Nigerian women, Agentic lives II
Izzy’s imperfect ending, a beautiful beginning…..
Arriving somewhere safe and free did not mean arriving somewhere healed. Trauma does not work like geography. What became clear to Izzy in the UK, over time, was that her capacity for intimacy had been restructured by years of transactional sex. She could not enjoy physical intimacy and trying to have sexual relationships (particularly with Nigerian men) felt uncomfortable in ways she struggled to name. What she describes is the specific kind of damage that comes from a body being used, repeatedly, outside of any framework of consent or desire: the way it eventually stops registering pleasure as separate from transaction, or stops being able to locate the boundary between the two at all.
Her response to this was not to perform wholeness she did not have, instead she went to therapy, figuring things out incrementally. She was honest with herself about what her body needed to relearn, and she found ways to do that relearning on her own terms. There is a radical honesty in how she discusses this that is both unusual and important: she refuses to allow the damage to be invisible, but she also refuses to be defined by it. She has a husband who sees her fully and has not required her to pretend. She has children. She has, by her own account, turned lemon into lemonade, using the metaphor as a precise description of what it means to insist on a life that is yours despite everything that was done to it.
She is also clear that healing is not the same as being fixed. Izzy was diagnosed with PTSD and still carries what Italy did to her. But she has made something out of this heavy burden, and she has done it without waiting for an apology from anyone.
“Protect a Girl Child”: Institutional Accountability and What Justice Actually Looks Like
Seven years after arriving in the UK, Izzy wrote three letters: one to the UK government, one to NAPTIP (Nigeria’s National Agency for the Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons), and one to the Oba’s palace in Benin. The UK responded within two weeks, informing her that the government spent five million pounds annually to support anti-trafficking efforts in Nigeria. Nigeria however, did not respond. Izzy has not forgotten this.
Her position on NAPTIP is not hostile so much as precise: according to her, they are not doing their job and they know it. The load is too large, the resources too small, the structural incentives too misaligned. What Izzy wants from NAPTIP is not a press release. She wants them to sponsor her book which she describes as a full-length account of her experience, and proposes that her book should be distributed to every girl child in Nigeria. She believes, and has said confidently, that this proposed book would do more to create awareness and protect girls than anything NAPTIP is currently doing. As it would be coming from a trafficking survivor, someone that has “been there”, she may be right.
When people respond to her videos by blaming her mother for what happened to her, Izzy points out something so obvious it should not need saying: she has a father. He is alive. He is, in fact, living with her in the UK and yet no one is making videos blaming him. This is the gendered logic of accountability in action prevalent in Nigerian online discourse. By our society’s logic, when something goes wrong (particularly with a child), the nearest woman is held responsible. Her mother, who has since died, has been posthumously tried in TikTok comment sections for the actions of traffickers. Her father has not been mentioned. This, Izzy sarcastically declares, tells you everything you need to know about what Nigerians mean when they call men the protectors and providers of their families.
On a larger scale, the accountability she is asking for is not symbolic. She is asking the Nigerian government to do its job. She is asking adults in Nigerian communities across Europe who see young migrant girls in obvious distress to intervene: to call the police, to speak up, to stop being convenient witnesses. She is asking people to stop performing outrage in comment sections and start asking what it would take to actually stop this. Italy, she says, is just the tip of the iceberg.
She has been talking about her experience for seven years on social media. This recent series of TikTok videos that brought her to wider attention is an act of extraordinary patience with a world that has been slow to listen. Izzy Ogbeide survived something that was designed to consume her, and she came out the other side not diminished but clarified. She knows what she wants to say. She knows why it matters. And she has, in her own words, absolutely no time left for the people who never protected her telling her how she is allowed to speak about it now.
For me, Women’s History Month 2026 has been a sober one.
I have been sitting with the particular weight of being a Nigerian woman at a time when the failures of Nigeria towards its women, towards its girls, feel less like aberrations and more like policy. These failures do not begin at the national level. They begin in the family home, in the silence of a father who is never blamed, in the education a girl child is the first to be pulled out of when money gets tight, in the dreams of living “abroad”, away from home, that is dangled in front of young women as opportunity and is sometimes something else entirely, mirroring or amplifying terrors young women try to get away from back in Nigeria. They accumulate through communities that shame survivors and protect perpetrators, through religious institutions that preach female submission and male authority, through a government agency created specifically to address trafficking that cannot be moved to respond to a letter from one of its own citizens. The failure is systemic and it is intimate at the same time, living both in big structures and in the small, everyday decisions of ordinary people who look away.
I know something about the immigrant life in Europe. Not Izzy’s life, but enough of the texture of it to recognise what she is describing: the way the diaspora can close around you like a second country with its own rules, the transactional nature of belonging, the exhausting gendered performance of being fine. What I did not have, and what I want to name plainly, is what Izzy had to survive before she got to any of that. She arrived in Europe as a child and was immediately consumed by a system built on the disposability of young Black women. That she emerged from it with this much clarity, this much insistence on her own story, this much love for herself and for the girls who came after her, is no small feat.
To conservative, misogynistic, sexist, androcentric Nigerians, Izzy Ogbeide is polarising. She is too loud, too explicit, too unrepentant, too unwilling to be quiet about the things we are all supposed to be quiet about. To me, she is perfect. She is the fullest possible expression of what it looks like when a Nigerian woman who was given every reason to disappear decides, instead, to stay visible.
This essay is my small act of bearing witness to her. And to all the women like her whose tenacity holds up more of this country than the country has ever held up for them.
Read Part 1 of this two-part series here:
