There’s something Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie once said in a speech that has stayed with me. “Culture does not make people; people make culture.” And if that is true, and I absolutely believe it is, then it follows that once an element of culture is no longer serving the people it was created for, we should be brave enough to question it, revise it, or let it go.

I have read several heartbreaking stories of people whose lives were stunted, derailed, or damaged simply because a harmful tradition existed and no one felt powerful enough to challenge it. Not because alternatives didn’t exist, but because “this is how it has always been.”

You might be shocked to learn that across parts of Africa, some practices still persist today. Female genital mutilation, rules that prevent younger daughters from marrying before their elder sisters, compulsory oaths of allegiance to deities as rites of passage into womanhood or marriage, forcing a prospective son-in-law to pay a soon-to-be mother-in-law’s marriage rites before even honoring the bride, compelling young women to gain weight before marriage against their will and what I consider one of the most damaging beliefs of all, that girls should not go to school, because their relevance supposedly ends in the kitchen.

I strongly believe culture is an asset. It is important. It gives us identity, social order, memory, language, values, and continuity. Culture preserves legacies across generations.

But culture can do all of that without becoming an anchor.

An anchor, by definition, is a heavy object attached to a chain and dropped to the seabed to keep a ship from moving. It secures, but it also restrains. And this is where culture becomes dangerous, when it no longer guides us forward but instead keeps us stuck in place.

There are countless examples. Women -young and middle-aged - are expected to slow down or abandon their careers to resolve family crises. Girls are pressured to marry from a particular social class because “family is supreme”, even when their comfort and safety is questionable and uncertain. Ambition is encouraged, but only to a point. Be capable, but not intimidating. Be intelligent, but not outspoken. Be visible, but not too visible.

Many of us carry unspoken expectations like invisible luggage. Be modest, but not boring. Be expressive, but not embarrassing. Be a “hardworking woman,” but not too hardworking, there is always a ceiling to how far ambition is allowed to go.

Some cultural practices are upheld even when their health implications are well documented, like forcing widows to drink the bath water of their deceased husbands’ bodies. In many communities, silence is mistaken for respect. You are expected to carry extended family responsibilities even when they drain your finances, your health, and your peace. Gender roles force impossible choices - be a wife or build a career, be a caregiver or a provider.

Whose says you can’t be this and that?

And then there is the invisible pressure to perform because “do you know whose child you are?” or “do you know where you’re coming from?”

I remember having an argument with my mother once over our culture’s most effective shaming tool, “What will people say?”

That sentence alone has redirected more lives than we care to admit.

Our culture places the weight of other people’s opinions on our backs and calls it discipline. Over time, it becomes unbearable to carry. And so, some traditions, rather than serving us, begin to hold us down. They stop being assets and become anchors.

The cost of this weight is real. Shame, anxiety, guilt, pretense, and the constant need to perform. And what makes it even more complicated is that this pressure often comes from love. From parents who believe they are protecting us. From elders who fear change. From communities that survived hardship by clinging tightly to structure.

But love can still limit us.

Here is what I believe

We do not have to swallow everything whole. We are allowed to choose what serves us.

Take Ubuntu, for example, the idea that I am because we are. It does not mean self-erasure. It means interdependence, not self-sacrifice. Respect for elders does not mean blind agreement, elders can be wise, and elders can also be foolish. Family loyalty does not mean covering up abuse or dysfunction, it means love, truth, and standing by one another through life’s real trials.

Reclamation is active, not passive.

We choose what we keep. We choose what we release. We choose what we reinvent.

Reframing culture makes space. For instance:

• Respect can mean listening without surrendering your voice.

• Family honor can mean breaking cycles, not preserving harm.

• Womanhood can mean capacity and agency, not endurance at all costs.

Claiming culture on your own terms might look like attending family gatherings while refusing silence when something is wrong. It might look like keeping your language, your food, your rituals, while rejecting expectations that diminish you. It might look like marrying differently, parenting differently, working differently, dreaming differently.

This does not make you a traitor.

I still feel the tension. I still feel guilty when I make decisions my family wouldn’t make. And I am learning slowly, that guilt does not automatically mean I am wrong.

Let me tell you a recent funny experience.

I saw a video content Eric Gugua made about parenting blunders as regards dating in secret that have been long standing and established unspoken rules in African households. You know situations where kids keep their love interests secret until it gets to marriage and sometimes make irreversible mistakes en route. I downloaded the video and sent it to my extended family group that has my parents and all uncles and aunties in it. Since I shared that video, no single person has said anything.

Let every body’s conscience judge them. We will all be fine. lol.

Your version of “African” does not have to look like everyone else’s. You can be fully African and ambitious. You can honor your roots and create new things. You can speak your language and think in English. You can wear the crown, and own it fully.

A Cultural Audit

This week, I invite you to examine your relationship with culture, not to reject it, but to understand it.

