By: Hunsu Gabriel Boluwatife [University of Ibadan]
[Third-place winning entry, 2026 Chidera Anushiem Undergraduate Essay Competition]
The title of this essay opens with a claim that, in a Nigerian’s worldview, might read like a fallacy. One may ask: by that question, do you seek to incite a prayer to God, or are you simply making a statement of how things ought to be? For it seems that in our world, our hearts quietly chant something else entirely: inequality begins at home.
But let us first settle what home is. Home is more than an abode or a family meeting point. It is where you take your first steps. Where your beginning begins. It is where the child takes his first meal, forms his first thoughts, and receives his first worldview: an understanding of the worth of another person, not as mere theory but as lived, breathed experience. That experience, shaped first by family, follows the child outward into society. Nobody announces a lesson. Nobody writes a curriculum. But we all receive one. The home has been Nigeria’s oldest gender classroom, and nobody ever asked for our consent to enrol us.
THE FIRST HOUSE
Since a child’s ideology is shaped first by his earliest contacts, it follows that family largely determines how he comes to understand gender. The mechanism that does this work is upbringing. The Cambridge Dictionary defines upbringing as “the way in which you are treated and educated when young, especially by your parents, especially in relation to the effect that this has on how you behave and make moral decisions.” This is not abstract.
In the Nigerian compound, upbringing is not just words. It speaks in who sits at the head of the table, whose hunger is served first, which child is sent to the kitchen and which is sent outside to play. Chinua Achebe captured the depth of this in Things Fall Apart, when Okonkwo’s entire life was authored by his fear of resembling his father. The compound transmitted its ideology silently but faithfully, as it always does. That is the power and the quiet danger of upbringing: it paints our tabula rasa, writing us before we learn to write ourselves.
DOCTRINES OF THE FIRST HOUSE
Here is what the boy-child receives from this inheritance: the belief that provision is masculine, that emotion is weakness, and that his worth lives in what he can carry rather than what he can feel. He grows into a man who cannot name his distress, who treats domestic labour as beneath him, and who cannot recognise the asymmetry of his household because, to him, that arrangement always looked like love. His blindness is not malice. It is sincerity. Home normalised the imbalance long before he had the vocabulary to question it.
The Yoruba speak of ọmọlúàbí: a child born of inner wisdom, of cultivated character, of human wholeness. The word is not gendered. It does not name a good man and a good woman separately. It names a good human being. When the compound assigns roles by anatomy rather than character, it is failing its own deepest standard. The Yoruba cosmos goes further still: before birth, each soul chooses its orí, its personal destiny before Olódùmarè. That choice knows no gender hierarchy. A woman’s orí can carry the destiny of a ruler; a man’s, the destiny of a healer or a poet. The father who tells his son that men do not cry is speaking, in the truest philosophical sense, against his son’s orí.
THE OTHER HOUSE
Yet, there is another house. The father cooks with his sons on Sundays. The mother tells her boy that tears are not weakness but weather: they pass, and you remain. The elder sister who refuses to fetch water for an able-bodied brother and is backed by her own mother. Where everyone is taught responsibility. These homes exist in Lagos (Yusuff & Ajiboye, 2014) and Ibadan (Akanle & Ejiade, 2012), and they produce different people. This is not a coincidence. It is a different curriculum.
The Yoruba tradition of Gèlèdé, the masquerade in which men perform to honour the power of àwọn ìyá wa, our mothers and female ancestors who carry àṣẹ, was recognised by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. At the height of its ceremony, men bow before female power. That same culture, on the same soil, sometimes tells its daughters to be small and its sons to be impenetrable. The compound has forgotten what the masquerade remembers. Some of this forgetting has colonial roots: the Omu institution among the Igbo, a queen of the marketplace with genuine political authority, was dismantled under British administration. What hardened into “tradition” inside our homes was often a wound wearing tradition’s clothing. Our culture always knew better. It simply needs to remember.
A NEW HOUSE OR NEW THOUGHTS?
Correction begins at home. It need not appear on another new year goal, it is simply a father teaching his son to sweep. A mother praising her daughter’s mind as loudly as her manners. Parents pausing a Nollywood film to ask together: is this the world we want? These are not policy proposals awaiting government approval. They are choices available in every compound, tomorrow morning. The Yoruba proverb puts it plainly: Ìwà rere l’ẹṣọ ènià: good character is the adornment of a person. The home either cultivates that character in every child it raises, or quietly diminishes it. Because here, no one sits on the fence.
There is a house, not new, it has the same zinc roof, same smell of firewood. But this time, the father is in the kitchen. The son is setting the table. The daughter is reading. Nobody has called it a lesson in equality. But it is the most powerful kind: one that does not feel like doctrine because it feels like home.
Equality does not begin in a courtroom, lecture hall or the rowdy streets of X. It begins the moment a child watches an adult choose differently. My people, in this compound, it starts with you and I.
References
- Achebe, C. (1958). Things Fall Apart. William Heinemann Ltd.
- Cambridge University Press. (2026). “Upbringing.” Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/upbringing
- UNESCO. (2005). Gèlèdé: Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.
- Yusuff, O. S., & Ajiboye, E. O. (2014). Social change and traditional gender roles in Lagos State, Nigeria. African Journal for the Psychological Studies of Social Issues, 17(3), 56-68.
- Akanle, O., & Ejiade, O. O. (2012). Traditionalism and household chores in Ibadan, Nigeria. International Journal of Sociology of the Family, 38(2), 203-224.
Gabriel is a penultimate law student at the University of Ibadan, passionate about using law to solve real-world problems. When not courting the jealous mistress of law, he’s writing, taking long walks, or savoring the quiet peace of silence.
