In our house in Awka, sex lived in the blurred pages between chapters, in the abrupt changes to the television channels when two lovers start to kiss; I noticed the way my mother spoke in hushed tones whenever her friend visited and they discussed in the sitting room. Words like “condom” floated in the air to my ears and yet I didn’t know what it meant. I saw my mother’s uneasiness when certain topics were brought up, how she always redirected it to my homework or the scripture, leaving pages blank and unwritten. I sat in that silence, putting together pieces of information and knowledge from places that my parents who were supposed to teach me would be terrified to know. What I would later learn is that silence is a teacher, writing its own lessons between blurred lines.
My parents were super religious and yet progressive. They were neither too spiritual to stop me from reading good books nor secular enough to allow me fully express myself. They bought me good books but spoke about sex using confounding euphemisms and metaphors. Mother told the parable of a lock and key, “When God jams two people together, he showers them with love and gives them children.” She made references to ‘special hugs’, clasping her hands in supplication. The conversations were awkward and they seemed to skirt the heavy subjects instead of hitting them head-on. What they had not counted on was the Nigerian religious culture sabotaging their well-intentioned but indirect approach to sexuality. How could you give your child a comprehensive sex education in a society that treats sincere discussions as taboos, where sex is God’s greatest gift and also one of the worst temptations of the devil? In this country, the awareness of your own body is treated as veering into dangerous territories.
When my questions became too frequent, my mother told me to wait, that when I got married, my husband would teach me everything I wanted to know. My purity was my protection and my ignorance would preserve my innocence. I was supposed to magically garner the confidence and knowledge for intimate relationships without preparation or practice. My father chose the simple answer of “respect yourself” anytime the topic came up, as if self-respect was easier than discussions on boundaries and consent.
The books my parents gave me were vague and detached from the truth. They were full of cartoon diagrams that looked nothing like a real human body, incomplete as if the most important pages had been ripped out. Is marriage a prerequisite for sexual feelings? Does desire develop after the religious blessings? Why then did my body experience sensations that had nothing to do with love and marriage? The questions remained unanswered.
I found romance novels through Ngozi, Sorochi’s sister, who attended Anambra State University and who had access to banned books. We passed Mills and Boons paperbacks with their romantic covers between us like illegal substances, hidden down in our school bags and read under bed covers with tiny flashlights after everyone had gone to sleep.
“Don’t let your mother see this.” Sorochi handed me a stack the day I went to visit her at Omagba Estate. “She will think I am corrupting you with oyibo nonsense.”
This oyibo nonsense became my introduction to witnessing women who were experiencing and enjoying physical pleasure as joy and not duty, desire as something they actively pursued rather than accommodated. They chose partners and experienced satisfaction on their own terms. They gave me something “proper” the textbooks left out: that female attraction mattered and intimacy should be mutual and not one-sided.
I felt like a student of archaeology, excavating information from forbidden materials. Every revelation felt like a discovery. I learned the vocabulary for the different sensations I experienced and the butterflies I felt in my belly when a boy I liked smiled back at me. I wondered if the boys I read in the novel were as dreamy and full of yearning as the boys on my street.
The novels planted seeds that would influence how I evaluated real-life relationships, how I deserved pursuit rather than tolerance, and that my pleasure mattered as much as my partners’. Sexual satisfaction should involve communication rather than just a man’s gratification.
I turned eighteen in my final year, in SS3, and my school, Federal Girls’ Onitsha, became a clandestine location for teenagers who wished to talk about sex. There, I added to my sexual education vocabulary local slangs for body parts and sexual acts. Sex was “knack” and breasts were “bobi.” There were social hierarchies for “experienced girls” and “juu” girls and street codes that governed how much girls could know without ruining the reputations of others.
“You first start with kissing,” Senior Ada, the head prefect of our dormitory room, told her friend one Saturday afternoon, right after lunch. She was loud, so everyone turned in that direction and she didn’t seem to care. “Then, he will move here,” she cupped her full breasts. “Before doing down there…you know,”—her hands glided down her pelvic region. She spoke with scientific confidence despite having sixteen-year-olds in her audience whose combined experiences amounted to stolen kisses and one scandal where Nneka Okonkwo was caught holding hands with a boy from Government College during a youth cross-over program. Hostel was navigating between a good girl (traditional, boring, naïve) and a bad girl (unmarriageable, wild and free).
