The Sunday News
Kilton Moyo
I believe that these days there is need for this generation to seriously and constructively interrogate our human cultures with the intention to get rid of all misconceptions and myths that hold us backwards and make us hurt, hate and destroy each other the way we do.
Where I stand, our cultures have in them some very dangerous thoughts and attitudes that are responsible for our poverty and backwardness if we were to compare with other parts of the world. I see women in particular as great victims of our African cultures. I am going to show, maybe, just three reasons for this. I know that some culture fundis out there might feel my opinions here are anti-culture, it is well, but let us engage.
For too long I have seen women suffer in the name of culture.
Our culture keeps women ignorant and overloaded with family work. It keeps them believing they are owned by men and that their lives revolve around men and they are to do whatever men want them to do. Our culture makes women believe they are not gifted beyond just being beautiful and kept at home by men who have the freedom to be anything and do anything. I have been to community meetings where women cannot contribute anything just because they are women. They are not allowed to talk. Of course these days there has been a push and only a handful can stand out.
Right from a tender age, women are trained to be wives and given a lot of don’ts as a way of life. It is all about do not do this and that. A woman cannot do this or walk like this or dress like this or sit like this or laugh like this and many more. Women are confined to so many boxes in our African cultures. I have worked in rural areas both as a teacher, a development agent and humanitarian worker and I have met brilliant women who have been denied the privilege and right to go to school and make use of their great brains. They wallow in poverty in the name of culture. It is all about lost brains, lost gifts and lost destinies.
Culture has great influence on religion. As such women are victims of this religion. This cultural or traditional religion claims and teaches that women are inferior to men and are cursed. It also teaches that women are powerless. For centuries our women have been brought up and socialised in this satanic lie that they are inferior and cursed. This has caused billions untold suffering, denying them their God given right to be independent human beings made in the image of God.
I am always shocked to the bone, to think that humanity has believed such a lie. If women were inferior, so is their offspring.
This means all of us are inferior because we are born of inferior women. God forbid, my mother was and is never inferior to anything. My wife and my daughters are not inferior to anything but are joint heirs with me in Christ.
See also how, because of cultural understanding, women have been victims of our educational systems in the past. Those who went to school were taught things like home craft, cookery, sewing and all those “kitchen” things because the thinking was that is what they were capable of. Men would go for all these high technical subjects, trades and others just because they were men. It was never about their mental strengths but just by being male and female. This is injustice.
In some African countries, even like South Africa next door, a first world economy, some women are still paid less than their male counterparts. In the whole world, even politically, they cannot be leaders or Presidents not because they do not qualify, but because they are women. Beloved, if all this is not cultural violence against women then it has no name.
Let me state it clearly as I end that according to God, men and women are equal and share responsibilities. I know that this is tough to swallow for many of us. A patriarchal society is not the creation or making of God. It is a man-made thing. God created male and female equal with the same task, same anointing, same blessing and same mandate. When men fell and left the presence of God he began to put up his own ways of living and messed up the beauty of gender as God had created it. Life is not gender-based but gift-based. Women and men are equal beings with the same value before their creator.
My prayer and desire is to see a generation that can seek to understand things and issues by the scriptures. If we were to organise our lives and communities around the word of God, life will be too beautiful and in abundance. Our women will be free and become that which God created them to be and not what human cultures want them to be. The need therefore to introspect, is greater than we think if we are to enjoy our future. Africa must be saved.
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Kilton Moyo is creator of Fruitful Marriages, a renewal and enrichment program and is pastor, counsellor and author of The Sex Trap. Call or WhatsAp on +263 775 337 207, +263 772 610 103 or [email protected]
