Treat Her Well

The progress of every society is tethered to how it treats its women. As the revolutionary Afrikan leader, Thomas Sankara had suggested, society is doomed to fail if one half of its members are relegated to the obscure background. Society is an arch that is better upheld in position by two pillars of equal height and strength, and it would indeed be folly to expect the arch to hold up with just one pillar. But sadly, many modern-day societies are still configured this way, with women always playing second fiddle to men; hiding in the background and positioned as liabilities to society, instead of being part of the asset ledger.

Our Afrikan societies are particularly notorious for their mistreatment of women. The more mistreated women are in a locality, the more likelihood of underdevelopment and miseducation in such a society. The girl child in some of our Afrikan communities are essentially commodities of their families; to be sold to the highest bidder for profit. Usually, she has been brought up to consider herself weak and eternally dependent on the male sex for life's provisions. Her weakness is brandished as proof of her femininity; the more openly weak she is, the more feminine she is considered. To be strong, independent and rational are unwomanly.

Marriage and raising her offspring are to be her primary dream and goal of life. To have greater aspirations is damn near discouraged, for reasons that are generally oppressive. She may desire to be successful, but not too much though, if not she would be threatening a man's natural ego, and hence she would be unsuitable for marriage; her one true "God-defined" goal. She cannot be as efficient as a man, never as capable of rational thinking as a man could, and definitely not as strong as a man is in all ramifications. She is not suitable for leadership, and her voice is easily misconstrued as noise.

But this narrative of weakness and irrationality that society had long fostered upon women has been proven times and times again by those women who broke through the status quo, to be very much untrue. It was very much like in Victorian times, when people of Afrikan descent were thought unfit for anything that required intellect or a thinking faculty. Negroes were deemed only suitable for tilling the fields and working the mills, and were definitely not worthy of the complex sciences and arts. As oppressive and as openly untrue as this was, this was the general opinion of society at these times; held not just by the European subjugators, but by the Negroes themselves.

History is littered with women who have proven that women folk can be mentally and physically strong, rational and capable of leading their lives independently. From the brilliant diplomatic wits of Cleopatra, to the imaginatively calculative mind of Ada Lovelace, to the military acuity of Queen Amina, we see women who have proven this narrative of weakness and irrationality to be untrue and unjustified. Unfortunately, the greatest purveyors of this narrative are often women themselves. Having being raised to consider themselves weak and irrational, most women truly do conform to the narrative, and would fight tooth and nail to keep other women trapped in the same oppression they had been in.

"It is divinely enacted that women should play second fiddle to their male counterparts; afterall, she was created from the man to be his companion", many would present as 'justification' for their misogyny. These same folks who tout this opinion are almost always just as ignorant on several other matters, as they are on reproduction, history and scientific understanding. Just as society had long been wrong for blaming the gender of children on the mother, so too is the idea that women are made from and for men, very wrong. The blueprint of the human body is ultimately female. E shock you?

You see, every male child originally starts out as female for the first month of zygotic growth in the womb. The XY male chromosome is essentially an adaptation of the XX female chromosome. It means every man is in the basic sense half-female. This is why males have redundant nipples and areola that should not be there in the first place. The penis comes with a sort of hood, a foreskin; a vestigial reminder of its foetal development from the hooded clitoris. On the evolutionary scale, the first human is woman. We are all supposedly descendent from the original Mitochondria Eve. It is the man that is made from the woman, and not the other way around.

Many men who still promote the patriarchal subjugation of women do not realize that it is a double-edged sword. The supposed rights also come along with responsibilities. These men forget that both the jailer and the prisoner are both trapped, with the jailer being forced to cater for the prisoner's food and sustainability. A lot of women have long realized this, and have weaponized their so-called weakness and sex in manoeuvring a man. They can now drop their own adult responsibilities and openly become responsibilities of men; to be catered for. Hence, today's radical feminists are looking to enslave men further to work and die for women, in the guise of empowering women.

Hence, in today's world, the theme of a successful woman is one who gets along on the singular basis of her sexual attractiveness. The successful woman is one who reels in the big fish that would feed her fat for life. This is the case of the relegated pillar of society now eating away at the standing one. A behavioural pattern that is sure to collapse the entire arch of society. So as Thomas Sankara had suggested, women must carry their own weight if society is to keeping growing upwards. Two pillars is evidently better than one.