments about how easy it must have been for her to graduate with a first class because she attended a private university. Others were sure that if she had attended a public school, she would probably have graduated with a second class lower degree at the most. They undermined her success forgetting that in the same graduating set, 86 students had graduated with a third class degree, 119 had second class lower and 123 had second class upper degrees. Of the 28 who made the first class, this girl had come out tops. The comments not only baffled me but also started to infuriate me as I had...
Post by Dinah Ekundayo Holy Matrimony Let's talk about cheating and the Nigerian woman. Dear Nigerian woman, I have always known there was something off about the way most of you were raised, I use "you" because I think that my parents did their own individual bit to raise me above the norm. Infidelity is a no, no, no in marriage it can be forgiven if it happens once but shouldn't be taken as a norm or the right of the Nigerian men to cheat with impunity. The Nigerian woman should not also be made to carry this cross in marriage without questioning or demanding better. The Nigerian woman is raised to be quiet and endure while I was raised to speak up, ask questions, and demand answers. This, of course, didn't sit exactly well with my disciplinarian mum and earned me lots of beatings as she never could understand why I should question her punishing me when it was my younger brothers who were at fault, or why I should demand answers for being as...
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