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Of hate, gender violence
In October 2004, French philosopher, essayist and iconoclast Andre Glucksmann published Le Discourse de la Haine (Discourse on Hate), whose preface opens with the words: “Sometimes burning and brutal, sometimes insidious and icy, a tireless hatred haunts the world.”
In Le Discourse de la Haine, Glucksmann observes that there are three principle objects of a rising spirit of hatred: women, Jews and America.
I am particularly interested with women as victims of hate. Glucksmann calls this hatred of women “the longest hatred in history”.
He has a point, some trace this hatred to the days of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, where Eve is believed to have been the first to be deceived by the serpent.
For a long time, in Europe, women did not have voting rights. In Elizabethan England, women were hated so much that they were not even allowed to act. Their roles in plays were taken over by boys. But that was hundreds of years ago.
Had Glucksmann been in Malawi in the past three weeks, his thesis on this premise should have been greater and stronger. While the Liberians are making Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf president, the Chileans putting Michelle Bachelet at the helm, the Germans electing Angela Merkel Chancellor and the Americans dreaming of a Condoleeza Rice, Hillary Rodham Clinton presidential race in 2008, what are Malawians doing to their women?
We have not sat idle on the women’s rights issue. We are violating their rights, as if it were some competition where a gold medal awaits the greatest abuser! Our women remain down-trodden victims of gender-based violence.
We have chopped their hands, we have killed them for refusing us sex, we have gouge their eyes in an apparently fruitless gold chase, we have mutilated their private parts and, God forbid, we have thrown at them petrol bombs with one intent—to obliterate them from the history of our lives.
Women in Malawi face hatred from birth. A family that has a girl for a first-born is more apt to face ridicule from friends and foes alike. The husband is most likely to infringe on the spouse’s reproductive health rights and gets her pregnant again as soon as lactation is over. This is done in the hope that the wife “will have it right this time”, and give birth to a baby boy.
It is not uncommon for men to force themselves even on toddlers. Whether that is done to satisfy their insatiable lust, or the means to attain riches by the backdoor is neither here nor there. The bottom line is that forcing yourself on a toddler is evil, and downright shameful.
If the girl-child manages to make it to school, she is likely to face the advances of the male teachers. High marks at the exams for girls are dangled as carrots to a horse in exchange for sex. If they say no, the girls face the teacher’s barbaric wrath, which may take many forms—physical, psychological and even mental.
Even in the home, girls encounter all forms of hatred (disguised as love). A girl who comes from her friends’ a little after six in the evening, is more likely to face the whip than the boy who comes home during the wee hours after mganda dances under the moonlight or a night at the pub.
It is no wonder, then, that when they get married someday, women are expected to understand and put up with their husbands’ late homecomings. The wife is expected to keep vigil for her husband to return during the small hours of the following day. If the husband finds the food cold, the result may be a thrashing.
On the other hand, if a woman comes home a little after six in the evening because there was a long queue at the water kiosk, or the minibus she boarded from the office ran out of fuel, she will face a harangue of questions or a tirade of fists. She is suspected of cheating on the husband.
These days, the hatred for women is increased with the popular culture that exposes women as sex tools, especially in the media. Just see the provocative, if not suggestive way women dance and dress on TV in music videos. From TVM to Channel O to MTV, the best female musicians are those who best express themselves with scanty dressing and sexually explicit dances, whether traditional or ultra-modern.
The solution to the problem of victimised women is not to visit them on their hospital beds and give them K100,000s. This amount is too little too late for a woman who loses both hands in an act of gender-based violence—you can’t buy the limbs with that amount. And if we are to give every battered woman a hundred grand, the K22 million special fund the Ministry of Gender is setting up will not last six months.
Rather, men must be made to understand that women are just like them—human beings. To borrow Haile Selassie’s words: “Until the philosophy that puts one gender superior and another inferior is totally, and permanently, abandoned and discredited, the fight against gender violence will not be won”.
Gender protocols, conventions and agreements to which Malawi is party, like the United Nations’ Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights, should not be left to be the empty talk of activism.
As the media leads the way in exposing this evil among us, the church, NGOs and, indeed, government must follow and fight this barbarism in their separate ways. When the Constitution of our Republic says “women have the right to full and equal protection by the law” it means just that.— The author is a graphic designer and creative writer.
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