On Sunday, March 8, we marked the International Women’s Day as we have done for many decades. In the past, there would be an impressive parade, speeches and a big feast to celebrate the day. Important women (and men) would come to the event, tout their achievements in the struggle for equality and make demands for more barriers to come down.  

The less important would watch and listen to all this from the other side of the ground and wonder whether what the big ones were saying also applied to them. Sometimes it sounded strange or distant and did not seem like the day belonged to them as well.

At the end of the celebrations, they would all go back home and life would go on as before.

That was in the past and the ritual was the same every year. Things have now changed.

We no longer have a big national parade. Instead, there are thousands of smaller meetings in all Rwanda’s villages. We do not have visitors drive in from the capital, say the right things and then go back to the city and wait for the next celebration in another part of the country and repeat the same things, with a slight variation, of course. This time they walk in from the neighbourhood.

Nor are the majority spectators or onlookers at an event intended to highlight their collective struggles and victories. 

At the local level everybody is an active participant because they are talking about things they know and experience everyday that affect their daily lives.

The shift in how we mark important events reflects a number of things.

In Rwanda today, we don’t do too much ceremony – not that we don’t like a big do – rather because we don’t want to be caught up in symbols and rituals and pay less attention to the real issues. Action and results matter more.

In addition, gains in gender equality are highly visible and are now largely taken for granted. There is therefore little need for a special spectacle to highlight problems that have been or are being addressed.  It makes better sense for everyone to celebrate these achievements at their level where everyone participates as an equal.

The most visible achievement is in politics. Mention Rwanda and gender equality in the same breath and the immediate response is: the country with the highest women representation in parliament globally, more than 60 per cent, and in cabinet, more than 50 per cent.

This is also increasingly happening in senior positions in other areas in the public and private sectors. That can be said of women’s participation in economic activity, especially in rural areas. One may say that this has always been the case. True, but they have been better facilitated to make their role a more gainful one.

In education, too, equality in enrolment in basic education has been achieved, in some places actually surpassed. There is also some progress in higher education.

With top world ranking and significant domestic gains, it is easy to be tempted by this success, feel satisfied and think that we have arrived, relax and enjoy the benefits. Falling into complacency would be a grave mistake. There are still other challenges to overcome.

The most mentioned is domestic violence where spouses are battered for any number of reasons, ranging from perceived failure to do one’s duty to accusations of neglect due to too much empowerment.

Domestic violence is more widespread than we think or care to admit. There is a misconception that it is only among the poor and less enlightened. It also happens among the elite, including those in top positions in government and the corporate world, only this rarely comes out in public.

If we are to achieve further gender equality, we must understand why this persists despite all the awareness campaigns, the policies and laws in place, and accompanying sanctions.

One possible reason for this behaviour is a sense of male insecurity resulting from the way they perceive gender equality or the way it has been communicated. Some see it as a sort of competition for power. For these, empowerment of some means disempowerment of others. Others see it as an attack of customary male privilege.

In Rwanda, this should not arise. We have a very apt definition of gender equality in Kinyarwanda. It is uburinganire no kuzuzanya (equality and complementarity). It seems, however, that the complementarity bit is usually forgotten or ignored.

This sort of male insecurity seems to manifest in other ways, such as in marriage where the order of ceremonies has been inverted, and marriage property regimes where the preferred option is increasingly separation of property. But that is a subject for another day.

In the days ahead, it will be important to address this growing feeling of insecurity among some men. Perhaps they feel they have been neglected and excluded. They must be brought into the conversation.

The views expressed in this  article are of the author.