Chimamanda x Some people ask: “Why the word feminist?

Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?”

Because that would be dishonest.

Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender.

It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded.

Recently a young woman was gang-raped in a university in Nigeria, and the response of many young Nigerians, both male and female, was something like this: 'Yes, rape is wrong, but what is a girl doing in a room with four boys?'

Let us, if we can, forget the horrible inhumanity of that response. These Nigerians have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty.

And they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings with no self-control is somehow acceptable.