Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie just sparked a powerful Twitter movement

Feminist movements have been sweeping the globe this summer with women in Turkey famously turning their backs on the country’s president early last month while women in India launched the #Despitebeingawoman movement to protest Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s backhandedly sexist remarks on the female Prime Minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina.

Now, women in Nigeria are taking a stand, finding inspiration in the work of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

This month, a mixed-gender book club in the capital city of Abuja chose Adichie’s 2014 pamphlet-cum-manifesto, We Should All Be Feminists, as the book-of-the-month, and the reading sparked an in-depth conversation on the challenges Nigerian women face. Book club president Florence Warmate decided to take the conversation to Twitter, creating the hashtag #BeingFemaleInNigeria in an attempt to engage women from her country on the subject of rampant sexism in the African nation.

“We all started discussing our experiences, and then we thought, ‘This should go to a wider group,’” Warmate told Buzzfeed. “If no one talks about it, it just escalates, and it becomes a normal thing that happens to everyone. So we wanted to spread this fire.”

And spread a fire it did, with thousands of women (and even some men) using the platform to speak against gender inequality in the home, domestic violence, and the role religion has had in promoting both.

This isn’t the first time Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s work has burst into the mainstream. In December 2013, she came to international prominence after Beyoncé featured an audio clip of Adichie’s TED Talk, also titled “We Should All Be Feminists,” in her now-classic song, Flawless.

“We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller,” says Adichie, filling in the song’s second verse. “We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise you will threaten the man.’… Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.”

It looks like her fellow Nigerians have heard the call loud and clear.

(Image via Amazon)

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