“You have to be careful,” she warned us. “Nigerian boys will sleep with you, then tell everyone you are loose. They want to collect what you have, then marry someone who will not give it up easily.” These conversations revealed the exhausting complexity of our culture: we should be pure but not overly prim and proper, attractive but not seductive, aware but not experienced and interested but not eager.
The hostel also provided information that no adults in my life cared to share. I learned about menstrual care in a society where pads cost more than some families could afford. I learned how babies were made (not the sanitized versions from textbooks) and what happened to girls who got pregnant outside marriage. Spoiler – their options were terrible.
“My cousin got pregnant in SS3,” Amaka, my classmate, once said. “Her parents sent her to the village till she gave birth. Now, she is married to a man thirty years older than her who has two wives already. She is finished. Her life is over.” These cautionary tales served as stark reminders of the punishment for girls who dared. The real-world mathematics of Nigerian girlhood where one mistake could change one’s trajectory. None of these prepared me for what I saw on our Prefect’s Inauguration evening.
The Inauguration party in Onitsha was the usual collaboration between the two top schools in Anambra. It was held in a mini hall of a popular hotel, Afro beats music blaring from the speakers, students wearing whatever fashion they thought looked sophisticated. I was drowning in a borrowed dress that didn’t fit, and sipping a fruity Chapman that tasted like urine.
At around 6pm, the party had reached its crescendo as they were handing out awards, bumping to the up-tempo music. I hunted for a bathroom, found them crowded with girls who were reapplying powder and lipstick, and it was there that I heard someone crying in one of the toilets. I recognized the voice.
“Ugonma?” I called.
She was my schoolmate, but we were in different Science classes. She had been our Chapel Prefect and had serenaded the assembly every Monday morning. Now, she didn’t reply to my call and I turned to leave but there was something heart wrenching about her cries that made me push open the door. And there she was, in a corner, on the ground like a sack of potatoes, hair disheveled, her make up smeared across her face and her blouse torn at the shoulder. She looked like she had fought with someone. She had always looked well put together, used to radiate confidence, commanding worship, but in that dimly lit toilet, she looked broken, like a façade had shattered and there she was, laid bare without any cover or protection.
I sat beside her, said nothing. She sobbed, snorting and wiping her face with her hands. And slowly, her story emerged in bits: Emeka Okafor, a popular boy from Government College, the son of a Commissioner, had offered to show her the hotel’s art collection and had suggested checking out private meeting rooms, and there, his mask fell off.
“I said no but he said I had been flirting with him all evening, giving him the sexy eyes. He said I led him on by following him to see the private rooms. Good girls do not follow a man to a private room unless she was looking for something. Maybe he was right, maybe I sent the wrong signals.” She buried her face in her hands and sobbed.
I sat with Ugonma while the party went on like nothing happened. Emeka was back with his friends, probably getting congratulated on his latest overseas admission while adults who were supposed to be chaperones were clueless. That night with Ugonma changed everything for me: everything we were taught about sexual safety was a lie. The boys we were warned about weren’t lurking in dark alleys or in rough neighborhoods. They didn’t walk around with placards screaming “predators.” They were sitting right next to us, the sons of senators and ministers. Their evil deeds were swept under the carpet, invisible due to social status and family connections.
Afterward, Ugonma avoided me at first, perhaps embarrassed that I had seen her in her most vulnerable moment. But gradually, something shifted between us. She began sitting with me in the chapel, and we made small conversations that never mentioned what happened but somehow acknowledged it.
“I told my older sister,” she said one afternoon as we walked to the library. “She said something similar happened to her friend in the University. Apparently, it is common.”
The way she said ‘common’ made my skin crawl. I began to pay attention in the hallways, in the bathrooms, and found girls talking in low tones about the boys from Government College Aba, Federal Technical College, “good schools” with the “good boys” who were privileged.
“That Ikenna boy from FTC,” Onyinye said during one of these conversations. “My cousin’s friend said he gets violent if you try to stop him,” added Chioma, whose sister was at the University of Lagos and had more stories than any of us wanted to hear.
