The Sunday News
Kilton Moyo
WHAT you will read here are my opinions based, however, on factual knowledge on gender issues that affect and afflict this generation. I believe that at the root of poverty in our societies, particularly in Africa, is what I will call gender misconceptions.
These misconceptions are the root of human relational problems. It is not a secret that relations between men and women have always been that of pulling apart without finding each other and this has been so for centuries since the great treasonous act by Adam and Eve in Genesis 3.
We are all born male or female and expected to grow up and mature into men and women. The culture around us has a task, therefore, of socialising us into men and women that will fit well into the cultural expectations of each society. It socialises us into its behaviour, mindsets, values and norms.
All we become is about our culture. I will not be wrong to suggest that we are by and large serious products of our cultures.
I will not be wrong to suggest also that you express your manhood or womanhood the way your culture has set you up. Maybe we need to just understand what culture is by way of definition.
Gender experts will define culture as “a sum total of ways of living, built up by a group of human beings and transmitted from one generation to another.” It is the people who draw up their own way of living which then becomes their culture and they begin to socialise each other by it from one generation to another.
Our culture influences how we think, talk, value ourselves and each other, relate one to another, and relate with the environment around us. It determines our good and bad, our beliefs and convictions and our general worldview. Culture has capacity to either liberate you or release your potential or to oppress and imprison you for the rest of your life.
When I then look around us, I begin to draw up conclusions that somehow our culture has seriously erred and produced some men and women of dubious characters.
Where do all these things that separate us and pain us come from? Let me show you a few things that I believe our culture must be interrogated about and held responsible and fined and ordered to be transformed. I will dwell on 2 issues today.
Check this post next week.
Gender-based violence
When they are young infants, both boys and girls, are equal and very loving and innocent. As they grow up they begin to pull apart and as boys become men they see the same girls they played with as weaklings and inferior and deserving of bullying and violence.
The girls begin to see themselves as victims and beggars who cannot do anything without men. Where do they get this from?
Obviously it’s from our socialisation methods and curriculum.
From one generation to another, our culture has perpetuated this gender injustice and seen it as a way of life. I personally find our culture guilty of human torture and injustice against women.
We have brought up violent men who think manhood is bullying women and abusing them. We have brought up women who think that womanhood is begging men and being victims.
Beloved, if we are going to deal with gender-based violence, or any other gender-based injustices and even our poverty, we must address culture fearlessly and face the brutal facts.
Our culture must produce men and not thugs. It must produce women and not victims and beggars. To do this we must change the spirit of our culture and of course its foundation. I will show you next week.
It is our culture that teaches that women are perpetual children, men cannot be questioned by women, that your husband shows you his love by beating you, women are property of men and women must stay in the kitchen.
What do you think you can achieve with such hurtful practices as a way of living?
Negative words
I am not lying when I say to you that our culture is made up of negative words. It is a cultural thing to be negative maybe to attract sympathy. I think begging is in our culture.
Begging is in our language. My apologies but this is what I see around me. What we need to understand all of us is that human beings are spirits. As such you create your world by your words.
Your words do not joke. Your words cannot be called back. What you speak you get. What you speak you become.
Our people are too playful with words. Our people curse themselves and their environment with their words. At least in the Ndebele culture they have a saying which goes, “umlomo uyaloya.”
This at least shows they understand the power of words but because of how they have been socialised, they think they cannot escape or think it is right.
The Bible teaches that life and death are in the power of the tongue.
You either speak death or life whenever you speak. Have you ever heard how men curse women in your culture?
Have you ever heard how women curse men in your culture? It is a pity. Listen to how we joke. We are so careless with words and meanwhile we wonder what is wrong with us. It is our words. It is our socialisation.
To me, we are both products and victims of our cultures. Poverty is the making of a people’s culture. Our challenges in many nations in Africa can be traced to our cultures.
Our leadership crisis at all levels of our lives can be traced to our cultural roots and socialisation. Cultures that worship leadership can never demand accountability from that leadership.
As a result we become easy victims of our own cultures. Believe you me, what Africa needs today for the future is a thorough interrogation of her cultures. We authored it, and we can change it.
The only way of changing a people’s culture is building it on the word of God and embracing the God culture before the fall of men.
Beloved, I am still convinced we are more of victims of our cultures more than we are of our political enemies or any other enemy for that matter.
For more on these you can follow us on our blog @fruitfulmarriages.wordpress.com or our Facebook page; Fruitful Marriages. You can call or Whatsapp us on the numbers given.
Kilton Moyo is creator of Fruitful Marriages, a renewal and enrichment programme and is a pastor, counsellor and author of The Sex Trap. Call or WhatsApp on +263775337207, +263772610103 or [email protected]
