NEW YORK – As the 2015 deadline for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) approaches, world leaders will face a choice: move the goal posts back another decade or two, or hold accountable those who have failed to deliver on their commitments. For women, the choice is clear. We have been here before. In …
LONDON — As a gay man living in Nigeria, my biggest challenge was choosing between my sexuality and my job. In 2004, I was at the start of my acting career. I had just left university, and I was featured in “Roses and Thorns,” a prime-time soap opera on Galaxy Television, one of Nigeria’s most …
LAGOS — While at dinner recently at a restaurant in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, I observed a mismatched couple. The man appeared to be at least 60, but was dressed in skinny jeans and a skin-tight sleeveless top, with a large gold chain and dark sunglasses, though it was after eight in the evening. His companion, …
Mogadishu – One of my earliest childhood memories is of swimming in a small gully near my grandmother’s home in Yaaq Bari Wayne, a dusty collection of tin-roofed adobe buildings huddled together in the plains of southern Somalia’s Bay region. After the Gu rains, the gully became a deep triangular cleft cut into the ground, …
Nairobi – My mother, like her mother, her grandmother, and so on, was born into poverty in the rural village of Rarieda, Kenya. I, too, was born in the village, and lived there until it was struck by a brutal famine when I was two years old. With no food, money, or opportunities, my mother …