What a woman is not allowed to do

By

Obododimma Oha

I have been raised in my Igbo culture to believe that there are certain things a woman must not do. No satisfactory reasons are given for this, the only explanation being that that is how our ancestors established them: “that is how they were handed down to us;” “that was how we met them;” etc. Some courageous males even go to the unacceptable extent of claiming: “That is how God wants them” or “God established them like that.” God must be male or shares male sentiments! God must be on the side of men, after all, that Supreme Being has a beard, a long one at that! Don't ask me if the Almighty has the other thing! To seal everything, the claim that these cultural leanings cannot be changed is enshrined in human language: “Can’t you see? It is so in our language! Our language is a witness! Even God is “a he”! Even male references to God can be found in our language! And so, these are natural!” That chauvinist should have said “natutalized.” If God is recruited and made an ally, anyone opposing the ideas must be the enemy! And it is even a dangerous thing to become God's enemy! It is a dangerous thing to fall into the hands of God. Terrorists of various kinds know how to weaponize and use fear!

I strongly believe that culture is a mere software installed in our heads and we can upgrade or delete it if it would cause a malfunction. Those who refuse the upgrading of culture get stagnated and are left behind. At most, they remain the laughing stock of the world. Individuals or societies! It is even terrible that highly educated people defend or promote backward cultural practices or find a way of laundering them into a local acceptability and following.

With these noted at the outset, let me turn to cultural practices that, as a male, I have grown up in my Igbo culture to believe that they are normal or that there is nothing wrong with them! That is not to say that one is not very proud of many practices in one's culture or that one does not thank one's maker that one emerged Igbo, with a male form on this planet! These are among the cultural assumptions one has received from one's ancestors and has not changed them:

(1)   Women cannot inherit land from their ancestors because they are supposed to marry and get attached to someone else (another man);

(2)   Women cannot perform the kolanut ritual or break it in the presence of men at a gathering;

(3)   A woman must not eat kite meat (even if she prepares the dish)! She must not even lick her fingers! Nwaanyi anaghi eri anu egbe!

(4)   A woman (a wife ) must not eat the rump of chicken or the gizzard! That also means that she must not lick the fat on her fingers when preparing it!

(5)   When an animal, a goat or fowl commits an abomination (another ancient cultural thinking), its meat must not be eaten by women! Maybe if they eat the meat, they would become male and grow a beard or, more outrageously, grow some other male forms!

These look ridiculous, especially since we are in the 21^st century; don’t they? Some people may even deny that they are still practised in the culture. Well, an authentic reform must begin from the inside. Self-criticism is always very helpful. I must confess that I conceived this essay when I visited our village and was celebrating the New Year in the midst of many brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces and cousins, distant and far, some whose names I did not even know. One lady came with her twins, two hefty girls, and introduced herself as a cousin’s daughter married to a man in a distant part of Alaigbo. I looked at the twins as I communed with her through the drinks present in abundance. As I said earlier, they were two hefty babies and their faces bore a resemblance of a highly respected, oldest matriarch in the community, who lived about 150 years! No joke! Then, it dropped from my mouth, for I could not chew and swallow it: “Those ancestors who killed twins and called them monsters were really silly and their ways were misleading! How could any sane person have looked at these hefty and happy babies and have them slaughtered? Those killer-ancestors were worse them evil. Glad they are gone!”

In the same way, many backward practices people have retained and think promote masculinity are simply silly and unjust deprivations. One of such is the exclusion of female children in sharing a father’s landed property. Although the Supreme Court in a suit has pronounced this unacceptable and illegal, it is still clandestinely practised by male relatives in Alaigbo, backed by cultural institution.

The major and lame argument has been that daughters would not remain in the family but would marry away and become somebody else’s oriaku, {literally, consumer of wealth) in which case she and her children have their economic inheritance through this man. So, this is actually an act of economic envy, not an abomination on culture? So, the male children think their sisters have double advantage or may have advantage over them materially through marriage?