Try this simple audit:

1. What I’m Keeping
List cultural values or practices that nourish you. Maybe it’s communal care, storytelling, respect for elders, hospitality, spirituality, or language.

Ask yourself: Why does this serve me? How does it strengthen my life?

2. What I’m Releasing
List expectations or traditions that shrink you - silence, guilt-based obedience, gendered limitations, harmful rites.

Ask: What has this cost me? Who benefits from my compliance?

3. What I’m Reinventing
List elements you are reshaping. Maybe marriage on your own timeline. Career without apology. Family loyalty with boundaries.

Ask: What would this look like if it truly supported my well-being?

You don’t need perfect answers. Awareness is the beginning of agency.

Culture Is Alive

Reclaiming your culture on your own terms is not just personal, it is leadership.

Every time you choose what serves you instead of what diminishes you, you set a precedent for the women coming after you. Culture does not evolve through silence. It evolves through people who love it enough to question it.

You are not rejecting your roots by choosing differently. You are tending to them.

Your culture is not a debt you owe.
It is an inheritance, and you get to decide what to do with it.

The strongest thing about our traditions isn’t that they stayed the same. It’s that they changed to keep us alive.

Keep that spirit.
Keep what works.
Release what doesn’t.

That choice, that agency - is one of the most African things about us.

It was about a 20-year-old girl. Barely out of her teens. She had lived in the city with someone who took her in rent-free. She worked with an industrial cleaning agency. On the side, she was learning fashion design, free of charge, at the hands of her boss’s friend. She was acquiring skill, independence, and something even more fragile: options.

Then she quit.

She stopped learning the skill. Left the city. Got married to a man she barely knew because “her people said so.”

A year into the marriage, she reached out to her former boss. She was heavily pregnant. Her body bore marks that told a story before her mouth could. Her husband beat her and left her for dead.

Her boss took her back in. Cleaned her up. Helped her restart her training. For a moment, it seemed like the story might turn.

But a few weeks after giving birth, she returned to the abusive marriage. Because her mother-in-law said so.

When I finished reading, I didn’t just feel sadness. I felt unsettled. Not because the story was unfamiliar, but because it was familiar.

Every young woman knows a classmate, a peer, a neigbour, a cousin or a daughter of a family friend, who has a different version of this same story.

I kept wondering: what kind of woman was she becoming?
And then the more uncomfortable question followed: what kind of woman am I becoming?

You might ask, why am I bringing this up? You don’t know her. I don’t know her.

I’m bringing it up because, in quieter and more socially acceptable ways, many of us are like her.

There is often a painful gap between who we think we are and who we actually are. Between who we say we want to become and who our daily choices are shaping us into. And the reason we don’t always notice that gap is because there are so many voices narrating our lives at the same time — family, friends, culture, religion, media, social media, even our own fear dressed up as “wisdom.”

So, this letter isn’t really about her.

It’s about you.
And it’s about what’s at stake if you never pause to ask, Who am I becoming?

Living Inside Other People’s Scripts

Many of us grew up with scripts handed to us early.

Be a good daughter.
Be a respectable woman.
Be educated - because you must represent the family well.
Don’t embarrass us.
Don’t fall behind.
Don’t ask too many questions.
Don’t be ungrateful for the sacrifices made for you.

In many African contexts, especially for women, success is not just personal, it’s communal. You are not just you; you are proof that the family did not suffer in vain and evidence that God answers your mom’s prayers. You are the example that the school fees were worth it and that someone “made it out.” And maybe in extreme cases broke “generational curses”

And these expectations are not imaginary. They are real. They come with love, history, and genuine concern. This is not a story of villains and victims. It is a story of pressure.

Pressure to marry on time.
Pressure to choose stability over curiosity.
Pressure to endure because “others have endured worse.”
Pressure to be grateful even when something inside you is slowly shrinking.

So, we learn to split ourselves.

There is a version of you that shows up with your parents, careful and agreeable.
Another version with your boss, competent, restrained and endlessly capable.
Another with your girlfriends, honest, playful, sometimes exhausted, sometimes taking things “too deep”
Another with your partner, negotiating how much of yourself is allowed and struggling to get some “independence clauses”

And over time, it gets harder to remember which one is you.

We make implicit promises by accepting certain paths:
If I take this job, I will not complain.
If I marry this person, I will endure.
If I accept this opportunity, I will not want more.

Family love, in these moments, can quietly tangle with control. Not always out of malice, but out of fear. Fear that your difference will cost you safety. Fear that your deviation will invite hardship. Fear that your independence will break something sacred.

And so, we carry guilt. Guilt for wanting something different from what was planned for us. Guilt for being tired of a life that looks successful on paper. Guilt for feeling empty in rooms we prayed to enter.

Some of us are applauded, promoted and even admired yet privately depleted. We have become everything we were asked to be, and almost nothing we intentionally chose.

That is the quiet danger.

