Chimamanda x Some people ask: “Why the word feminist?<br /><br /> Why not just say you are a believer in human rights, or something like that?” <br /><br />Because that would be dishonest. <br /><br />Feminism is, of course, part of human rights in general—but to choose to use the vague expression human rights is to deny the specific and particular problem of gender. <br /><br />It would be a way of pretending that it was not women who have, for centuries, been excluded.<br /><br />Recently a young woman was gang-raped in a university in Nigeria, and the response of many young Nigerians, both male and female, was something like this: 'Yes, rape is wrong, but what is a girl doing in a room with four boys?'<br /><br /> Let us, if we can, forget the horrible inhumanity of that response. These Nigerians have been raised to think of women as inherently guilty. <br /><br />And they have been raised to expect so little of men that the idea of men as savage beings with no self-control is somehow acceptable.