The Patriarchy Paradox

 

The Patriarchy Paradox: How Older African Women Both Challenge and Support Patriarchy

Recently, I’ve been thinking quite a lot about patriarchy, its seeming inescapability, this looming towering giant that pulls at the fabric of our lives, and the women that weave this fabric, that support the patriarchy’s dismissal of our humanity, and help it steal away our happiness.

I know of a couple that got married not too long ago, a Shona one, and when they had their roora ceremony I knew immediately that theirs was a marriage destined for disaster. The husband’s family was very ‘traditional’, in the sense that they viewed women as nothing but glorified mops, and I couldn’t name off the top of my head one woman who had married into this family and was happy. They had all struggled in some way, and in order to truly make it in that family, a great deal of sacrifice was required; sacrifice of joy, of time, of self. Now, the woman who had married this man seemed to have had somewhat of a more spoilt upbringing, and she clearly had enjoyed some sense of independence. She was in school, ran a business and put out content on social media platforms. This wasn’t a woman who would do well having to cook, clean and baby her husband their entire marriage while faithfully enduring abuse from him. The women from his family, surprisingly enough, rather than welcome a young woman who had done quite well for herself, and enjoyed more independence in her twenties than they ever had, seemed to have hated her.

They made fun of her wigs, of her makeup, of her distaste for hard work, her fragility, her ‘weakness’. I was surprised. Wasn’t she the culmination of every older woman’s dream? Wasn’t she the goal our grandmothers had in mind when they told us our books were our first husbands? That we should get married after we have accomplished ourselves? They seemed to have a disdain for her ‘purity’ that she hadn’t yet been ravaged by men, hadn’t yet had to sacrifice her own hopes and dreams in the furtherance of his. They seemed excited that everything she had built up would inevitably be put down. This seems to be a common running theme among a number of older African women. They cannot bear to be miserable alone, and so with many of them, will actively sabotage younger women who veer off the path of collective female suffering. This isn’t to say that grounds cannot be established upon which to empathise with these women, who themselves are still victims of a cruel system that has shown them nothing but brutality.

Quite a while back I had a conversation with a friend who mentioned that her aunts harboured a fervent desire that she would fall pregnant in university and have to drop out. Around that same time, at a work meeting for the NGO run project I work for, someone mentioned how girls from lower class high density neighbourhoods had a tough time making it out because once someone saw a spark in them, and the potential to escape poverty, all forces, majority of them women, would unite to bring her down.

I have had the great misfortune of having to travel to numerous family and non-family events, where for days on end I have to suffer being tossed around patriarchal, misogynistic, homophobic opinions like a shirt in a rickety washing machine. Usually at these events the men and women separate into two different groups, and the men go and sit outside, basking in the sun, cracking open beers and sharing anecdotes and terribly misinformed political opinions. The women, sit in dark badly ventilated huts and spend the majority of the time complaining about their husbands while cooking meals for upwards of 15 people, three times a day, simultaneously taking care of babies (although that can be delegated to younger female children) and cleaning. They complain about how bad their husbands (who majority of the time are not even breadwinners) are at managing money, how they seldom help out in the household, the stress of managing a household, how unloved they may feel, how their lives lack the romance and passion they thought they would have as teenagers. They make self-deprecating jokes and reconcile themselves to the fact that that is their reality, however sad it is. It is frightening how there seems to be a template for what married life looks like for women. People who I grew up playing pada with, have had their youth and liveliness all sucked away, and succumbed to this same deadness.

The paradox comes in, when you vocalise that you want something different. When you are in the kitchen, cutting vegetables with a blunt knife, squinting against the smoke, and mention that maybe you would like to marry a man who would at least treat you with kindness, they laugh dismissively. They tell you, quite ominously, that “you will see”. And when you suggest that maybe, if marriage is as hellish as it has been for them, that you would rather give it up altogether, they laugh even harder. They would rather see you conjoined in their suffering than having escaped it. I do not think that this objectively makes them bad people, as this is a rather complex topic.

Anyway, these same women, who have borne the brunt of back breaking marriages, rather than nurture sons who are what they would have liked from the men around them; soft, gentle, kind, thoughtful, helpful, seem to amplify the negative traits of those men. They nurture men who are brutish, mean and selfish. And this is not to say that the faults of men are solely to be blamed on the women that raised them. Rather than raising little girls who are loved, safe and cherished, and ensure that these little girls become women who marry good men, they open up room for abuse, they shame them for showing skin, for being too educated, for liking their appearance too much. They shame them for not valuing men enough, for wanting more than patriarchy has to offer them. The couple I first spoke about, has separated now, and the woman’s family, rather than force her to endure a loveless horrific marriage, has welcomed her back and offered the groom’s family their roora money back.

This was my first time witnessing a Shona family protect their daughter in such a way. Refusing to open her up to harm on the basis that she has been bought by another person’s family and as such, must suffer whatever she can at their hands. In another instance, a different family’s daughter was having such severe marital problems with her husband that she fell so sick she almost died, and was incredibly depressed. Rather than pull her out of a situation she clearly was so unhappy in, the women in her family told her to toughen up, and discouraged her from pursuing a divorce.

It is strange to me, to see this role a majority of older women play in the lives of younger women, to see this complex portrayal of patriarchy, and that it is not as simple as stating that it is us the women (et al) versus the men. But that inside this giant hierarchy there is also us the women versus each other. How do we resist this system that has torn the fabric of our lives and ensured that we constantly live in fear? Fear of not just the strange men who will leap out of the shadows and rape us, but the men in our homes, the men who we have chosen to love? How do we resist this system if at the core of it we are attacking ourselves?