Trading Places

“There ain’t a white man in this room that will trade places with me. None of you. None of you would change places with me. And I’m rich” — Chris Rock, Bigger & Blacker.

Let us be frank, Nigerian men go through some shit. SARS will see a well dressed young guy with new phones and assume he is a yahoo boy; the economy might be circling the drain, but your girlfriend could be pressuring you to provide for her as if you have special access to some unseen wealth that she doesn’t. All of that sucks. But in the final analysis, despite the shit stacked against the Nigerian man, I do not know how many of us, if any of us, are willing to trade places with the Nigerian woman. We often claim that we are the rational gender, so let us use those rational minds for a second. If we pause to think about it objectively, the entire gamut of the female condition — from legal dicta to societal norms — is indeed oppressive.

Embedded in our constitution are stipulations that both overtly and covertly discriminate against women, reflecting who we are as a society. For instance, the language for personhood in the Nigerian constitution is male-gendered except for those instances where a woman or girl is specifically referred to. For some, this may be a petty grievance, but for others, it remains a subtle suggestion of the extent of our recognition of the importance of womanhood.

More specifically, there are sections in the constitutions that cannot be explained away without an acknowledgment of blatant sexism or at least unequal treatment. Here are a few examples

• Child Marriage: Section 29, Subsection 4(b) stipulates that “any woman married is to be deemed of an adult, and thus of age.” This is a clear gateway to child-marriage — a horrendous attack on the dignity and psyche of the girl child.
• Domestic Abuse: Section 55 of the Penal Code “Nothing is an offense, which does not amount to the infliction of grievous harm upon any person and which is done by a husband for the purpose of correcting his wife. Such husband and wife being subject to any natural law or custom in which such correction is recognized as lawful.” This should appear to any reasonable person as a justification for domestic abuse.
• Unequal Treatment: Section 353 of the Criminal Code: “Indecent assaults on any male person is a felony and punishable by 3 years imprisonment. Section 360 of the CC: Indecent assaults on any female person is a misdemeanor and punishable by 2 years imprisonment.” Why? Are women less valuable than men? Why is the punishment less when the victim is a woman?
• Unequal Treatment: Section 26 & 27 of the Nigerian Constitution: “a woman cannot make her husband from a foreign nation a citizen of Nigeria by virtue of their marriage but a man can do that for his foreign wife.”
• Gross Negligence: There is no law against marital rape. Section 182 of the Penal Code provides that “sexual intercourse by a man with his own wife is not rape if she has attained puberty.”

More exist. Granted, some of these are not enforced as strictly, but they speak volumes to our underlying sympathies and the value we place on the woman.

But it does not stop there. These things are not just institutionalized but are also evident in the way we treat women on a day to day basis.

If we asked ourselves “What is it like to be a woman in Nigeria?” A reasonable answer would be:

“Imagine being raised to be a caretaker of your able-bodied, potentially older siblings, who simply happen to be men. You are taught to cook and clean, not with the goal of being a self-sufficient individual, but in preparation for some ultimate goal of securing a spouse. You find a guy that you like and you invest emotionally into the relationship. You might want to take it to the next step because, unlike him, you have a biological clock that is ticking fast, but you have to wait till he is ready to propose because it is quite untoward for you to pop the big question. Basically, you are on his clock. He finally proposes and you guys get married. On your wedding day, your religious leaders and family members tell you that despite your education, intellect and good decision-making skills, the man is the head of the house and he has the final say.

They tell you to respect him simply because he has a penis and that comes with an ego that must be massaged rather carefully. Yes, they may tell him to love you, but they also tell you to love him, so it does not really count. If you are lucky you will have kids, preferably male, so your in-laws do not call you a witch or kick you out, despite the fact that the sperm’s chromosome is responsible for the baby’s sex. If you do not have help, you are expected to wake up early to take care of the kids, get them ready for school, go to work to earn money, come back home and still take care of the family too. Oh, and if you are unfortunate to have a husband who has a wandering eye, you will probably either get blamed for his indiscretions or urged to forgive him because that is what a good wife does.”

As the “rational” gender, we should be able to see how anyone would be livid at being groomed all her life for this. To be considered automatically subservient to a man has far-reaching ramifications. It comes with a loss of agency which often translates to grievous physical and sexual harm to the female body. The expectation to serve and please men often means that the domestic work women do is not recognized as work but as duty, and as such is not compensated appropriately. All of this leads to political and economic exclusion which perpetuates the cycle of oppression. In short, women are placed on a leash that is both short and tight.

