Let me tell you about a girl. She is a brilliant 12-year-old whose grades in school can see her attending an Ivy League institution in a few years. From time to time, she encounters family members who remind her of her gender when trying to force her to do kinds of stuff they believe are the exclusive preserves of the female folk. She hates this and never shies away from voicing her dissent.
Like her, this practice gets to me. And it gets me feeling bad each time it happens. I hate it when a girl is repeatedly told and ‘you are a girl o’. This happens when she does things the society believes should not be done by a girl, or when she is refusing to do something that society has labelled chores for girls.
In many homes, girls cook, wash clothes and keep the house clean. Boys watch television, play games and wait for the food to be served. So, these boys grow up to expect their wives to do everything. Men with this mentality will see my friend, Olola Seun Akioye, as from another world because he sees his role beyond just dropping the cash for the home to continue running. This still happens in a world where some of the best chefs in the world are men!
In Bisi Adjapon’s Of Women and Frogs, we see boys and men getting undue advantages just because of their gender. Esi, the heroine, rebels and is labelled a badly-behaved girl. Like many fathers in our society, her father, Edward, always sees a lady through her womanhood—her education counts less. He sees nothing wrong in Abena’s husband almost throwing her out of the window. All is well with Mansa’s husband pummelling her. To him, being a woman equals being the wrong one in any dispute with the man of the house.
Fellow women also help in putting down their folks. At a point, the young girl in Esi becomes fascinated by her own body, but her stepmother and sisters criminalise this and punish her. Her father and stepmother always drum it in her ears that the glory of a woman is in her husband. She is constantly reminded that equality, when it comes to man and woman relationship, is a mirage, and she must learn to live under a man’s shadow. In fact, she is made to feel men do not like educated women! In some other instances, her father makes her feel special, makes sure she gets into the best girls’ school and the University of Ghana—yet reminds her what vacuum will be in her life without a man.
She is deceived into what she assumes is an engagement to Rudolph who is planning to relocate to Hollywood. Her father pursues her from home, arguing that their traditional engagement is equivalent to marriage. She is heart-broken but nonetheless heads for Ibadan to stay with her husband. In Ibadan, her eyes open to the fact that Rudolph is not willing to sacrifice his Hollywood dream to start a family. So, when she falls pregnant, she is made to undergo another abortion, a development which marks the beginning of the end of their union. She soon heads for Dakar for a one-year stay as part of her French and Spanish degree programme, where she is forced to declare: “I am the queen of my body”.
Literature is a mirror of the society and Ayodele Olofintuade’s amazing novel, Lakiriboto Chronicles, shows this succinctly. It explores our biases against the female gender. She lays bare a world ruled by fears where we pretend a lot, where we fear to talk about rape. I am talking about a girl— a child— being raped by her father or an uncle. A strong woman is considered rude and unfit for marriage.
Fathers and mothers need to stand for their girls and make them feel equal to their brothers. Please do not tell my Opemipo to do something because she is a girl. Tell her to do it because she is a human being. Like her, Tolu, her younger brother, must clean, cook and do every other thing once he is old enough to do it.
There is another that also gets into me; it is when women fight each other because the husband or boyfriend of one of them is cheating with the other. When this happens, the man should be the object of attack, if there is a need for it. Men gloat when women fight each other because of them. Wives should fight their husbands and not the side chic. Women must stop stripping rivals naked and posting the pictures or videos on social media. It takes two to tango and your man should be the one to answer queries about his indiscretion.
Most times, when a woman cheats, she is in trouble, and when her man cheats, she is still in trouble of ensuring the other chic does not take the man forever. What a world!
Aside from the family unit, society also helps to put the female gender down. Our politicians are guilty in this respect. Every election season, each political party, especially the major ones, comes up with the ridiculous policy of exempting women from paying nomination and expression of interest fees. On the face of it, it looks good. But, these parties have other policies or practices that ensure women do not get the nomination.
I remember this practice when South African President Cyril Ramaphosa formed a cabinet with half of its members being women. One of the women, Patricia de Lille, is from the opposition. With our politics heavily monetised, women may lack the resources to out-bribe men. So, what South Africa just did is a good start.
The marginalisation of women in politics is just one of the many injustices the female folks face in our country. It is so bad that when a woman is doing well many of us believe she must have used the ‘bottom power’. Brilliant women abound and even when we acknowledge their brilliance, we still find a way to rubbish their records by attributing their rise to extraneous factors.
My final take: Like globally-acclaimed novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie urges, ‘we should all be feminists’ and by feminists I mean we should give women equal opportunities; we should stop telling a girl to do all the chores while the boys play ludo, and we should, as husbands, support our wives to be the best they can be. They are our better halves and deserve to live their dreams. If they choose to be housewives, all well and good, but we should not force it on them. Each partner in a marriage deserves respect, which should be earned and not forced.
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