[2] During her time at the School of oriental and African Studies, University of London she earned a certification in Hausa.
[3] She was a research fellow for a year at the University of Nigeria, Enugu, and taught and lectured in the UK, Canada, US and Senegal.
[3] Her fieldwork in Africa resulted in two ethnographic monographs relating to the Igbo: African Matriarchal Foundations (1987), and the award-winning Male Daughters, Female Husband (Zed Press, 1987).
[5] The latter is considered groundbreaking as it was a number of years before the articulation of queer theory,[6][7] it argued that gender, as constructed in Western feminist discourse, did not exist in Africa before the colonial imposition of a dichotomous understanding of sexual difference.
[4] As a poet she participated in Festac '77, the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture,[10] and her 1985 collection, Passion Waves, was nominated for the Commonwealth Poetry Prize.