We might say it does not happen this way in our specific families, but we will be disingenuous to say this is not the common experience. I have seen men double down and claim “We are African!” or “This is our culture”. But this appeal to antiquity is untenable. We should not forget that tradition is really just an agreed upon set of myths with no real or material support. It exists solely in our collective imagination and only to the extent that we permit it to. Of course, this is not to say that all tradition should be discarded. Tradition is useful in binding groups of people and lowering the costs of transaction within a group. But we must remember that tradition is made for us and we are not made for tradition. Its continued existence must always be predicated on its utility and harmlessness.

Moreover, tradition, even as a narrative or a tool is often changing. Many appeal to tradition’s authority as if its restrictions are not flexible and as if its boundaries are not malleable to prevalent conditions: powerful myths, colonial influences, collective rejection, and joint amnesia. Did we not stop killing twins? Are a lot of our faces not free of tribal marks? Did a lot of our parents not eschew traditional gods for the Christian God? Why then do we appeal to tradition as if it cannot be challenged? Why cannot we cast away the albatross around our necks particularly as it significantly subjugates half of our population?

Look, I am not saying anything groundbreaking. I am not saying something women have not mentioned repeatedly, for decades. I am not saying anything that we do not already know, even though we might be reluctant to admit it because we benefit from it. But we must be empathetic to how this makes women feel. When they tell us about their very real fear of walking down a dark street because they are one or two degrees of separation from a person who has been raped, we should listen. We should act. When we hear about female genital mutilation confining women to a life void of sexual pleasure because female sexual pleasure is anathema to some, we should listen. We should act. When we hear about successful women complaining about how their hard-work is diminished to selling sexual favors, we should listen. We should act.

The American Philosopher, John Rawls, crafted an interesting Gedankenexperiment called the “Original Position”. He charges you to imagine a hypothetical scenario with you behind a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, you know nothing of your identity, status or ability. However, you do know that in the “real world”, there will be differences in identity, status, and ability. If you were to design a society based on what you know and do not know, how would you design it? Or more succinctly put, if you were to design a society not knowing what place you would fall in, what would your society look like?

So here is an “Original Position” experiment for my fellow Nigerian men — Imagine yourself, ignorant of your sex and gender, standing behind a veil, charged with designing the Nigerian Society that your gender would be placed in. Would you design the society we currently have? What would be different?

Would you want a society where your significant other pays a symbolic fee to your father for your hand in marriage and then you have to go through the onerous rigmarole of changing your last name, knowing that the underlying subtext of all this tradition might be a transfer of ownership to a person who is supposed to be your peer? Would you be fine with your siblings inheriting all or most of the property simply because they are a different gender that considered, for no real reason, to be more valuable? Would you want a society where you could be sexually assaulted and have the law enforcement officer ask you why you went to the perpetrator’s house at an ungodly hour? Or worse be asked, “not to ruin [your perpetrator’s] life”? Do you want to march in the market streets protesting against being sexually assaulted and have to listen to potential assaulters brazenly shout back at you “We must touch!”?

If not, why are you not dismantling that society now? Because that is the society we currently have.

I must reiterate, I am not saying anything new or anything particularly interesting. Nigerian feminists, both on and off social media, have been saying these things in far more eloquent and poignant ways. They have told their stories. They have dared to be vulnerable. They have taken the risks that come with trying to effect change. But some of us have tried to silence them. Some of us have remained apathetic.

Yes, you may not be directly perpetuating the culture, but are you doing enough to end it? Are you using your position of privilege to stand up for women? Not just the women within your ambit of love and concern, but women you do not know; women you have no vested interest in. We often hear men say after they have had a daughter that they want to make the world a better place for women. While the sentiment is understandable, we should not have to wait until we have that experience to have a shift in perspective. We can start now. Maybe start by listening to women and the stories of their lived experience. Maybe start by calling your friends out when they objectify women. Maybe start by challenging your parents to stop pressuring your sister to get married. Maybe start by understanding and pushing for the rights for sex-workers even though you might disagree with their occupational choices.

Just start.

And while we are at it, let go of the farcical idea that we are the “rational” gender.