Lewis Ricardo Gordon, a professor of philosophy at Temple University, gives an interesting story about his time as professor at a university whose environment was hostile to black faculty. The faculty would park their cars next to the buildings where they taught, and then disappear once their classes were done. However, Gordon decided to be walking across campus to class. After some time, he says, "editorials began to appear in the school newspaper voicing anxieties over affirmative action and the ‘deluge' of black faculty," even though only 17 out of the 2,000 faculty members were black. It was then that Gordon realized that each time he was seen, he became "another black faculty member." In other words, he explains, he was ‘"seen' exponentially." One black person was one black person too many.
Those who have been following the reports about a woman in Nyeri who sliced the face of her husband and left him for dead might get what I'm driving at. Every time a woman commits a crime, or every time a woman leader makes headlines, the press interprets it as all ALL women being empowered, having jobs and beating their husbands. The press has been scaring the public with statistics about how these women are "everywhere" and are a threat to manhood. Yet the reality is that women form the majority of the poorest in Kenya, and they have a negligible presence in leadership positions in government, education and industry.
What infuriates me about this hatred and prejudice against women is the ignorance and sheer intellectual laziness that causes educated people, who should know better, to write such alarmist reports. Like the national elite described by Fanon in The wretched of the earth, the press and the professionals are too lazy to understand what oppression really is, and that what has paralyzed men is patriarchy; not women in power or women with pangas.
One journalist writes, for example, that "the male has been the dominant gender since the dawn of the human race. But, for the first time in history, this is changing with shocking speed." Yet, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ifi Amadiume, Karl Marx, Simone de Beauvoir, Gloria Steinem and so many others have explained that patriarchy developed over centuries with the changing material and intellectual conditions. In fact, Diop says, the distinguishing feature of the African cradle of civilization is its matriarchal foundations. Even African myths of creation do not talk of male dominance. Among the Agikuyu, for example, Gikuyu and Mumbi were created together, and were given daughters (tradition prevents me from numbering them), and those daughters provide the names of the clans. Even our African languages do not have gendered pronouns, and so God shares the same pronoun with people and animals, unlike in English where God is "he."
So what is this "since the dawn of the human race" that he is talking about? If it about the Jewish myth of creation in Genesis, then we need to start having a discussion about our African identity and psyche. The Bible introduced by the West has made us adopt the myths of others as if they are unbending truth. On a more technical issue, it is King James that distorted the Bible because English is a sexist language that separates gender. The word used in Genesis 1 is that God created "human beings," which in the Kiswahili is translated to "mtu," not "mwanaume," but which King James translated as "let us create MAN in our image."
Also, when that rare woman says that all she wants from a man is his sperm and not his person, she is talking from cynicism; not empowerment. She has assimilated the dehumanization of men as the norm, rather than as an abnormality. Such a woman has lost hope in men being human beings, and such hopelessness is not different from that of the young men trying to drown reality in alcohol. In any case, men have also reduced themselves to their private organs, for example Uhuru who made whether the president circumcised or not a matter for public discussion.
In other words, the biases against women being voiced are an expression of our ignorance and inferiority complex as African people. As long as Africans have not appreciated the extent to which Eurocentricism distorted our minds and twisted our souls to make us blind to the real, anti-human nature of oppression, we will make jokes when an African human being is sliced by another. Journalists must read, they must read, they must read. The kind of jokes and innuendo that they proliferating, at the expense of a man nursing his wounds in a hospital as a result of a CRIME (not women's empowerment, for heaven's sake!!!!), is unacceptable.
And let's stop pretending that all these laments about the social paralysis of men are about concern for men. Like in the Gordon's case, the concerns about Kenyan men are misogyny through the back door. There is an insane political leadership, impunity, corruption, a small group of elites played around with our economy like a toy, high commodity prices, high unemployment, grabbing of land for social facilities, but the problem facing boys is girls in the classroom? Give us a break.
