The debate on gender equality brings a lot of African men I’ve had on the defensive topic with. Many of them prefer to disrupt the subject by doing something “Western” and seeing feminism as an unhealthy theory.
The problem is that many people, when we talk about gender equality, don’t really understand what we mean, and we hold various speeches about the impossibility of equality between two genders who do not have the same physical, physiological abilities and do not play forcefully same roles in society.
To be honest, if I were to take gender equality as an equation measuring the physical, physiological, psychological and even social function of women and men, I would be bluntly opposed to this theory because dear gentlemen, as hard as it is for you to admit, the Woman is superior to you physiologically, psychologically and even socially.
Oh yes! The complexity of the woman’s body that allows her to carry human beings and give life gives her a superiority that nature did not offer you. The social role that women have in the fact that they are life carriers is that of the vehicle of culture; a function that surpasses most of yours because culture is the foundation of any society.
Finally, the emotional attachment that a woman develops towards her children from conception to birth also gives her a psychological strength that enables her to endure more than you men. We are all born of a woman and our mothers are superior to us all. So when men take gender equality the way they see it, it is not their fault to complain but women who must be lowered to the worst level: to be unable to bear their offspring. We all agree that man and woman are not physically, physiologically, socially equal.
Now, let’s go back to the issue of gender equality, an agenda driven in part by Western countries that saddens you so much. Well here it is about legal and political equality, meaning that before the law, women and men must be equal. This is absolutely possible because laws are created by humans not nature. We cannot control our physiological differences because we are born that way. But when it comes to laws, it is humans who make them in their societies and it is unacceptable and unfair that in a society in which men and women must coexist, one is more privileged and have the power to abuse others.
In Western countries for the most part, up until the 20th century, women were not allowed to vote, they were not allowed to inherit or own property, and they were excluded from all decision-making sectors. In the United States, for example, women were allowed to vote in 1920 and in France, it was in 1944, a fairly recent date. And these rights were earned through the fight of women in these countries. It took several more decades for women to run for election, join the military, and earn just over half of what a man earns for the same job.
In the US, Labor Department data reveals that women earn 30% less than men for the same work done. So when we talk about gender equality, it’s about ending these injustices that punish human beings just because they’re women.
Some will ask me how is this engaging Africa. Well in many African societies, women were not treated unfairly as is the case in the West. Africa has known many queens and warriors such as Ravalona who resisted French occupation of Madagascar, the Amazons of Béhanzin who led the hard life to French soldiers in Benin, or Yaa Ansantewa, the Ashanti Queen who led a fierce and terrible war against the English in Ghana to name a few.
Unfortunately, when gay societies rubbed on us during colonization, they imposed their way of life on us. For Europeans at the time, a female leader and warrior was an outrage and an inadmissible thing that needs to be corrected. Thus, they imposed their laws on us, instilling a culture of inferiorizing women.
By reading “Ainsi soit elle” by Benoite Groult, a French journalist and women’s rights activist, you will discover the horrible way women were treated in Europe and more precisely in France. Once upon a time in France men could take their wives to the market and sell them to buy another one. One of the most popular and most educated French philosophers in French-speaking schools Alain said this: “I often want to ask women, why they replace intelligence” and to one of the most famous writers in France Baudelaire to research: “to love women intelligent women are a faggot’s pleasure.” As for Mirabeau, “great leader of the French Revolution”, he tells us: “We are the ones who make women what they are worth and that’s why they are worthless.” The list is very long and if I continue with the Balzac, the Rousseau, the Voltaire and other great French thinkers who were the light of France and the mirror of the country of human rights, I will end up resembling this being that Baudelaire describes in these words: “The woman is natural, that is, abominable.”
So Africa has been colonized by extremely misogynistic individuals who transferred some of this machism to Africans and established laws similar to their countries in our societies. It is so in Togo for example, a woman could not obtain a passport and/or leave the country without “marital permission” that is, the husband must authorize his travels otherwise “you don’t move”.
It was necessary for human rights defenders to denounce this injustice so that in the 1992 constitution it would be rectified. Before 1992 to be Togolese, you had to be either the wife or the daughter of a Togolese because the woman could not grant her nationality to her children or her non-Togolese husband.
Further, the code of people and family of Togo was simply the copy-pasted code of the family of France of the 1800s and it was only in June 2012 that it was amended, granting more rights to women before the law.
Togolese civil servants all contribute to the National Social Security Fund (CNSS) and these funds are used to pay their pensions and rights to their families if an accident happens to them. Although the same percentage is applied to the salary of men and women, the benefits are not the same for both genders. When a civil servant dies, his wife can touch a widow’s pension but when a civil servant dies his spouse gets nothing. Meaning that despite the woman’s contributions, her family does not enjoy the same benefits and rights as her male colleague.
This culture of educating men depends on women that western countries claim to fight in Africa today was born from them. When colonizers created schools in our societies, for many years they refused to enroll girls in these schools because Western schooled “indigenous” should serve as clerks in administrations and they didn’t recruit women. This culture has so been incorporated into our societies and modest families, parents prefer to send boys to school because there was no employment for a girl in school; a decision that was perfectly reasonable.
Besides, when Westerners settled in our country, they imposed their currencies on us, which became the unit of measuring wealth in our societies. Unfortunately, since only men could get paid for their work in European-occupied territories, only they could get rich, which has created an enormous economic gap between men and women in today’s Africa.
The debate on gender equality finds its place very well in this contemporary Africa, which has not yet decolonized itself from the machist and segregationist laws and cultures inherited from European colonization. So don’t tell me that feminism is only valid in Europe because today’s Africa resembles yesterday’s Europe where women face grave injustice and abuse caused by legal, socio-political, economic and cultural discrimination. And African women will have to fight to take back the place that was snatched from them in our societies.
While for Europeans, the struggle for gender equality is a step forward, in most African societies, it is a step backwards that requires women to fight to occupy the places of warriors, businessmen, leaders, doctors and teachers they occupied in the pre-colonial societies.
Gender equality in Africa is simply the decolonization of phallocracy in Africa.
* Farida Bemba Nabourema
Unabused African Citizen
