“Lastly, there was this old happy couple in my neighbourhood, …

Comment on 10 years after Fulbright by Olakunle Idris.

“Lastly, there was this old happy couple in my neighbourhood, the Moores, who told me they were barren and that their two grown children were actually adopted. So, seeing how pleasant their life was, I realised the fault in my culture where the society blames childless women for no fault of theirs. Based on theirs, and the fact that I was married three years before then with some pressure on what was happening from people, I resolved that if anyone came to me to say I should marry another wife just because we had no child, I would fire him or her like Akukalia, Chinua Achebe’s character in his Arrow of God (1964), “Go back to your house or I will make you eat shit!”:

I so much like this paragraph because it’s most disturbing issue in most of our culture where woman is being blame for not having babies and husband being advices to marry another wife. I believe there is need for re-orientation on the fact that ones a man is married to a woman, the ‘infertility’ should not be put on the woman alone.