Sheila Ochugboju: Ph.D at 25, but 'unfulfilled' until motherhood

Born in Nigeria, she moved to the UK at nine with the only goal being to “study hard, get married and have children.”

After all that happened fast, she started stacking up her life with achievements and experiences: head of strategic communication, Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Consultant with the UNDP as a coordination specialist. The inaugural TED Africa Fellow and co-founder of Africa Knows, a knowledge management and media consultancy.

She is currently the Executive Director of the Alliance for Science, which promotes access to scientific innovation. She’s got the brains for science and the personality of a storyteller: quirky, effervescent, and enchanting. This means, as a plant biochemist, she quotes phrases like, “The fear of darkness is a protein.”

Where did it all start?

In a tiny village in Nigeria, where we lived until I was nine, I was then teleported to London to join my parents. I lived in the United Kingdom (UK) until I turned 40 and then came back to live in the continent, in Kenya, in 2009. But all through, I was trying to find my way home and just took a long way around (Chuckles).

Why did you want to find your way home?

Sighs) So, I’m an only child, which is a very unusual thing in Nigeria. When I was young, my mom got a scholarship to study in the UK. At the same time, my father got a Soviet scholarship to go to Russia to study medicine. And so it was a choice between who gets to go and who gets to stay behind. They decided they were not losing the opportunities, so they both went, and I grew up with my relatives.

I had the happiest childhood. I was a village child, loved by the village, the headmistress’s child, and then I went to the UK, and it was like darkness descended on my life. I didn’t understand what had just happened, where all the people that loved me had gone, and why everything was so big, and I was so small. (Chuckles)

I never quite got used to the dislocation. The homesickness was profound. This continued until I was a teenager, and my mother was convinced I would never settle. She began sending me home for extended periods, for long holidays.

But, you know, the thing about home is that it is not just a place; it's also an idea. And so for me, home, even though I went back, it was never the same because that moment in time is like a bubble of memory, isn't it? You go back, and yes, it's the same place, but it's not. And so you're always trying to get back to that moment. That sort of feeling has never left me, and it's been why I'm on this journey to find a home in Africa.

How's that going?

Very well. What I realised in the decade or more of looking for a home is that as you grow bigger, your cells are deposited in different places. It’s funny how you can go somewhere you’ve never been and find a home because a part of you recognises the place.

So I can go to Botswana and look at a dusty place and think, okay, this brings back a memory and then it’s suddenly like a flash of home. Home is dispersed into a bigger geography. How amazing is that?

Quite. Why is being in Africa, finding a home here, important to you?

I have a quote by Kwame Nkurumah [first Ghanaian president] on my fridge. It reads, "I'm not an African because I was born in Africa. I'm an African because Africa was born in me." So, there are many Africans who Africa was born in them, yet they're not necessarily Africans.

It's a composite feeling of being connected to a continuum of time, being connected to a big place, being small and big at the same time. I can't explain it. Like when I'm in the West, in big cities like London, they are physically big, yet small because I am isolated within the space. But in Africa, you're always larger, no matter how small you are.

What was the impact of being the only child in your family?

Huge. You know, it was always the thing. There's a saying in Nigeria, "An only child is like no child." (Chuckles). In Nigeria, the average birthrate is four to six children in a home. When you have one child, they say, "Oh, she doesn't have children."

Because of this, my mother would always introduce herself with a sense of apology. It was how she carried herself through life like she hadn't fulfilled her mandate as a woman. People pitied her! (Chuckles) It was that sense of not being enough, being very vulnerable.

I couldn't understand it, but everybody conferred with me, saying, "Oh you're just an only child. If anything happens to you, everything is finished." (Chuckles) So, there was the weightiness of having to be bigger, give more, and do more to make my mother feel safe.

My mother always felt very unsafe in the world and in life. She said, "If anything happens to you, I'm finished." That weightiness shaped my choices. I was always trying to make my mother as happy as I could. And, the only thing that made her happy, forget the PhD at 25 and other career accomplishments, what made her happy was the four children I gave her. Then, I fulfilled my role in life. Those are the four children in the picture behind me.

I have so many questions. What was the impact of all that on motherhood?

Oh yeah, I had no choice but to have many children. People said, “You will have many children for your mother.” My dad was always like, “Your mother needs children.” I was like, “I’m studying. I don’t even have a boyfriend.” Every stage of my achievements was crowned by people saying, “Good, now you need to find a husband.”

I was in my final year of doing my Ph.D. in biochemistry - I was in the lab all the time, depressed, because I could not think about anything else, but that didn’t stop people from flying in from Nigeria to tell me I needed to marry because if I got a Ph.D, no one would marry me. You know, your bride price falls the higher you climb the academic ladder.

My cousins were flying over, giving my number to random strangers who would call me up.

My self-esteem plummeted. I was advised not to tell these men I was doing a Ph.D. in biochemistry, to say I was doing agriculture, that I could help at the farm. (Chuckles)

Anyway, they introduced me to somebody in the end, and my self-esteem was at its lowest peak. I was so exhausted. He proposed after 16 days of our first meeting, and we married after three months.

