As an African Writer, I Do Not Enjoy Writing Happy Endings Sometimes.

Now this an honest confession, truth be told. And it’s not because I am a chronic pessimist or that I take delight in despair. No. It’s because happy endings, at least the type that exist in Western fantasies, often feel dishonest when written in the language of my people’s reality.

I stumbled on a couple of tweets recently. I don’t remember the exact handle, only the heaviness two left behind. It said something like, “My mother could have been so many things” “Nigerian marriages are cemeteries full of graves and women’s ambitions” And I swear, it wasn’t just a tweet. It was an obituary. For women’s dreams. For the childhood dance classes that stopped at puberty. For university degrees turned into house keys. For books never written, songs never sung, businesses sacrificed at the altar of “wife material.”

It shook something in me. Not because it was new, but because it wasn’t. I know those women. I’ve met them. Some birthed me. Some taught me how to cross my legs at the ankles. How to smile gently. How to silence ambition so that it doesn’t scare a suitor away.

And then I started thinking about literature. About how African women’s stories, especially when told by African women themselves, often don’t bother with happy endings.

Because how can you end on happiness when the middle is soaked in generations of grief?

You open a book by a Nigerian woman and brace yourself like someone about to enter a burning house because someone will lose a child, or a husband, or herself. And when the world reads it, they call it strong storytelling.

But I wonder, sometimes, if what they really mean is: look at how well she suffers.

Let’s not lie to ourselves, our literature is full of bruised women. Not because we enjoy portraying them as broken, but because that’s what many of us have inherited. Pain, packaged with our placenta.

Yet, these stories, as heavy as they are, are not tragedy porn. They are acts of rebellion. Because to write a woman’s truth in a culture that prefers it buried beneath layers of lace and silence, that is power.

Think of Nnu Ego in The Joys of Motherhood. Her story wasn’t about joy. It was about a woman bold enough to expect it. Or Yejide in Stay With Me, who refused to dissolve quietly into the margins of motherhood. These aren’t just stories of sadness. They are chronicles of resistance.

They are women, refusing to disappear.

So no, I do not always enjoy writing happy endings. Sometimes I feel like I owe our mothers and our aunties the dignity of being remembered fully, not just as survivors, but as women who dreamed of more. And if the stories must end in tears, then let them be honest tears. Let them be sacred. Let them mean something.

There’s a beauty in telling the truth. Even when it’s messy. Especially when it’s messy. Because, in a world allergic to women’s pain unless it’s prettified, these stories say, here it is, raw, unfiltered, unedited. That’s not just writing. That’s truth-telling. And truth-telling, my dear, is dangerous work.

The real magic is this: in telling the hard stories, we carve space for new ones.

For women who get to want. To rage. To rest. For characters who choose themselves, not out of selfishness, but out of survival. Out of sanity. Maybe, one day, I’ll write a story where the woman doesn’t cry into her wedding veil or bleed into her kitchen sink. Maybe she’ll laugh, loudly.

But even then, it won’t be a fairy tale. It will be real.

So yes, the stories are heavy. But they are not hopeless. They are blueprints. Maps to a new world. A world where a woman can say “no” without being called difficult. Where she can leave, and still be whole. Where dreaming isn’t a dangerous thing.

But I understand the longing for happy endings.

Sometimes readers don’t just want joy, they need it. They want to see a woman win, because maybe if she does, then they can too. They want that wedding that doesn’t end in tears. That baby that arrives in the final chapter like hope wrapped in soft cloth. That job, that dream, that escape. I understand. Because stories shape how we imagine freedom. And if all we see are women who survive but never thrive, who speak but are never heard, then what future are we offering?

But here is the rub: many of us aren’t writing fiction to discourage hope, we’re writing to mirror reality. And reality, in our part of the world, is still catching up.

Some of the struggles we write about are not metaphorical. They are happening now. This morning, somewhere in northern Nigeria, a twelve-year-old girl was handed over in marriage like a dowry is an eraser that can wipe out her childhood. Somewhere else, a woman was told that her miscarriage was her fault. That her silence is sacred. That her pain is dignity.

Our literature reflects these things not to normalize them, but to name them. Because silence, in our society, has never been neutral. It has always been permission.

So, while readers may crave stories that end in celebration, it’s important to know that some of us are still trying to wrestle with the beginning. With the fact that, from the start, African women have had to fight. Against culture disguised as morality. Against religion misused as control. And yes, we do hope that the future will allow more of us to write about laughter and love and liberation without it sounding like science fiction.

But until then, let us tell the truth. I will. I will write about the struggle, because sometimes, writing about it is the only fight we have. Writing is another form of advocacy as it is. And in writing it, maybe, just maybe, we’ll inspire someone to start their own.

So no, not every story ends with happiness. But every story we write, truthfully and fearlessly, is an act of rebellion. A candle lit in a room that has been dark for far too long.

And maybe that’s not an ending at all. Maybe that, too, is a beginning.