Not dramatic collapse.
But slow disappearance.

Becoming Is Not Passive

Here is the truth most of us were never taught: becoming is active.

You are not just becoming by accident. You are becoming by repetition. By compliance. By the questions you refuse to ask. By the discomfort you keep swallowing.

There is a difference between who you were told to be and who you are becoming. And the gap between those two widens when you outsource authorship of your life.

“Who am I becoming?” is not a question your family can answer for you.
Not your pastor.
Not your friends.
Not even your younger self with all her idealism.

It is a question you earn the right to ask by paying attention.

What would shift if, even quietly, you stopped asking “What do they want?” and started asking “What do I actually want?” Not what makes sense. Not what sounds impressive. But what feels honest.

Clarity is not rebellion.

You do not have to reject your culture, your family, or your faith to choose differently. You do not have to burn everything down to tell the truth. Sometimes clarity is simply naming what is no longer yours.

Becoming yourself does not happen in one dramatic decision. It happens in small acts of honesty. In noticing when your body tightens around certain expectations. In admitting when something that once fit no longer does. In speaking up instead of smiling through clenched teeth. In “changing it” when it becomes necessary without being disrespectful. Put in nicer words, ‘standing your ground.’

For many women, the hardest permission to give is not permission to succeed, but permission to want. To desire without immediately justifying it. To imagine a future that was not pre-approved.

Your life is not a group project.

It is yours to author—even if you are still learning the language.

Sitting With the Question

This week, I don’t want you to overhaul your life. I want you to observe it.

Here are a few gentle practices you can sit with:

1. Notice your shape-shifting.
Pay attention to the moments you become a different version of yourself. In what rooms does it happen? With whom? What do you gain by shrinking or expanding there? Don’t judge it, just notice.

2. Write down three things you want that surprise you.
Not things that sound responsible. Not things you can easily explain. Things that make you feel slightly exposed. Then ask: what fear lives underneath each one?

3. Have one honest conversation.
With someone you trust, say one thing you actually want, not what you should want. Notice how it feels in your body to say it out loud. Relief? Fear? Grief? That response is information.

You are not trying to fix yourself. You are trying to meet yourself.

That is enough for now.

Here’s my Invitation

I keep thinking about that young woman—not just the choices she made, but the questions she may never have been allowed to ask.

I don’t know who you are becoming.

But I know it is not fully captured by your CV, your relationship status, or your ability to endure. I know it is shaped in the quiet moments when no one is watching, and in the courage that it takes to listen to yourself anyway.

After some time away, living, observing, and sitting with questions I couldn’t rush, I’m back. Not with answers, but with intention.

This year, I want to write about identity, leadership, agency, and the women we are becoming in contexts that never planned for our autonomy. I want to sit with the uncertainty, not rush past it. I want to tell the truth gently and clearly.

So, I’ll ask you the same question I’m asking myself:

Who are you becoming - really?

If this stirred something, I’d love to hear from you. Reply. Comment. Share with a friend who might need the question.

This is Week 1.
And this is the work.

If this email feels a little different, it’s because… it is.
We have a new name (Letters by WorldClassAmara) and a cozy new home on Substack!

I know you may be wondering why we have a new house….
It’s because our former house became too tight. I’ll be honest with you, I was using Mailchimp earlier; you may have noticed. Our family got too full, 496 people, and they informed me that we can’t take more than 500 family members in that house.

So…

We had to move to a new apartment. Absolutely nothing else has changed.

Okay, scratch that. Our Name Changed

That one, eh? It’s simply because I feel like the new name will help my creative juices to flow better. You know, it makes me feel like Apostle Paul, writing to the Christians in Antioch.

You know that meme that reads,

As always, you can expect stories, lessons, and little nudges that help you grow into the best version of yourself, with a sprinkle of humour, many doses of honesty, and a cup of “yes, you can” each time.

I must confess, I have extended this starting over for the longest, for several reasons. You know what happens when you give “an” excuse? You will soon discover you have a whole palace of excuses, but one thing I have learnt and I’m currently practising is the quote below.

“Don’t be afraid to start over. This time, you’re not starting from scratch. You’re starting from experience.”

What is Inside Today’s Letter?

Exactly what you read before getting here: the announcement of our new name and medium. I have many other things to tell you. I essentially want to bare my heart to you through these letters. Everything I think and experience about growth, leadership, success, adulthood, politics and everything in between.

The next letter would be about the book I read last month. The name is “Thinking for a Change” by John C. Maxwell.

I’m so glad you’re here, whether you’ve been reading my emails for months now or this is your first time. This is more than a newsletter; it’s a community. A safe, vibrant space to grow, laugh, learn, and glow.

Now that we no longer have the restriction of space in our house, I’d be thrilled if you invited a friend (or five) to our family. The more we grow, the brighter we shine.

Until next time

(which is tomorrow morning, by the way),

💜 Amara