There is a popular saying that women’s rights are human rights, and there is no gainsaying this because women make up the majority of the world’s population. But the fact is, women constitute the majority of those whose fundamental human rights are routinely violated. There are many reasons for this, but in essence the cause is toxic patriarchal dominance.
Africa is the home of humankind, the continent in which the most ancient fossils of human ancestors are found. Civilization began in Africa, and Africa set the pace for all human civilisations. But despite all these records and achievements, African women still suffer gross violations of their human rights.
And it is not only men who are responsible for these violations. People imagine that women unite and care for one another against men’s oppression, but this is not always the case. Some women advocate the oppression of the weaker and more vulnerable women in their societies.
An instance is female genital mutilation (FGM). It is women who carry out the surgical removal of young girls’ clitorises. According to some feminists, these women are victims of patriarchal indoctrination – brainwashed into accepting the abuse of their own gender.
Education
Another vexing question is that of equal educational opportunities. Most African boys continue in education up to adulthood, but African girls living in both rural and urban environments are often denied access to education because of their gender so that the proportion of girls out of school in Africa is higher than in any other part of the world.
In many cases girls are withdrawn from school by their parents or guardians to be married off or to work as hawkers or domestic servants. This puts girls in a precarious position due to the loss of empowerment which education brings.
Although some people blame poverty for this, most government schools in Africa provide free elementary education. So, when parents withdraw girls from school, the explanation usually lies in cultural and religious beliefs which decree that girls should marry when they reach puberty.
Employment
Similarly, patriarchal African societies do not award men and women equal rights in the field of employment. African women are discriminated against, and most are not gainfully employed. Even those women who manage to acquire the necessary education and skills are often either unemployed or are underemployed by both governmental and private institutions. Such institutions consequently employ more men than women due to the patriarchal attitudes which give preference to the male gender.
Moreover, employment practices often discriminate against women. In Nigeria, for example, military and paramilitary institutions often insist that female officers must not marry even though their male counterparts are free to marry as soon as they are commissioned. This is clearly a violation of the women’s natural rights.
Similarly, some Nigerian financial institutions push their female employees into “corporate prostitution” to ensure that financial targets are achieved. Women who fail to persuade rich customers to bank a given amount of cash are liable to be demoted or even sacked. Appeals to the authorities to remedy these abuses have fallen on the deaf ears of the patriarchs.
Physical abuse
African women are at risk of violence, especially in areas where there is civil unrest. Women have been repeatedly raped, beaten, starved, and harassed in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Sudan, and South Sudan, among others. All these atrocities are perpetrated by men, and women are their victims. This is a tragic situation: women do not start wars, but they are made to suffer severely in times of conflict.
A further violation of women’s rights in some parts of Africa is the practice of breast-ironing or breast-flattening which is carried out by the parents or guardians of young girls to make them less attractive to predatory men. The reasoning behind this cultural practice is clearly flawed. The physical appearance of girls and women must not be presented as a justification for rape. It is a gross violation of a girl’s rights if she is made to look less “womanly” as a means of avoiding unwanted male attention.
As in the case of FGM, women who have been forced to undergo this violation often force their own daughters to suffer in the same way. As one such women stated, “I knew she didn’t want it because she was crying and squiring. But what could I have done? She was too young to start having breasts. I love my daughter and do not want men to start noticing her.”
The practice of breast-ironing amounts to torture and can have serious physical consequences. These include painful abscesses, cysts, itching, chronic pain, burns and tissue damage. It can also cause scarring, infections, difficulty in breastfeeding, and an increased risk of breast cancer.
Burial rites
As Professor Ethel E. Idialu suggests, widows in Nigeria and in other traditional societies across sub-Saharan Africa, particularly young and middle-aged widows, are often accused of being responsible for the deaths of their husbands and are then subjected to inhumane rituals to prove their innocence.
As evidenced by home videos, a widow’s hair may be shaved, and she may be forced to drink her deceased husband’s bath water or sleep with his corpse for days. If a widow fails to carry out the burial rite, she will be deemed guilty of her husband’s death even if he died from an accident or illness that his relatives knew about.
Furthermore, in some traditional communities widows are forced to marry their deceased husband’s brother as a mark of loyalty to her deceased husband’s family.
Sadly, women are not protected under traditional laws, and efforts to stop such practices have been blocked by rural patriarchs. So widows are often compelled to undergo burial rites which cause injury to their physical, psychological, emotional, and economic status. Bankole Adebayo and Oyebode are of the view that this causes intense psychological pain affecting the widows for the rest of their lives.
According to ecological system theory, inhuman, discriminatory, and oppressive treatment of widows should be eliminated so that they can adjust to the new phases of their lives. As it is, these burial rites put widows in a pathetic situation due to patriarchal structures and to attitudes which place the female gender below the male.
Conclusion
African women are on the receiving end of the harm dealt out by men in their various societies. Toxic patriarchal relations can be singled out as the foundation of all these violations of women’s rights which derive from religious, cultural, traditional, political, and economic factors. African women are thus prevented from realising their full potential as human beings.
The only way to improve the toxic relationship between men and women is to encourage a humanistic approach to addressing social issues in Africa. As Professor Gloria Bell Hooks rightly puts it, “institutionalized sexism (Patriarchy) is a learned behaviour, and it can be unlearned also.” Men in privileged positions should know that we are human beings first and foremost before we become anything else.
By Zacham Bayei (Nigeria)