NIGERIA: A COUNTRY WITHOUT MEN
Preliminary investigations show that a police inspector in Plateau State cut off his wife’s hand over N3000. Reports say he gave her N20,000 to keep, but she could only account for N3000. While the woman has been hospitalized, the man has been detained as the investigation continues.
These days, news from within and outside Nigeria is replete with reports of men who have become violent at home, turning their wives into victims in the place where a woman can be anything else but a victim.
In a world which insists on persisting with the privileges and prerogatives of patriarchy with nothing to show for it, while men have become monsters at home, women otherwise wives and mothers, and their children, have become victims.
At the heart of this spiraling, scandalizing cyclone of domestic violence is patriarchy’s foundational pedagogy that women are inferior to men and must live their inferiority, especially at home. Christianity counters this only by half when it teaches that at marriage a man and his wife become one but stresses that the man is the head.
This conscious and subconscious impositions
Of patriarchy manifest in marriages which commoditizes, dehumanizes, cancels and cheapens women even when they are the bread winners as is increasingly the case.
Surely, the degree of violence visited on the housewife in Plateau State over money indicated the violent conduct was not a first time. The love in the marriage must have grown cold out of abuse.
Men who are violent and abusive abuse their relationship and responsibilities. In situations where they enjoy privilege, say in marriage, their lack of compassion molts into a lack of provision for their families. When threatened or called out, they resort to violence.
Women experience pregnancy different. What’s certain is that men can never experience pregnant that way, especially the changes that the body undergoes. Pregnancy is a sweet kind of vulnerability and women need all support but especially serenity so they can support another life.
Unfortunately, a mix of poverty and patriarchy ensures that pregnant women hardly get the support they require when they are pregnant. Devastating maternal mortality statistics also indicate that it is a health problem.
When a husband becomes a hammer—or the wife becomes a pestle, even if this is rare — within the matrimonial ministry of the home, the overwhelming emotion is often a mixture of shock, shame and then silence. When touch that used to indicate tenderness becomes threatening, women, usually, respond with shame which shocks them into silence. The heartbreak comes from the fact that the woman who has long been told what she can or can’t be especially in her home has to put her children, security (which is unjustifiably linked to men) and the snobbish views of society before her life and well-being, all while battling the concentric forces of patriarchy. Most times, the unspoken admonition for women caught up in hellish marriages is to hunker down and endure for everyone’s sake but theirs. In this callous conundrum lies one of the most fundamental failures of society which is as scandalous as it is unjust.
While violence against women is mostly a conscious act, the circumstances that conduce to it are mostly subconscious. A lot of gender-based violence begins from the mind where the hierarchy of patriarchy sets up a perverse pyramid which crushes women underneath. A society that strains to render women invisible from birth is one averse to the scars they bear as they have to navigate life and marriage. The cartography from girlhood to womanhood to marriage is usually aided by a foolproof compass of scars inflicted by men who should be protectors but have instead become predators.
The law is prescient in recognizing that because men sometimes bin nobility in treating women, there should be sanctions-regulated standards of treating women. The Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act and the Constitution are just some standards-setting legislations.
Implementing them though has not been effortful enough. This strengthens the case for gender equality, for radical feminism.
In her seminal book ‘We should all be Feminists’, global literary icon Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes that: Gender matters everywhere in the world. And I would like today to ask that we begin to dream about and plan for a different world. A fairer world. A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves. And this is how to start: We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently.”
What has marriage become today, what is it becoming? What is making friction into fisticuffs in that exulted field of human elevation and affection that should be inherently non-violent and non-abusive? Why should disagreements degenerate into murder and grievous bodily harm?
These questions warrant society’s attention because what starts out as disagreement between two people in marriage are increasing having nationwide consequences. The effect of such terrible news of marital harm on the senses, the way it provokes the humanity in each of us indicates it is an emergency.
It is not male genitalia that makes a man. It is the ability to love and protect women and children at all costs. This means empowering women to live their best and most productive lives. It means emboldening women to break the curse of silence that cloaks domestic violence. It means hoisting them up not just to reach glass ceilings but break them. A society failing to do this is one without men. Nigeria is presently and resoundingly failing to protect women from monsters parading as men. Nigeria has no men.
For each woman hit in her marriage; for each woman for whom the only heat in her home is not from her kitchen – her only nation; for each woman denied of opportunities by an abusive spouse and forced instead to shoulder a sack of physical and emotional scars; for each woman dead from repeated acts of domestic violence; for each woman forced into silence in the face of life-threatening violence by the senseless expectation of society, we are all victims and there is no victor and no justice.
Ike Willie-Nwobu,
