About 52% 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.'

When it comes to dressing well, American culture is so self-fulfilled that it has not only disregarded this courtesy of self-presentation, but has turned that disregard into a virtue. "We are too superior/busy/cool/not-uptight to bother about how we look to other people, and so we can wear pajamas to school and underwear to the mall.

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.

I had consumed a lot of American culture, but I was not quite prepared for the reality of American poverty.

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls 'You can have ambition, but not too much'.

I am a strong believer in the ability of human beings to change for the better. I am a strong believer in trying to change what we are dissatisfied with.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.