The Real Woman


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Agony of a Child Bride!!!

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My Name Is Fatima Mustapha. I Am 21 Years Old. I Am From Makarfi In Kaduna State. I Would Like To Share My Divorce Diaries With You . I was married off at age 11. In my village, most of us were married by age 12 to preserve our purity. I am still not sure what that means. I never thought it would happen to me because my parents allowed me to attend school instead of hawking and I loved school alot. In my school nobody made me do extra work because I was a girl. I loved school because I loved coming first and being ahead of the boys in my class. I was in JS2 when my mother started talking about getting me married. I honestly thought she was joking until my uncle brought his friend to our house as my suitor. My suitor, Malam Faruk was a shoe seller and cobbler in Zaria. He was 42 years old and my parents felt he would make a good husband. I did not understand what they were all talking about. I really did not understand what I would do with a husband. So that’s how Malam F...
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Why Women Sometimes Don't Help Other Women

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It’s not because they’re inherently harsher leaders than men, but because they often respond to sexism by trying to distance themselves from other women. There are two dominant cultural ideas about the role women play in helping other women advance at work, and they are seemingly at odds: the Righteous Woman and the Queen Bee. The Righteous Woman is an ideal, a belief that women have a distinct moral obligation to have one another’s backs. This kind of sentiment is best typified by Madeleine Albright’s now famous quote , “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” The basic idea is that since all women experience sexism, they should be more attuned to the gendered barriers that other women face. In turn, this heightened awareness should lead women to foster alliances and actively support one another. If women don’t help each other, this is an even worse form of betrayal than those committed by men. And hence, the special place in hell reserved fo...
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My Quest to Be ‘Cool’: Dealing With Low Self Esteem

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I was born in Sekondi to a nurse and a farmer. At about 5 years, we moved to Komenda, a small town in the Central Region of Ghana. Even though I was one of the best students in primary school, I always felt ‘little’ when we travelled to cities like Cape Coast, Accra and Takoradi. I felt everyone there was more beautiful, more intelligent, spoke better English and was generally better than me. I had a similar experience in secondary school, always looking down on myself and feeling I was not good enough. Oh how I wished I were an ‘Accra girl’ because I thought they were so cool! Yet, when my family finally moved to Accra, I still didn’t feel cool. On top of this I didn’t even have a boyfriend! If only I could get a boyfriend, then I will be cool like the other girls… I thought. In University, I met some really wonderful friends, some of whom were from ‘rich’ families and I thought being friends with them will make me feel cool. I didn’t. I had the opportunity to start tr...
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