Feminism campaigner Chimamanda Adichie has said there is nothing unusual about the corrupt acts of former Nigerian minister, Diezani Madueke.
Adichie speaking at the University of Edinburgh after being awarded an honorary doctorate degree, said Diezani was pilloried by the media for her corruption and embezzlement.
She said Diezani should not have been castigated on the basis of her gender as some members of the Nigerian media had done. Adichie said women are just as evil as men, and there should be no difference in the way their crimes are perceived.
“I’ve always been politically engaged. I’ve always been very much aware of how how politics is isn’t just about policy it’s also about people. It’s about people’s lives about emotions about the way injustice affects us and so I started to talk about feminism because I think that feminism is a fundamental issue of human rights and because I feel very strongly about how important it is that we that we try to take away the negative stereotypes attached to feminism and so I dream of a world where all start to collectively destruct masculinty.
“I dream of a world in which women are no longer perceived to be a species of angels and I and I’ll tell you what I mean. I think often learning the conversation about gender there’s the assumption that women are somehow morally better than men and so which is why there’s actually a new series on Netflix called killer women which which I find ridiculous because because there is in some ways it’s making a fetish of the idea of evil manifesting itself in the female form. It shouldn’t be it’s normal female evil should be just as normal as male evil we shouldn’t have higher standards for women. We shouldn’t assume that because the person is born of woman that person somehow is just one step lower than angel.
“I find it quite dehumanizing for women, because what it means is that women cannot be judged on the same terms as men. I remember once a politician in Nigeria who was a woman had stolen money which is an exercise that most Nigerian politicians are very adept at, and she was pilloried.
“I remember journalists saying ‘and she s a woman’ and somehow the assumption was you know it would be better if she were man because then you know it wouldn’t we wouldn’t judge her so harshly because you know we expect men to steal and so I think that the idea of women being a species other species of angels is bad for both women and for men because what it does is that it makes the standards uneven so I dream of a world in which women are seen as human, a world in which women are allowed to be many things.”