There is something twisted about thinking that human freedom for some means oppression for others, or that one's freedom is dependent on another's oppression.
In the United States, freedom for slaves was portrayed as a threat to the white race, the extreme result of which was Jim Crow and the loss of thousands of lives through lynchings and race riots.
Martin Luther King addressed this logic by saying that whites were actually oppressed by the oppression of blacks. Unfortunately, the logic of "your freedom is my oppression" is so strong that it has twisted King's message to mean that blacks should feign historical amnesia in the name of forgiveness.
I will now tell you why I am going over the civil rights struggles in the age of Obama. Yesterday, my students launched the staple discussion of my writing classes: women are free and their freedom has made men lose their dignity.
A similar discussion in my last year's writing class was launched by a female student's sympathy for the lament about the oppression of the boy child "at the expense of" the girl child as the poster cause of NGO's.
She was not the only female student in that class who presented a project on the same theme; another one wrote a paper profiling Kenyan female politicians, arguing in absolutes, such as the fact that the presence of women MPs means that Kenyan women are now free. When I pointed out that women MPs are about 10% of parliament, she seemed to react like I was speaking Greek. If she was one of those clueless blondes in Hollywood movies, she would have asked me "yeah, so?"
I remember thinking during that semester that it is odd that Kenyan girls who have reached the university are ashamed to be there. In one breath they will lament that African women remain the poorest and least-educated members of society who also have to contend with physically mutilating traditions, murderous husbands and glass ceilings at the work place. But in the next breath, they will apologize for the few prominent women in seas of male-dominated professions and public arenas. So yesterday's discussion was déjà vu.
This time, the discussion started with the mention of single parenthood. In this day and age where the most powerful man in the world is the son of an absentee father, I was surprised that one would still think that single parenthood is a handicap. When I prodded further on why single parenthood would be such a challenge in today's society, the answer was that women are free and they are no longer depended on men survival.
Such thinking is archaic. But it is not only archaic; it is also built on lies and misconceptions. One of those misconceptions is that the reliance of a single parent on support from male relatives is evidence of dysfunction. That reasoning is surprising; given the way we Africans like to show off that our extended family ethic distinguishes us in this Euro-centric world. I pointed out that the extended family was the spine of the African society for everybody, not just for homes with only one parent. But again, I suspect that I was speaking Greek.
The other misconception is that "long ago" African women were "housewives" who depended on their husbands for family income. I find that argument so annoying that sometimes I want to shout at the people who repeat it. The role of "housewives" who stay at home, bake and welcome their husbands with a chef-prepared meal while wearing an immaculate dress and fancy heels is a bourgeois fantasy that has nothing to do with African traditions.
African women have always worked. They farmed and fed the households, traded at the market, built houses and took care of livestock. So much so that in most African societies, land was not owned - it was managed by women for the sake of the home and the survival of society. Ifi Amadiume explains this matriarchal system in detail in Reinventing Africa: Matriarchy, religion and culture.
I pointed out to my students that the women's dependence they were talking about came with colonialism and the market economy it introduced. Since colonizers employed only men and educated only men, African women were denied access to resources which required money and Western schooling. To compound matters further, colonialism introduced land ownership solely for men, which meant that men now had the power to dispose of the land as they wished without consideration of the family and in disregard of the social good.
In fact, the bourgeois model of a housewife is so imperialist, it's not even funny. Historians of 19th century France have demonstrated that the concept of "femme de foyer" (women of the home) was introduced by the imperialist republicans who felt that the monarchy was supported by women and therefore women needed to remain at home and serve the husbands.
Moreover, the model of such a home was in turn the model of the empire, and so French women were encouraged to expand the empire by teaching African women to be bourgeois housewives. Mariama Ba and her heroines, as I have argued in my article "On Mariama Ba's novels, stereotypes and silence," were a product of this feminized imperialism.
Therefore, insisting that African women were housewives in the "good old days" is just as twisted as Mungiki insisting that women wearing long skirts is African when in fact it is Victorian. Moreover, it should be obvious that peasant women - whom some African men like to laud as the "real" African women - cannot afford to stay at home and expect their husbands' immorally meager earnings to feed the family.
The other misconception that has become a gospel is that of women demanding "50-50" share with their husbands in household chores. That lie is constantly repeated in the Kenyan media and blamed for the rise in divorce cases. An article in today's Daily Nation even lumps together marriages that end due to wife battering with those that end due to financial strain and lost love, essentially blaming women for domestic violence.
Frankly, I know of no woman who has done anything as dumb as demanding to split with her husband the household chores down the middle. And if anyone should have heard something like that, it should have been me who has been called a bourgeois woman.
In the era of fuel prices, inflation, food scarcity and limited opportunities for children's education, women have better things to do than bicker with their husbands about who is putting sugar in tea. In any case, in most homes the household chores are shared, rather than left exclusively to the mother and wife. By the time they are adolescents, most children prepare tea for guests and meals for the family, or there is someone employed to do that work.
Lies and misconceptions is one thing. There is nothing worse than the philosophical thread underlying the distorted gender history of Africa, which is essentially the belief that African men's freedom is dependent on African women's oppression, and so if African women are free, African men become oppressed.
It is anti-human to think that one person's freedom is another's oppression, because oppression disfigures both the oppressor and the oppressed. In the case of Africa, the real oppression is the anti-human Euro-centricism, entrenched through slavery, colonialism and capitalist dominance, which dismisses the public good, distorts African dignity by transforming us into ravenous wolves who prey on our own families and societies.
That same anti-humanism has made men in Congo spend their time mutilating women and treating them worse than animals, while leaving the West and neighboring African countries to exploit Congo's mineral resources basically unchallenged.
Patrice Lumumba fought against that kind of manhood when he sought to nationalize the country's resources for the benefit of the Congolese people. Thomas Sankara also fought against that manhood when he said that there can be no revolution when half the society is oppressed. Nyerere fought against it with the concept of a coherent social ethic through Ujamaa. Cheikh Anta Diop fought against it when he chronicled African history since antiquity and demonstrated that African civilization was unique because of it's matriarchal foundation.
These were real African men, men who understood that we all had to be free or none of us was free, that our oppression does not come from each other but from the Euro-centric system that turns us against each other. And these men went further than their understanding - they put their lives on the line to implement that understanding. They proved the point made by Mary Nyanjiru who challenged men to abandon their manhood if they were not going to get Harry Thuku out of jail. They are the sons of Queen Nzinga, Mekatilili wa Menza, Field Marshall Muthoni, Winnie Mandela and all those other women - famous and not - who defended the dignity of our entire society.
But rather than study our African history and believe in our human dignity as Africans, we continue to perpetuate lies about gender roles. Instead of African men and women talking with each other about freedom, we blame each other for our lack of freedom, leaving unchallenged the poverty, disempowerment and Euro-centricism that continue to batter our self-esteem, human dignity and our striving for independence.
Those lies make young African women apologize for freedom and make young African men lethargic. Every semester I see that dehumanization in the faces of my students. The young men slouch in their seats, waiting for the class to end, while the young women - who are the majority of students in both the class and the entire university - dominate the discussions, only to later write apologies for women's freedom.
We won't talk about the real source of that oppression because we don't want to be seen as "angry," "bitter," "violent," refusing to "forgive," or to "move on," or as "blaming colonialism for everything."
That is why I firmly believe that Pan-Africanism and Ubuntu remain the strongest theories of freedom for African peoples. They remind us Africans that the ultimate oppression we have suffered is the loss of our dignity and of our confidence in our humanity. If I am because we are, a liberated Africa is homeland where both African men and African women are not only free, but also living that freedom together.
