'Real men beat women': The dangerous beliefs behind Kenya's gender violence crisis
Domestic violence. One anthology cites a saying adopted in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa advising men to “beat your wife regularly; if you don’t know why, she will.”
What you need to know:
- Social construction of gender roles enables violence against women, with many communities socialising women to be submissive while training men to be aggressive.
- Global proverbs and sayings across cultures, from Africa to Europe and Asia, continue to normalise and justify violence against women, often equating wife-beating with love and proper marriage.
A court in Meru recently jailed for 30 years a security guard, Patrick Naweet, for killing Elizabeth Ekaru, a neighbour and relative, on 3 January 2022 in Isiolo. The two had a dispute over the boundaries of their farms. This escalated into a physical fight in which Naweet claimed to have been slapped and stoned by Ekaru. He responded by knifing her to death as he could not withstand being slapped by a woman. The mitigation by the accused’s lawyer was that Naweet was a traditional Turkana man who encountered an outspoken woman, contrary to his cultural expectation and upbringing.
This case lays bare the question of construction of gender. It specifically highlights how this emboldens men to batter women. Social construction is the process through which we learn what it means to be a man or woman in our cultures.
In many communities, women are socialised to be submissive while men are trained to be aggressive. In some, wife battery is considered an expression of love and a man is expected to do it as an acceptance ritual. A wife who has internalised this norm will deliberately enrage the husband to attract the slap “of love and acceptance”.
Nonsense on stilts. But this is what is captured in the Hausa (Nigeria) proverb that “’now the marriage will begin’, as the neglected wife said when she was flogged with thorns”. Men and women socialised this way will see nothing wrong with wife battery.
Lingala proverb
Mineke Schipper’s anthology Source of all evil: African proverbs and sayings on women demonstrates how proverbs, the repository of our “wisdom”, devalue women and justify violence against them. The norm is summarised in the Lingala (Democratic Republic of Congo) proverb “woman is like the earth; everyone sits down on her”.
Schipper laments that proverbs from all over the world contain “shocking ideas about women, especially as far as violence is concerned”, adding that sentiments in sayings that are more than 4,000 years old “are still part of the daily conversation in many societies” today. Noting that violence against women is prescribed and glorified, she cites one from Spain and Puerto Rico that “to keep your wife on the rails, beat her - and if she goes off the rails, beat her.” This suggests that even when the woman is down, she should be kept permanently there through sustained battery.
She also cites an Arabic saying adopted in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa advising men to “beat your wife regularly; if you don’t know why, she will.” In other words, once women internalise that battery is their portion, they will justify it when it happens. Another Arabic proverb states that “the man who can’t slaughter his sheep or who can’t beat his wife, is better dead than alive.”
And there is still another one, that “women are like asses; the more they are beaten, the better they become”. Schipper highlights the German saying that “women and chops - the more you beat them, the better they’ll be”, the Chinese version “clubbing produces virtuous wives” and the Korean one that “a woman who is beaten is going to be a better wife.” The same is captured in England and the United States as “women, like gongs, should be beaten regularly”. Violence against women is thus a global norm of devaluation.
The low value assigned to a woman’s life is immortalised in a South Sudanese riddle, which poses that a man was once travelling on a boat with his wife and cow. The sea became turbulent and the boat was going to capsize unless he offloaded one of his companions. The respondent is asked to suggest what he should offload. The answer is that the woman should be thrown into the sea, being that with a cow, the man can pay bride wealth for another wife. But if he loses the animal, he is left with a “worthless” creature! This low value is reflected in a major world religion where compensation for the life of a murdered woman is half that of a man.
It is instructive that brutalised women often get little justice from traditional dispute resolution mechanisms. Many times, compensation for battery is awarded to her father (if the husband is the perpetrator) or husband (if the aggressor is someone else). Harm is perceived to have been done to the pater rather than the woman. This is a warped sense of justice also reflected in our statutory system where fines are paid to the State rather than used to compensate the victim. In our case, Naweet was jailed. But what about the lost life? What happens to Ekaru’s family and dependents?
The writer is a lecturer in Gender and Development Studies at South Eastern Kenya University ([email protected]).
