Okoloma Maduewesi.

Okoloma lived on my street

and looked after me like a big brother.

If I liked a boy, I would ask Okoloma's opinion.

Okoloma died in the notorious Sosoliso plane crash

in Nigeria in December of 2005.

Almost exactly seven years ago.

Okoloma was a person I could argue with, laugh with and truly talk to.

He was also the first person to call me a feminist.

I was about fourteen, we were at his house, arguing.

Both of us bristling with half bit knowledge

from books that we had read.

I don't remember what this particular argument was about,

but I remember that as I argued and argued,

Okoloma looked at me and said, "You know, you're a feminist."

It was not a compliment.

(Laughter)

I could tell from his tone,

the same tone that you would use to say something like,

"You're a supporter of terrorism."

(Laughter)

I did not know exactly what this word "feminist" meant,

and I did not want Okoloma to know that I did not know.

So I brushed it aside, and I continued to argue.

And the first thing I planned to do when I got home

was to look up the word "feminist" in the dictionary.

Now fast forward to some years later,

I wrote a novel about a man who among other things beats his wife

and whose story doesn't end very well.

While I was promoting the novel in Nigeria,

a journalist, a nice, well-meaning man,

told me he wanted to advise me.

And for the Nigerians here,

I'm sure we're all familiar

with how quick our people are to give unsolicited advice.

He told me that people were saying that my novel was feminist

and his advice to me --

and he was shaking his head sadly as he spoke --

was that I should never call myself a feminist

because feminists are women who are unhappy

because they cannot find husbands.

(Laughter)

So I decided to call myself "a happy feminist."

Then an academic, a Nigerian woman told me

that feminism was not our culture

and that feminism wasn't African,

and that I was calling myself a feminist

because I had been corrupted by "Western books."

Which amused me,

because a lot of my early readings were decidedly unfeminist.

I think I must have read every single Mills & Boon romance published

before I was sixteen.

And each time I tried to read those books

called "the feminist classics,"

I'd get bored, and I really struggled to finish them.

But anyway, since feminism was un-African,

I decided that I would now call myself "a happy African feminist."

At some point I was a happy African feminist who does not hate men

and who likes lip gloss

and who wears high heels for herself but not for men.

(Laughter)

Of course a lot of this was tongue-in-cheek,

but that word feminist is so heavy with baggage, negative baggage.

You hate men, you hate bras,

you hate African culture, that sort of thing.

Now here's a story from my childhood.

When I was in primary school,

my teacher said at the beginning of term that she would give the class a test

and whoever got the highest score would be the class monitor.

Now, class monitor was a big deal.

If you were a class monitor,

you got to write down the names of noisemakers --

(Laughter)

which was having enough power of its own.

But my teacher would also give you a cane to hold in your hand

while you walk around and patrol the class for noisemakers.

Now, of course you were not actually allowed to use the cane.

But it was an exciting prospect for the nine-year-old me.

I very much wanted to be the class monitor.

And I got the highest score on the test.

Then, to my surprise, my teacher said that the monitor had to be a boy.

She had forgotten to make that clear earlier

because she assumed it was ... obvious.

(Laughter)

A boy had the second highest score on the test,

and he would be monitor.

Now, what was even more interesting about this

is that the boy was a sweet, gentle soul

who had no interest in patrolling the class with the cane,

while I was full of ambition to do so.

But I was female and he was male,

and so he became the class monitor.

And I've never forgotten that incident.

I often make the mistake of thinking

that something that is obvious to me is just as obvious to everyone else.

Now, take my dear friend Louis

for example.

Louis is a brilliant, progressive man,

and we would have conversations and he would tell me,

"I don't know what you mean by things being different or harder for women.

Maybe in the past, but not now."

And I didn't understand how Louis could not see what seems so self-evident.

Then one evening, in Lagos, Louis and I went out with friends.

And for people here who are not familiar with Lagos,

there's that wonderful Lagos' fixture,

the sprinkling of energetic men who hang around outside establishments

and very dramatically "help" you park your car.

I was impressed with the particular theatrics

of the man who found us a parking spot that evening.

And so as we were leaving, I decided to leave him a tip.

I opened my bag,

put my hand inside my bag,

brought out my money that I had earned from doing my work,

and I gave it to the man.

And he, this man who was very grateful and very happy,

took the money from me,

looked across at Louis

and said, "Thank you, sir!"

(Laughter)

Louis looked at me, surprised,

and asked, "Why is he thanking me? I didn't give him the money."

Then I saw realization dawn on Louis' face.

The man believed that whatever money I had

had ultimately come from Louis.

