I have a rule of thumb; one that I think it truly would be great if all men were to adopt. It is that any time a dispute, an argument, or a quarrel crops up to do with feminism – what feminism means, how it impacts relationships, how it impacts families and on and on – I will automatically be certain it’s the feminists or those that side with them who are right. Before I go any further let me point out that not all women are feminist, and that in fact a great number of men are feminist, and so this isn’t a fight neatly demarcated between the genders. Personally, the thing(s) that turned be feminist, early on in my pre-teen years in fact, were the kind of injustices that the feminist movement was born to fight and rectify. As a child of course I couldn’t have worked it out to myself that women and girls doing every household chore – cooking, cleaning up afterwards by washing the dishes, sweeping the floor and compound and doing all this while (in the case of the mothers) also carrying out child-care duties – was an injustice, and a gross one. But, society said, this was the ‘natural order’ of things. Still, instinctually I felt there was something terribly wrong that women not only were expected to do all household chores – which, where I grew up, also included fetching the household water from creeks long distances away, whenever there wasn’t water in the communal standpipe where all neighborhood families accessed it – but that women also did the lion’s share of the hard labor, digging, weeding, or harvesting crops from family garden patches (those whose families owned plots of land anyway). I instinctually felt outraged that our mothers, aunties, all girl relatives, did all this work – which as children we boys too helped with, but which help could only relieve a little of the burden since we had to spend most of the day at school – while the men; our fathers, uncles, every grown male in the neighborhood mostly sat around playing cards or board games, drinking moonshine alcohol, and just lazing their time away. Which usually was after doing whatever work it was by which they earned their meagre incomes. The men went away in the morning to vend stuff in the market, to vend milk by the cup, to perform casual labor at building sites, to hustle any way they could. When they came back home in the late afternoon, ‘baaaaasi’, no more thing called work! It was relaxation time spent in their idle activities, while the women slaved away in their households. It was completely unheard of for a man, a married one that is, to light up the sigiri charcoal stove to cook, or to wash the plates and saucepans, to get a broom and sweep the house, and similar other domestic chores. If the wife became sick, they better communicate to their sister, cousin, or whoever the nearest female relative was, to help. How unfair! I took to asking, as my mind developed. How unfair, I thought, and all this before one pondered the power imbalances in households, the frequent incidents of men beating wives or perpetrating other forms of abuse, but societal norms demanding women take it silently...it was awful! When it came to African womankind in rural settings, man! Their suffering was something else. It was hell on earth. Those poor women were closer to beasts of burden than humans. They and their daughters fetched water from creeks backbreaking distances away, foraged for firewood in the bushes, cooked on traditional stone-tripod hearths while inhaling smoke, cooked, cleaned the compounds, and whatnot. They often did this moreover while either carrying a baby on the back, or nursing a baby on their breast, or soothing stubborn, crying toddlers, hustling to find something for them to eat, shooing them this way and that before they inflicted harm on themselves. I saw, firsthand, the plight of rural African woman when one time we went to live with one of my uncles, deep in a village setting of grass-thatch huts where things like electricity, running water, mosquito nets, and similar, were unknown. Obviously, life for our fathers, uncles, and other men in the places I came up in never was a cake walk. Far from it. But existence (I won’t call it life!) for the women was unimaginably dire. I cannot be wrong to say it was traumatic. All because tradition assigned women and girls so many back-breaking roles. By the time I was a secondary school-going kid, I thoroughly detested African men for their behavior. But then as a kid I was atypical, in that I was prone to reading – anything; any tattered piece of months old newspaper or magazine; any old novel missing its jacket and several pages... I read, enraptured, drinking in knowledge, of things far beyond where we lived. The knowledge I acquired in this way was supplemented with the television shows that a few times a week, mostly in the evenings, we went to watch at a generous neighbor’s house. With the information I gleaned over time, I came to understand that even in the countries of the white people, the bazungu overseas; even there, women were treated as second-class members of their societies, even though matters were a lot easier for them than their African counterparts. They occupied the same place in their societies. The women in Western societies, where the feminist movement started, happened to be much more fortunate in their circumstances in that they had universal access to household gadgets that steeply eased domestic chores, and none of them had to wield a hoe in a garden to grow food crops, or perform any other form of horrendously exhausting labor. Plus, theyalready were empowered by the pill, to plan their families, and didn’t have to have a child before the last one was weaned off the mother’s milk. Still, they fight, to overcome many lingering injustices. One can say a certain class of woman in our cities has attained the same level of freedom as their Western counterparts. These women, people like Sylvie Nsanga if I may use one example in our capital, fight, and not only for themselves but for those of their sisters living in far less fortunate circumstances. For goodness' sake, as men the first impulse, always, should be to side with them. Don’t get all defensive about something as small as a declaration that “men are trash”. So, what if they say that? What exactly does it take away from you as a man? Walk a mile in their shoes instead. Then side with them in their fight against hideous, millennia-old injustices.
