EPISODES FROM MY CHILDHOOD 2 : GRANDMA AGAINST PATRIARCHY

The culture of our town like every other part of Africa was patriarchal. I'm not saying this to sound in line with the observations of most social media commentaries on gender equality. I'm saying this because it's actually what I saw, felt and witnessed first hand. 

It was a system that supported the superiority of my gender over the opposite gender. Men were seen as the most important members of the society, they had more voices and representation in the meetings, they earned most of the recognition for the actions of their children, they were entitled to several inheritances including women. Yes men could inherit women. They also owned the lands and anything their money could buy

The women had a different story to tell. They earned less of the respect, except on rare circumstances where the men in their lives were seen as important. They couldn't own lands for themselves, couldn't inherit any either and there was a limit to what their money could buy. They earned very little recognition from the good works of their children. Yet when the men talked, they used to say " all sons and daughters of this land are the same" and somehow, it sounded like that speech from The Animal Farm that said "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others".

No doubt, the patriarchy had a way of providing some privileges for the different genders. Everyone had a place they could be pardoned or spared simply because they were men or women. The men could enjoy certain favours, the women too, could walk away from certain things they did wrongly and also enjoyed certain favours but this didn't change the fact that they were placed on a lower place in the whole scale of gender superiority.

As a girl, the men could forgive my elder sister for not attending the family meetings from when the first libration was poured. They wouldn't say a word if she couldn't make tall heaps of Earth for the yam seedlings. They would spare her if she forgot how to interpret the chieftaincy ranking from the length of the feathers in their caps but my grandpa would whip me if I couldn't remember the beads for the family heads and heads of households.

Many times, my sister never had to carry her water pot on the way back from the stream. Other boys did it for her. My grandpa used to keep goats and no matter how hard I tried, I was never able to beat the amount of fodder she fetched for the goats because the boys that did it for her were way older than I was. 

Being a first son, I had seen many times when the elder family members scolded my sister to go away when they were talking because "big people were talking" while I was allowed to sit and listen because I was "...going to be a man one day". Other times, I was always the first person to take my share of the traditional cake before my sister and my other female cousins were allowed to pick. 

I remember once we went for farming. While Grandpa told my sister to join grandma and the other women to do the weeding, he took us (the grandsons) on a tour round the whole estate to show us the boundaries. When he was done, he said " I need everyone of you, including your only Uncle in the army to be brave enough to keep these things after I'm gone. The world is wicked, they will want to take everything away from you people the moment I stop breathing." 

Till today, that statement still makes me believe he didn't have complete knowledge of the woman he married. My Grandma.

That woman was living in times ahead of when she was alive. She wasn't ready to conform to any social construct that enslaved her and she was unapologetically comfortable with that. I knew from her that a woman could stand against societal constructs that oppressed her long before I learnt about feminism and gender equality through foreign movies and social media.

My grandma was a woman that believed that no gender was created to boss around the other. She believed there was nothing a man on Earth could do to make him above her in enjoying any right that was fundamental to the human person. She believed people deserved to be treated better no matter what they had in between their legs. " A penis doesn't mean you are better than the Virgina that birthed you" 

My grandma was never the type of woman that would watch another woman go through unnecessary suffering and do nothing about it. She used to be some sort of guardian angel. One time, she led a team of women that took up canes and flogged a certain titled man that had the habit of beating his wife and the next morning, before the chiefs convenned, she and her women were already at the village square with a goat, palmwine and tubers of yam.

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Grandpa had only two sons, my father and Uncle Emma and what he said about people coming for everything he owned the moment he stopped breathing came to pass barely a year after the soldiers took him away. 

Some members of the extended family started trying to intimidate my grandma over the landed properties. They started dragging her to the town council over false accusations of land grabbing. 

My grandma had a lawyer and she used the services he could offer. One of my grandpas cousin bagged two years in jail for harassing my grandma over a plot of land. The other faced risk of loosing his retirement benefits if he continued to press the false charges.

When they knew intimidating wasn't a weapon that could bring my grandma to her knees, they brought another one from their bag of tricks. Remarriage.

They tried to pressure her into marrying another member of the family so they could use whoever she married as a mule to grab all the properties. The man that moved the motion in one of the meetings was my father's cousin. He looked at my grandma with lustful eyes and romours around the town said he loved warming the beds of older women. Even if my grandma was going to remarry, it was definitely wasn't going to be him. I knew it the moment he started speaking.

Grandma wasn't going to have any of that. She wasn't going to remarry anybody to appease anybody and she was damm good at standing her ground and she did it for ten good years.

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FICTION

Episode 3 drops next week on this site.

- Ifiokobong Etuk ( KING of the QUILL )