Its 2006 abroad, but 1956 in Nigeria

In an interview published in today's This Day, a friend of Bibi's who is also a well known Nigerian is interviewed (she is helping to bring the play The Vagina Monologues to Nigeria). She is asked the question, "In the African culture, some men believe that wife battery is another way to make their wives submissive. Do you think the play can correct that?” She responds, "There are many ways that women can be submissive to their husbands but not by getting beaten...While there is a general belief that many of our cultures condone wife-beating, I doubt if there is any culture that condones the killing of a wife...There is nothing wrong for men to correct their wives but not through physical violence."

The general sense of her response as summarised above is therefore this: that women should be corrected by their husbands, but that killing women is going a little too far. Although the final sentence tries to clarify, the damage is already done in the sentence immediately before it in the quote above. The last part of the sentence, “I doubt if there is any culture that condones the killing of a wife,” although a non-sequitur, only serves to implicitly legitimate the first part, i.e. condoning wife-beating. But where is the evidence that battery of women is part of any specific African culture? What is the origin of the ‘general belief’ she alludes to? Might it not be the prevailing contemporary patriarchal prejudices, rather than any form of historical or socio-cultural precedent, that generates this attitude? She goes on to say a little later in the interview, “when I got married, I moved to Abuja where my husband is based. He said that now that I am his wife, I have to cook and do stuff like that.” Oh dear, we are back to the 1950’s, with the black and white television in the living room, Dad watching the cricket on a snowy screen, Mom doing the ironing by the kitchen door..

Anyone who attempts to highlight the widespread physical, psychological and sexual abuse of women in Nigeria by bringing Vagina Monologues here should be lauded and supported. However, it is important for public figures to be mindful of the power of words, especially when printed in the newspapers. For a woman to be anything less that completely unambiguous on their position on women’s rights within a relationship is extremely dangerous. To tacitly endorse the submission virus carried by the evangelical churches, a doctrine which leads many Nigerian women to suffer silently at the hands of their husbands, is to commit an unenviable act of complicity. Why should women have to submit to the man in the relationship? Is this supposed to be ‘traditional’ within, for example, Yoruba culture? Why not emphasise mutual submission (if the language of submission is to be used at all)?

In all this, one thought remains: that Nigerian women in the public realm are continuing to let down the society by betraying attitudes that should be locked behind a glass case in a museum somewhere.