We began warning each other. Not with the microphone or dramatic announcements, just quiet words passed between friends. We developed unspoken, unwritten rules – never go anywhere alone at inter-school events, always have an exit strategy, create codes for when we need help but can’t ask directly to avoid scenes that would travel home to our parents.
Weeks later, Ugonma began speaking up, fiercely protective of younger girls. “You don’t owe anyone anything,” she told a group of us during one of those dormitory conversations. “If a boy makes you feel bad for having boundaries, especially if he brings up his family’s status or your family’s reputation, that tells you everything you need to know about who he really is.”
But this underground network of warnings and shared survival tactics only went so far. Ugonma could teach us about boundaries but she could not explain what healthy relationships looked like beyond avoiding dangerous ones and how to handle desire safely. We were still teenagers trying to educate each other in incomplete sentences, filling gaps with assumptions and fear. We needed adults to save us from drowning completely in confusion.
Then came Mrs. Nwankwo, the new NYSC teacher who taught Biology. Mrs. Nwankwo gave us the words Ugonma didn’t have. Her real skill was knowing when we girls needed more than the textbook diagrams of reproductive systems. She would extend health lessons beyond what the syllabus required, creating a space for the questions we were too embarrassed to ask in front of the whole class.
“Your body belongs to you first before anyone,” she would say during those lessons, looking directly at us in a way that made it clear she wasn’t just talking about biology. “It belongs to you before your parents, before your future husband, and before your community.”
She kept a small box where we could drop in our anonymous questions, things we could not say out loud. The questions revealed how completely lost we were, uncertainties about our anatomy, pregnancy, disease transmission, misconceptions, and sexuality.
“How do you know if a boy really loves you or just wants to use you?” another asked and Mrs. Nwankwo answered our questions with grace, providing medically sound and socially realistic information.
Slowly, the blurred pages started to clarify like the sun cutting through dark, rainy clouds. Words started to take shape.
By the time I got admission to the University, I was twenty. Thanks to Mrs. Nwankwo, I finally understood what family background and silence had failed to explain. In my second year, I dated Gozie. Three months in, he wanted sex and I said “no”. He pressed on: “Don’t you love me?” “Other girls.” “Just once.”
One night, I almost gave in just to stop the questions. My hand was on my blouse button when I remembered Mrs. Nwankwo: “If he cares, your no is enough.”
I buttoned back up. “Take me home.”
We broke up. It hurt. But I had learned to use my education even when it cost me something. In third year, a guy cornered me after a study group. “You have been flirting,” he said blocking the door. The old me would have apologized, but I said, “Move! Now,” loud enough for others to hear. He called me difficult the next day, and I didn’t care.
I learned to trust what I had seen over what I was told was true. Writing this essay is itself a form of witnessing, of finding my voice in the silence that filled my parents’ home. I am thirty now. I speak about my body without metaphors. I ask questions without shame and I set boundaries without apology. Last month, when my niece asked me why her body was changing, I didn’t reach for metaphors of the lock and key. I instead sat her down, looked her in the eyes and used the real words. She asked two more questions and I answered, her eyes brightening with each answer.
About the Author:
ChideraUdochukwu–Nduka is a Nigerian Igbo writer, screenwriter, creative professional, and pharmacist. She won FirstPrizein the Letters Category in the 2025 LIGHT Magazine Contest, the second prize for the 2024 Dissolution Climate Change Essay Contest (Litfest Bergen, Norway) and was runner up in the 2024 South African Bloody Parchment Horrorfest. She is a recipient of the Kokonut Head (Illino Media) Writing Residency and was shortlisted for the 2025 Afro-Abebi Award for Non-Fiction and the 2024 Akachi Chukwuemeka Prize for Literature. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Isele Magazine, Midnight & Indigo, Brittle Paper, Harriet’s House, Carmalaky, BIPOCrypha, Lagos Review, Akpata Magazine, Feminists in Kenya, Ngiga Review, World Voices Magazine, Mythic Picnic, Libre Lit, Aprilcentaur, Valiant Scribe, 22/28, Conscio Magazine, and others.
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