| Plus |
|
|||
|
In Africa, it's
truly the battle of the sexes A British military
analyst told the same gathering the war would start on March 20.
Abdal Bari Atwan was alluding to the story doing the rounds before
the United States' invasion of Iraq that Saddam once plotted the
assassination of Barbara Bush, George W's mother. The son had apparently
sworn to avenge that attempt by blowing Saddam to smithereens. A son's love
for his mother can be fathomless. The Oedipus complex is described,
in psychiatry, as a "manifestation of infantile sexuality towards
parents, with attraction to a parent of the opposite sex, especially
mother, and jealousy of other parent". Don't ask me
if this is the case with the Bushes, but what Abdal Bari Atwan seemed
to be saying was that there was something weird about George W's
reason for wanting to overthrow Saddam. To love your
mother to the extent of risking the murder of thousands of people
thousands of kilometres away sounds reckless in the extreme. All for
the love of a woman In any case,
if a love for his mother were the only reason for Bush's determination
to blow the walrus moustache off Saddam's upper lip, then not many
people, including the British, would be able to explain Tony Blair's
willingness to help him out - unless Blair loves his mother to the
same extent and wishes to warn anyone plotting to assassinate her
in her sleep that he, too, would do to them what Bush is trying
to do to Saddam. But then where
matters of the heart are concerned, nothing can be measured in terms
of how much is too much. All this does
not detract from the truism that men are no better than women, or
that women are as good as men, even if men don't menstruate. At
the bottom of it all, we are all the same. But I worry
constantly about the African woman's status on the continent. In
November, I urged them to stage a demonstration to protest against
King Mswati of Swaziland after he had taken on his umpteenth wife. A reader suggested
polygamy didn't necessarily heighten the chances of HIV infection.
He defended the practice, saying it was part of Swazi and African
culture. I say: Fine, but a man of promiscuous mating habits is
dangerous in any situation - monogamous or polygamous. On March 8
in Zimbabwe, women demonstrating on International Women's Day received
a savage reception from the police. In Bulawayo and in Harare, they
locked them up and roughed them up - one of them into menstruating.
On top of that, there is the matter of the shortage of sanitary
pads. Oh for a
nice normal man The men who
never make the first move, automatically lose interest in us when
we take the initiative. Complicating
matters Some of these
problems afflict men in equal measure. But what I am very keen to
investigate is just how men like Godfrey Nzira, the Chitungwiza
sect leader sentenced by a Harare magistrate to an effective 32
years in jail for rape, managed to hoodwink the women into believing
they are men of God. Rasputin, the
Russian monk, did a similar job with Czar Nicolas's wife and I daresay
they are men who have fallen prey to women possessed of the same
sort of guile. The equality between men and women in everything,
except their biological make-up, would seem to be fairly incontestable. In many countries,
especially the developed world, women have fought long and hard
to free themselves from the stigma of being the weaker sex in every
department. In Africa, the battle of the sexes is likely to be long
and hard. Women like Jocelyn Chiwenga are not likely to help matters
at all. Their concept of feminism seems to be steeped in the Zanu
PF concepts of everything - there has to be violence and force for
anything to succeed. The hero-worship
of the president of the party among the women members is no different
from that of Kamuzu Banda's Mbumba. Margaret Dongo, who refused
to be a Zanu PF wallflower in Parliament - part of the dzepfunde
sycophants another former Zanu PF woman MP, Mavis Chidzonga, spoke
of - was repaid for her assertiveness by expulsion from the party
of Yeschef. The struggle
for women's rights in Zimbabwe cannot be entrusted to Zanu PF, a
distinctly patriarchal party, like the society in which it was bred.
Only extraordinary measures will have an impact on the citadel of
male chauvinism that underpins the domination of society by men. So far, there
has been no real champion of women's rights in Zimbabwe. For that
matter, nowhere in Africa has any woman emerged who has so challenged
the male domination of politics that she had presidents trembling
in their long johns. Gently but
firmly That could
really stun the leader who has some of them assembled like she-goats
for him at the airport. There, he regales them with his latest exploits
and they lap it up. Their children, meanwhile, must weep tears of
shame and humiliation at that spectacle. |
||||
Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
colleagues
from the Commonwealth Press Union in Sri Lanka last month that George
W. Bush would go to war against Iraq because he loved his mother,
the silver-haired Barbara Bush.
