The Sunday News
Lighterside Christopher Mlalazi
IN a typical African scenario, found in most homes, women are tasked with cleaning the house, while the men only do the cleaning if the women are away.
In the most typical, hilarious yet disgusting scenarios, where the men are tasked with cleaning the toilet, they use long sticks, standing at a safe distance, with a wincing face.
And so too in the kitchen . . . It’s the women who always do the cooking, and just like in the first scenario the men here, too, are forced to cook if the women are not there.
Men often laugh at each other for carrying out such chores, since in the African culture it is deemed as taboo for a man to carry out such house chores.
Some men openly brag that they do not carry out house chores, citing marriage as a reason for not doing so.
The funniest scenario is going to the home of the man who brags the most about not carrying out any house chores, only to find him in the kitchen wearing an apron, standing tall above the stove, while the wife ebhale u4 watching TV in the lounge.
This usually happens when you visit this kind of a man without alerting him of your intention to visit.
At a glance, in most workplaces, men and women are tasked with an equal share in doing cleaning or cooking jobs.
I will dare to even go further to say in most professional hotels, the head chefs are men.
But how is it that when the man returns home he refuses to cook for his family, quoting scriptures from culture, that the ancestors bequeathed it that the woman should always toil in the kitchen.
There are some extreme cases, some even funny, where the children of the man who works as a chef, grow up believing that their father is a manager or something not related to stirring a pot and this belief stemming from a lie a father would have told his children, fearing for his pride.
Now that is not funny. Why hide your profession from your family? Yibulema kuphela.
Now this one is funny. A man at a certain school in a certain village who worked as an office orderly, who always liked to wear a suit when carrying out errands at the growth point, quickly got to be known in the growth point as the head teacher, and not because the growth point people suspected him of that, but because he fanned the rumour with his own mouth.
Maybe he had dreams of being a head teacher. It’s good to dream, as one day, if the person works hard enough, they may live their dream.
Now back to the cooking thing at home. The husband refuses to cook for the family, and like I said, quoting ancestors, but catch him with his small house at the braai in a hidden spot out of the city, where all the swanky cars park, the same man will be busy roasting meat and boasting to be the world champ barbeque master.
But again catch the loud mouth at home, innocent as a lamb and professing at not being able to roast even a locust (intethe).
There is a famous joke of a starving wife, who caught her husband barbequing meat somewhere, and the man claimed that the meat was not his, but he had been hired by somebody to roast it for him.
And another one who was barbequing for his friends, who were sitting a distance away under a tree, and the wife caught this guy and because kwakungelasitshebo at home, she confiscated all the meat and the husband was put to task trying to explain to his friends what had happened to their meal.
Should a wife and husband have a timetable for cooking at home, say wife cooks on Monday, papa on Tuesday, mama on Wednesday and so forth . . . ?
I think those who are married should discuss this with their spouses, because, like I mentioned, some fathers can really cook good meals at their workplaces, or at the braai and we think it is not fair that their skills should only be wasted outside the home.
