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Lucy Oriang’
There’s nothing more fascinating to me than a woman with an attitude. Being prim and proper is very worthy — and deadly boring.This probably explains why there is almost always an outrageous mistress behind every conventional marriage. But feel free to ignore that piece of mischief. It is not so much that there is anything wrong with the good woman. There is safety in conforming to the standard, after all. Being good has also been known to yield high value returns. It is just that being virtuous can be such a pedestrian existence, especially when it is rammed down your throat and not a product of your free will.
Worse still, you can die of being good. Witness the loyal women who have stuck in abusive marriages literally “till death do us part”. The principled way is a gamble that often does not pay off, especially in the freewheeling world of African politics.
So there I was, being a good and faithful servant, when I stumbled on a recent story in The Citizen titled “Activist calls for gender revolution”. Finally, something to get the adrenaline going!
The call to action came from none other than Bineta Diop, a Senegalese gender activist who made it to the list of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world in 2011.
Diop argues that women have been victims of discrimination for much too long. Yes, Ma’am, you can say that again. Speaking at a recent workshop in Arusha for women leaders in East and Central Africa, the founder of Femmes Africa Solidarite rolled out a list of the virtues women can bring to leadership.
We can help end poverty and ignorance. We can make Mama Afrika a better place to live in. Amen! We can be hell on a pair of legs too, but that’s a story for another day.“It is high time we started to identify women with potential to catalyse economic growth and conflict resolution and with high qualities to take up high leadership positions in the continent,” Diop reportedly declared. Huh, did she really say that?
I am not going to do the foolish thing and argue with these high sounding sentiments. But I am going to go slightly off road and ask what the heck we have been waiting for all these decades if we have yet to start shopping for women “with potential”.
Ma’am, we have the paper qualifications. We have the experience. We have the qualities it takes to rise to the top.
We’ve gotten rather good at walking and chewing gum at the same time. For pity’s sake, Liberia has just given Ellen Sirleaf-Johnson a second term on probably one of the hottest presidential seats in the world. What more do the doubters out there want, blood?
With all due respect to the delegates around the table in Arusha, who no doubt comprised the top cream of professional womanhood, we must learn to use the language of power. No grovelling, please. This is how the superior side of the species lost out in the first place.
Women must drop this business of asking for permission to sit at the high table. No Bineta, you do not ask African governments to “put women in the forefront in the struggle against poverty and ignorance”. They have little incentive to do so. They’d rather use and dump you, home and away. Except in a handful of countries, such as Tanzania, African women have been running on the spot politically for much too long.
If we want our interests taken care of, tune in to the other saying that has been drilled into women: If you want the job done properly, do it yourself.
We got the sequence of events wrong right from the beginning. To get anywhere, we need to operate from a position of strength. Sitting on our hands won’t help. I have it on good authority that there is nothing men fear more than women on the rampage. The problem is that our house is often divided.
Can we pull off a gender revolution? I am not going to trot out the predictable arguments that women are their own worst enemies. I am going to say “pooh” to the much-maligned “petticoat revolution”—unless it is woven with golden thread, of course.
Seeing all those women, young and old, putting their lives on the line in the Arab Spring has changed my worldview and fired my imagination. But before we walk off into the rosy future, there is the small matter of pay-offs. Would a gender revolution necessarily benefit women?
Women’s liberation definitely opened up some room for manoeuvre for millions of women worldwide. But it also created battalions of exhausted women struggling to make the best of both worlds. We got responsibility but not power. I look forward to the day the order of that equation changes.
The writer is a consulting editor at The Citizen
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