#BeingFemaleInNigeria Sparks A National Twitter Conversation

It all began on Tuesday, June 30, when Florence Warmate, a member of The Abuja book club put out a call to action. The group, comprised of 10 women and 5 men, had just finished reading and discussing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s essay, We Should All Be Feminists--the published version of her famous TedTalk.

In her talk, Adichie remarks, "Some people will say a woman is subordinate to a man because it's our culture. But culture is constantly changing." The flood of tweets that came after Warmate launched the hashtag #BeingFemaleinNigeria, speaks to the frustration that people have with the patriarchal society that Adichie speaks of. Within a few hours, #BeingFemaleinNigeria was the top trending topic in the country.

“We all started discussing our experiences, and then we thought, ‘This should go to a wider group,’” Warmate told BuzzFeed News by phone yesterday. “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.”

In 140 characters or less, women and men alike reflected on the societal pressures and expectations placed on women, the normalization of domestic abuse, and the negative sentiments that exist towards educated women. The hashtag spread like rapid fire. Above, we look at #BeingFemaleInNigeria in 10 tweets.