Professor Molara Ogundipe, one of the members of the older generation of Nigerian writers, academics and feminists, died on Tuesday 18 June, in Ijebu-Igbo, Ogun State, Nigeria at the age of 78.
The late Professor, a scholar, writer, poet and gender advocate was the first Nigerian to earn a first class honours degree in English from the University of London. Widely travelled, she was a professor of English and Comparative Literature and Head of the General Studies Department at Wisconsin International University College in Accra, Ghana. She later moved to Ogun State University, now Olabisi Onabanjo University. She was in Nigeria to deliver Keynote address at a conference on gender. In this interview with NEHRU ODEH she speaks about her activism, literature, gender issues and publishing.
Why is it that we have not heard of you for a while?
I used to be nationally known when I was writing for The Guardian. The reason you have not heard of me is because I was living in the United States. Not only in the US, in South Africa, Britain and so on. It’s just my way of doing my women’s work on a global level–to teach courses on women, set up women studies department, gender studies departments, gender courses and so on. This is because we need to put the issue of gender on the curriculum. And I think it is something we need to do in Nigeria.
Have women made any headway in their struggle for emancipation?
Yes, I think we’ve made a headway because I have been in the struggle, say, from the 1960s. And at that time, it seemed like a very dark world in which women were consigned to second class spaces, abused and expected to be quiet. There were very few women, even in the university. But if you look at education, particularly post-independence, there has been a vast difference in the status of women. A lot of fathers are sending their daughters to school and supporting them because they want them to have their own ways of supporting themselves in case their marriages fail.
You have more visibility of gender issues even at the governmental level; people talking about gender, thinking about gender, legislating about gender even in the military era; and also dealing with issues like the VVF in the North. I hear Nigeria also has been positive about Female Genital Mutilation and has a law against it. Women have worked for widowhood rights and have managed to establish legal protection for themselves. And there are also many women in government than you had in the 60s and 70s. You have women in visible positions such as the media and, of course, in government, more than before.
So I think it is not an equal world yet in which women can say they are perfectly happy, but they are protected within institutions like marriage or inheritance. In the 60s and 70s, and until recently, the woman could not do anything without her husband or her brother signing on her behalf, which means that she had no identity. She could not get a passport on her own behalf. Her husband had to sign for her to get a visa to leave the country. But I think there have been significant changes.
In your keynote address you mentioned Mariama Ba’s novel, So Long A Letter. Do you think African female writers still write in her mould?
Read answer to this question and the rest of the interview by clicking: TheNEWS
