Babu Ayindo
In this article, I intend to stand in solidarity with my mothers and sisters by sharing my experiences that reveal some disturbing similarities between racism and oppression of women. I hope that this can contribute to the debate on sex, gender and humanity. Let me begin with a true story.
I recall, like it was yesterday, I had just handed my father my grade four end of term report card. Previously, I had maintained first position in my class for several grades but this time things were a little different. My father paused, stared and asked whose child it was who had beaten me to second position. I then mumbled “Angelina Tanda.” What shocked me was that my father was particularly troubled by the name Angelina. He just could not understand why I had “allowed myself to be beaten by a girl.” For him, this was sufficient evidence of not only how I had been joking with education in general, but also how prepared I was to let down the male species in particular. Of course, he was not going to let me let men down.
What followed was predictable. He democratically informed me that he would whip me so that the message would stick in my “medulla oblongata.” The rest is history. In a way, this exemplifies how my perceptions about myself in relation to girls and women were shaped from home to the wider society. It has been a continuing struggle to transcend the consequences of the stereotypes about females and males.
The germ of my struggle with my supposed male superiority, or to be more specific, male “superiority simplex,” was almost accidental. At my first year at university, a friend handed me a book with a rather arrogant title I Write What I Like by one anti-apartheid activist, Steve Biko. Overnight I read about white oppression in apartheid South Africa through the eyes of a young Black philosopher and activist. What struck me most about the book was the similarity between the arguments whites made about blacks to justify oppression and the ones men make about women to justify oppression.
I wish to share at least five counts of these similarities as I see them today:
1. Do women and blacks have small brains?
Former president of Kenya, Daniel arap Moi, is on record as having publicly declared that women would have achieved a lot “had it not been for their small minds.” Let us consider that for whites to justify oppression of blacks they came up with “studies” that “revealed” that blacks had black spots on their brains and were, therefore, incapable of rigorous intellectual pursuit. Of course, this is nonsense. But to date, people of African descent are still struggling to undo these fallacies that have affected both how African perceive themselves and how they are perceived by non-Africans. I suggest that men use the very same logic that whites used to justify oppression of non-white peoples.
2. Are blacks and women emotional?
Again, I have read quite a few writings that blacks are incapable of rational and logical thinking. Blacks are too emotional, they say, that is why they only excel in song and dance. Now is this not what we also say of girls and women? Part of the problem is the way knowledge systems categorize intelligence and emotion. In my view, emotional intelligence is a very positive energy that is widely under-utilized. A priest friend of mine insists that we are at our most intelligent when our intellect is in touch with our emotion. In other words, we need to debunk the myth that using the head – and presumably being non-emotional – is more superior than using other sources of intelligence.
In other words, men are not more intelligent that women just because they are socialized not to cry. I am not a psychologist but I wish to venture that because men are socialized to bottle up emotion this might actually contribute to stifled growth in intelligence. If we argue that women are intellectually inferior because of their overwhelming emotional tendencies then, should we not, by the same token, accept that blacks too, are inferior to other beings, on account of their “imbalanced” emotions?
3. Did God ordain our suffering?
The most heinous schemes of apartheid were to distort the Biblical message to justify wanton oppression. Some whites of apartheid South Africa and racist America comfortably told lies “on behalf” of God. It was common to meet with strange tales about blacks being the descendants of Ham, one of Noah’s sons. We all know the story. Since blacks are the descendants of the son who laughed at their naked and drunk father, so the story went, they were cursed to suffer and serve the descendants of the son who was abundantly blessed because he clothed his father.
Now, I recall having a discussion with some Catholic seminarians on the question of why women should not be ordained priests. The arguments were, of course, very familiar. Here was a group of young men giving biological and psychological reasons, or excuses to be more precise, about women being “unordainable.” In any case, they concluded, it was “against the will of God.” With enthusiasm, they even went back to the Bible with a “super-market” approach and picked up the “relevant” verses that supported their arguments – the same thing that whites did to blacks!
4. The Strategy of Integration
At a recent workshop in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe, a woman raised a simple, yet fundamental question. How comes, she posed, that men, even though a minority in the world, have exercised domination over women for centuries? One answer is the male strategy of integration. In other words, men create structures that mask the extent of women’s oppression. Then, they create a few women in their own image and likeness and allow them to sit together with them in positions of power and privilege. As well, such women serve another useful function: pacify the rest of their kind.
Look at it another way, at the height of apartheid, we had a few blacks who were at the top, or were made to think they are on top of the hierarchy. The same thing happened in the Civil Rights Movement in the USA. That is why we have many blacks who were not sure whether they are white, black, yellow or brown in the same way we now have women in positions of authority in patriarchal system who are not too sure whether they should behave like men or women or boys.
The effects on identity and self-definition affected other non-African peoples. I have met some lighter skinned people who were convinced they were better than blacks merely because their skin color was a little lighter. In other words, a little closer to white!
5. Trivializing the Problem
Another strategy that men have used is to trivialize the problem. I recall a discussion with a white South African in Johannesburg who painfully tried to convince me, without my asking him, how the world had terribly misunderstood apartheid. He painfully detailed how apartheid actually was a cultural-sensitive strategy of the liberation and development of the whole of South Africa.
Here was a man trying to explain away the evils of apartheid in the same way we men wonder why women make noises with all opportunities provided for their taking. We trivialize the fact that our systems are set up to favor men.
In my study of liberation movements in Africa, one stark irony is that even the best of liberation movements hardly recognized and confronted the oppression of women within the rank and file. When women highlighted these contradictions, the matter was quietly swept under the carpet where, for the most part, they lie to date.
A final Note
Finally, my interaction with women’s studies tells me that women are not interested in becoming men. In fact, that would make the world very boring. Women are simply demanding they be respected and treated as human beings who are not in the world by accident.
Let me end by recalling an insightful sentence penned by one Herbert Vilakazi in the book, African Renaissance. He argues beautifully: “In order for people of European ancestry to regard and treat the Africa as ‘semi-animal’, they themselves had to bow down to the level of ‘semi-animal.’ What Vilakazi is telling us today is that a man who dehumanizes a girl or a woman actually has to dehumanize himself first. In other words, by respecting and treating women as humans, men would actually be humanizing themselves, first and foremost!
