Two Nigerian girls tell a different story

LAGOS: It isn’t easy for a girl to get an education in Nigeria.
The world’s attention has been focused on the April kidnappings of a schoolful of girls by the militant group Boko Haram, which doesn’t believe in education for girls.
Boko Haram is waging an insurgency in several predominantly Muslim northeastern states, an area with the country’s highest illiteracy rates — with women at 67 percent, compared with 51 percent of men. But even in other areas where female literacy is higher, girls face impediments to getting an education that men don’t, including teen pregnancy, early marriage, and cultural and religious beliefs that prevent girls from going to school.
And in cities where girls can go to schools that will lead them into an elite profession, such as law, the girls themselves don’t have much say about it.
Sheila Chukwulozie and Olivia Iloetonma can attest to that.
Chukwulozie, 20, who is completing her second year at Amherst College in Massachusetts, was born in Lagos and went to school in Abuja, Nigeria’s capital, where she was put on the “humanities track.”
“You rarely saw a boy taking history,” she said. Chukwulozie asked many questions, but, she said, “that was almost seen as a negative” because kids who did that were seen as inattentive or as troublemakers. Teachers made no effort to make the material relevant to her life so she “went through school feeling lost.”
That changed when she decided to further her studies at the African Leadership Academy (ALA) in Johannesburg, South Africa, a residential high school for students from around the world. It offers a two-year program for students seen as potential leaders.
They take courses, start businesses and perform community service projects. The curriculum combines African and leadership studies with traditional advanced Cambridge courses. Many graduates go to elite US colleges, and all are asked to return to Africa for 10 years to help transform the continent.
“Suddenly, my math studies were related to my ideas on improving the arts industry and improving gender equality throughout Africa,” she said. “They encouraged questions.”
When the girls were kidnapped, she said, she first got angry at the terrorists and then at everybody, including herself, for not doing enough to fight social attitudes that objectify women.
“This may be a generalization, but people everywhere rate women on things that have no significance to their lives and then make these physical attributes their whole essence,” she said. “We’ve put a price on these girls’ heads. Boko Haram knows what the price is. . . . Everyone is saying girls should get an education, but there is a difference between a girl in school and a boy in school. Girls will wake up and not want to go to class because last night someone called her ugly or laughed at her for being flat-chested. It’s all these crazy things that break down your morale. So when you are in a class with a male you are not learning the same things. You are checking your body every second.”
ALA funders give loans to graduates to attend college that will be forgiven if the student returns to Africa. Chukwulozie says that she and others don’t need incentives to go back.
Studying theater, dance and international relations, she plans to use the arts to educate African communities about gender discrimination. She will continue a teen after-school program she started at ALA , called “EmoART,” that infuses the arts with lessons in emotional intelligence and self-sufficiency, all aimed at reducing gender discrimination and gender-based violence.
It’s not just for females. It’s for males, too. “Women empowerment is only one part of this problem,” she said.
Now meet Olivia Iloetonma, 22, who is graduating from Vassar College with Phi Beta Kappa distinction. She was born in Aba, a city that is a trading center in southern Nigeria, where teachers put her on a path to go to law school, though she had no real interest in going. “Nobody cares what the girl child wants. This is a society in which women are valued only in positions when they can be controlled.”
She wanted a “way to know more,” so three weeks before she was set to go to law school, she decided to go to ALA to see what else life had to offer. The school provided opportunities to meet world leaders and to start a business with four classmates, a beauty salon called TEN50.
“In many ways, my life truly began when I got to ALA,” she said. “We had core values of excellence and curiosity. . . . We were encouraged to build solutions to any dissatisfactions we had with the school or the community around us, and to challenge everything.”
Iloetonma, who double-majored at Vassar in international studies and Latin American studies, is returning to Africa to work as a financial analyst for Dalberg, an investment advisory and asset management firm.
“I am working with them because I am passionate about building successful businesses in Africa,” she said. She also wants to invest in education for girls.
“The kidnapping of the girls has made it kind of a shameful time to be Nigerian the past couple of weeks,” she said. “It shows how much we don’t believe in the potential of half of the population. . . . The kidnappings, though, are a manifestation of something that is a larger problem. . . . It’s not just in Nigeria, and that’s why there is a proper global response.”