But many daughters have been known to be very helpful to their parents, helping to raise their siblings, building or rebuilding their family houses, looking after their aged parents, etc. In fact, once  some male siblings marry, they forget their parents – those witch and wizard --   and mind only their nuclear families! It is only my wife and I, along with the children! So, one must acknowledge the caring roles of the married daughters who are not even allowed to inherit land and family house. Of course, they are like the traditional Igbo rake, aziza: the broom is said in the culture to be denigrated, but looked for every morning when the compound is untidy. The umuada, married daughters, are very good in and effective in traditional dispute resolution (among their brothers who have all the inheritance.

Indeed, the insistence that daughters do not inherit land or landed property feeds on poverty and lack of education. Rich and highly educated homes can will landed property to their daughters. And who are you to enter there and cite your culture and tradition as an arbiter? Further, highly educated and rich daughters can buy parcels of land anywhere they like. No one can stop them, citing tradition. Also, if they are lawyers or know the law, go near their property and announce that you want to go to jail! For you will eventually go to jail!

What about performing the kolanut ritual? Hmmmmm. That is still a knotty issue which patriarchy refuses to revise or give up. I recall that, as a young boy, any time my mother and other women were holding an all-women meeting, I was called to break kolanut for them. Imagine, a sapling breaking the kollanut for his mother and other mothers. A sapling that perhaps had one of the women clean his runny nose. He is breaking the kolanut that they were not allowed to break, simply because he was sporting a penis and was probably naked! Was it God that ordained it to be so because He too sports a penis?

The denial of the kolanut ritual to women was a denial of speech or expression. They were not permitted to approach God or the ancestors through symbolic codes? Were they so unclean? What was the convincing reason for not allowing them to perform the kolanut ritual?

Yet, some reform has started coming in. It is human beings that created the kolanut ritual and human beings would reform it. I recall a visit my cousin and I paid to an inlaw in another community but he was away from home. But we met his wife, our sister, in the house. When kolanut was brought to welcome us, I insisted that our nwaada, our sister, who was quite elderly, should perform the ritual. She prayed over the kolanut and God and the ancestors accepted her prayers. An eclipse did not occur as a result of that. She did not develop a penis or grow a beard afterwards. The planet Earth did not miss is route on its rotational axis.

The same applies to saying that women must not eat the gizzard and rumps of fowls killed in the homestead or of animals “accused” of committing abomination – a laughable cultural practice. Similarly, women are not permitted to eat kite meat, Nwaanyi anaghi eri anu egbe (A woman does not eat kite meat).Is it not when you can catch the kite and kill it that you can tell me who is allowed to eat its meat and who is not? Why use the toilet paper before going to toilet?

And the gizzard matter, hmmm, does it mean that that woman cannot see surplus gizzard on sale at cold rooms in supermarkets, shipped to Nigeria from elsewhere or from local farms? When there is surplus gizzard in the soup, is it not a matter of blaming the ladle or spoon if one’s dish does not have some? Or does one person, one gourmand, have to eat all the gizzard in the soup?

Now, this issue of accusing animals of committing an abomination, hmmmm. Maybe a hen moving free range is looking for a safe place to lay an egg and cannot find one. So, she drops the egg in the middle of the homestead, the sad way a human that has running stomach may have the misfortune of defecating in public! Why accuse the hen of committing an abomination when you have not put the layer in a proper setting? And maybe when a human steals the hen’s eggs and uses it for breakfast, the shell is dropped carelessly in the compound. If a goat moving free range and looking for its daily bread comes across the shell, is it that time you would remind it that it is a taboo for goats to dare eat or sniff at egg shells? Is it an abomination for a hungry fellow to try the shell if it could be a ration, at least to experiment? Must goats eat leaves? Must it live and die a herbivore?

Why not just say you want to eat some meat and that you are looking for a victim? An excuse is not necessary, especially if it is laughable!