Because Louis is a man.

Men and women are different.

We have different hormones, we have different sexual organs,

we have different biological abilities.

Women can have babies, men can't.

At least not yet.

(Laughter)

Men have testosterone and are in general physically stronger than women.

There's slightly more women than men in the world,

about 52 percent of the world's population is female.

But most of the positions of power and prestige are occupied by men.

The late Kenyan Nobel Peace laureate,

Wangari Maathai,

put it simply and well when she said:

"The higher you go, the fewer women there are."

In the recent US elections we kept hearing of the Lilly Ledbetter law,

and if we go beyond the nicely alliterative name of that law,

it was really about a man and a woman

doing the same job, being equally qualified,

and the man being paid more because he's a man.

So in the literal way, men rule the world,

and this made sense a thousand years ago

because human beings lived then in a world

in which physical strength was the most important attribute for survival.

The physically stronger person was more likely to lead,

and men, in general, are physically stronger.

Of course there are many exceptions.

(Laughter)

But today we live in a vastly different world.

The person more likely to lead is not the physically stronger person;

it is the more creative person, the more intelligent person,

the more innovative person,

and there are no hormones for those attributes.

A man is as likely as a woman to be intelligent,

to be creative, to be innovative.

We have evolved;

but it seems to me that our ideas of gender had not evolved.

Some weeks ago, I walked into a lobby of one of the best Nigerian hotels.

I thought about naming the hotel, but I thought I probably shouldn't.

And a guard at the entrance stopped me and asked me annoying questions,

because their automatic assumption is

that a Nigerian female walking into a hotel alone is a sex worker.

And by the way,

why do these hotels focus on the ostensible supply

rather than the demand for sex workers?

In Lagos I cannot go alone into many "reputable" bars and clubs.

They just don't let you in if you're a woman alone,

you have to be accompanied by a man.

Each time I walk into a Nigerian restaurant with a man,

the waiter greets the man and ignores me.

The waiters are products --

(Laughter)

At this some women felt like, "Yes! I thought that!"

The waiters are products of a society

that has taught them that men are more important than women.

And I know that waiters don't intend any harm.

But it's one thing to know intellectually and quite another to feel it emotionally.

Each time they ignore me, I feel invisible.

I feel upset.

I want to tell them that I am just as human as the man,

that I'm just as worthy of acknowledgment.

These are little things,

but sometimes it's the little things that sting the most.

And not long ago, I wrote an article

about what it means to be young and female in Lagos,

and the printers told me,

"It was so angry."

Of course it was angry!

(Laughter)

I am angry.

Gender as it functions today is a grave injustice.

We should all be angry.

Anger has a long history of bringing about positive change;

but, in addition to being angry, I'm also hopeful.

Because I believe deeply in the ability of human beings

to make and remake themselves for the better.

Gender matters everywhere in the world,

but I want to focus on Nigeria

and on Africa in general,

because it is where I know, and because it is where my heart is.

And I would like today to ask

that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world,

a fairer world,

a world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves.

And this is how to start:

we must raise our daughters differently.

We must also raise our sons differently.

We do a great disservice to boys on how we raise them;

we stifle the humanity of boys.

We define masculinity in a very narrow way,

masculinity becomes this hard, small cage

and we put boys inside the cage.

We teach boys to be afraid of fear.

We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability.

We teach them to mask their true selves,

because they have to be, in Nigerian speak, "hard man!"

In secondary school, a boy and a girl, both of them teenagers,

both of them with the same amount of pocket money, would go out

and then the boy would be expected always to pay,

to prove his masculinity.

And yet we wonder why boys are more likely to steal money from their parents.

What if both boys and girls were raised

not to link masculinity with money?

What if the attitude was not "the boy has to pay"

but rather "whoever has more should pay?"

Now, of course because of that historical advantage,

it is mostly men who will have more today,

but if we start raising children differently,

then in fifty years, in a hundred years,

boys will no longer have the pressure of having to prove this masculinity.

But by far the worst thing we do to males,

by making them feel that they have to be hard,

is that we leave them with very fragile egos.

The more "hard man" the man feels compelled to be,

the weaker his ego is.

And then we do a much greater disservice to girls

because we raise them to cater to the fragile egos of men.

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller,

we say to girls,

"You can have ambition, but not too much."

(Laughter)

"You should aim to be successful, but not too successful,

otherwise you would threaten the man."

If you are the breadwinner in your relationship with a man,

you have to pretend that you're not,

especially in public,

otherwise you will emasculate him.

But what if we question the premise itself?