Whoa.

Yeah. And then I had four children in five years. So I did everything. I did the most. (Laughs) My son is the youngest. He is turning 25 today. My eldest daughter is 30. The whole plan was to tick these boxes. It was hard, but perhaps not so hard because my mother was there; she had taken early retirement.

I was still in a daze. I mean, I feel that I kind of didn’t wake up for several years. I think that during my Ph.D. I was in a low-level depression point. I just sleepwalked through things. The children kind of woke me up. The thing is, children give you a reason for being every single day. It’s amazing how energising children can be, you know?

My peak achievement was getting a scholarship to do my post-doctoral research at Oxford University. I was doing cutting-edge research, and this was six weeks after I had my son. So I got the Daphne Jackson Trust Fellowship and was in the Institute of Virology in Oxford, studying genetically modified viruses for pest control. That was my life’s most challenging period, yet I achieved the most.

I had some landmark moments; I gave the Millennium lecture for the BBC at the turn of the Millennium on the Renaissance of African science. I was on stage with the late great Ali Mazrui and the African Liberation Day Talks, and at that time, Jacob Zuma was not yet president; he was also on the panel, and I was behind the scientists and prime ministers. So, my career had many landmark moments in that hard time.

What are the hard things you're currently doing?

Science communication is surprisingly hard, which shouldn't be the case because science is in everything. Every aspect of your life; what you eat, what you put on, is science. And yet people don't want to think about it. So, at the Alliance for Science, we are very much about how to enhance food security, health, and agriculture across Africa using frontier technologies.

How do you now develop drought-resistant crops? How do you bring about this green revolution that we haven't had in Africa? And even forget the revolution, how do we feed ourselves and leave no one behind? How do you bring about an abundance through improved seed varieties and improved inputs and give the farmer more choices?

How did your relationship with science start?

So my memory of it is as a child in Nigeria, just being given a lot of freedom to walk around in the village, going to the river, spending a lot of time looking at insects, leaves and frogs and cutting things up. I wasn’t discouraged that scorpions or snakes would kill me, I was told to be careful.

They took time to educate me and not stop me. That gave me the freedom and curiosity to investigate the natural environment and try to understand the world that I live in. But I didn't know necessarily that I wanted to be a scientist per se.

My father's a doctor, so he thought I would be a doctor. He took me to his surgery clinic but I just couldn’t deal with the suffering and death. However, I became curious as to what happens when one is sick. What does that mean for your cells? I was reading a book by a great writer called Joan Didion. The book’s called A Book of Common Prayer and it tells the story of a woman who's an anthropologist, who is curious about the world, why people live the way they live, and what they do. But then she gets disillusioned and says, "But observing people tells you nothing. You end up knowing nothing."

She decides to take up biochemistry. She said, "Biochemistry is the only science that tells you why people do what they do because it's encoded in their genes. And she had this phrase where she said, "Fear of the dark is a protein", which is not true. But it sounded wonderful. I knew that memory is a gap protein but I was drawn into that world, the idea that love perhaps is also just a biochemical reaction. It's just nothing else…What was the question again? [Laughs]

Do you ever suffer from imposter syndrome?

People ask me that and I find it funny. The answer is no, because, number one, people never expect much from me. They don't. It's not as if when I enter a room, people go, "Oh my God, she's so wonderful." They don’t. What most think is that she's a black woman. She's a scientist, a black African woman scientist. Okay. Expectations are already set pretty low.

The fact that I'm even halfway coherent can even say anything already. It doesn't take much to impress. I am shocked at how easily, especially in the international community, it is to impress people. They ask, "Oh my God, where did you learn this?"  I'm like, "Have you been to Nigeria? I'm not impressive in Nigeria." (Chuckles) I watch my people, this is not a thing. In the spaces I frequent, people’s expectations of people like me are low. So I don't have to do much.

What are your aspirations right now?

I can't tell you! (Laughter). But I always wanted to be Oprah Winfrey. (Chuckles) But Oprah 2.0. As in, the Oprah of science and development. What’s great about Oprah is not just that she's embracing and empathetic, but that she's a genre-defining person. She defined the storytelling space and then that space opened up a whole industry around the world.

But more importantly, it allowed people to tell stories with an openness that the world didn't have before. Her production company tells people what to read, she's also very spiritual. Oprah is such a whole woman. But she's a whole woman who is not an icon because of who she is in herself, but because of what she gives. So, yeah, when I grow up I wanna be Oprah. (Chuckles)

Did you stay married to that fellow who gave you those lovely children?

No. No. It ran its course. The way I describe it is when you're building a building, you put scaffolding and sometimes some relationships are just scaffolding. They're not the building but think they're doing the building. Scaffolding can be there a long time when you're building, offering support. And then when it’s done the scaffolding goes away, and you see the building.

I loved being married and I believe very much in marriage and the family and all of that and it helped me to grow as a woman, and as a person. It gave me structure. It gave me four gorgeous children. And yeah, and now I am in this building and I'm interested in what can happen in this beautiful building.

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