Are women leaders subverting the natural order?
Machakos Senator Agnes Kavindu, Samburu West MP Naisula Lesuuda, Turkana Woman Rep Cecilia Asinyen Ngitit, Kirinyaga Woman Rep Jane Njeri Maina and Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga.
What you need to know:
- The pastor fortified his argument by stating that the woman was made to be a helper.
- In his view, women have digressed from this ordained path and are now sources of stress to men and the prime cause of unhappiness in the world.
During a recent church service, a pastor was categorical that the status of men and women was prescribed right from when man was created by God and woman extracted and made from his ribs. The inlaid message was that this made man superior. He argued that creating is superior to making.
The pastor’s perspective was clearly to justify what is now called gender apartheid. What purveyors of such perspectives do not appreciate is that the Bible is a historico-religious text that reflects the ideology of the cultures and times when the specific texts were written.
Specifically, the biblical creation story is based on Hebrew mythology, which is not universal, but presented to be so by believers in the Christian faith. This downplays the fact that African communities also have their creation stories with various depictions of men and women and their varying status.
The Gikuyu creation story of the nine daughters of Mumbi, for instance, gives pride of place to women as the originators of the community. In this myth, men are quite secondary to women.
The story actually forms the basis of the naming of the community’s clans. It is, therefore, an act of cultural enslavement to give precedence to the biblical creation story at the expense of our own.
In Kenya today, it is notable that it is from the Gikuyu community that we get many men who have adopted their mother’s names as their surnames. Although this is often attributed to single motherhood, that does not explain why single mothers from other communities do not pass their names to their sons. This practice seems to be taking the community back to its roots as a matriarchal community.
The pastor went on to postulate that women yearning for and occupying leadership positions are subverting the natural order. He fortified his argument by stating that the woman was made to be a helper. In his view, women have digressed from this ordained path and are now sources of stress to men and the prime cause of unhappiness in the world. Specifically, he argued that this partly explains why men have shorter life spans than women.
This reminisces of a comedian in Churchill Show who came up with the following syllogistic statement. “When you ask a woman to love you, she will say that she needs time. As we know, time is money. And as the Bible says, love of money is the source of all evil. Logically, therefore, women are the source of evil.”
This narrative is often linked to the biblical story on the fall of man when Eve was lured to eat the forbidden fruit. Critically, however, such interpretations blame women but conveniently ignore Adam’s responsibility to heed God’s original advice. In other words, it is selective interpretation to cast women in a negative light.
This is the same narrative one finds in interpretation of the Wangu wa Makeri legend of the Gikuyu on why women should not be trusted with leadership. The popular version of this story is that Wangu was a tyrannical chief who would sit on the backs of men while conducting her meetings. This version does not say anything about her effectiveness as a chief and how she ascended the position in the first place.
Purveyors of these narratives do not pay attention to a few critical questions. Are women a liability or asset to men? What does it mean to be a helper? Why did man need a helper if he was adequate? They also ignore the exact words in Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them: male and female he created them.” This verse dismisses the notion that women were created after men, which is inherent in the rib version used to suggest that women are subordinate, but which feminists understand to mean that men and women are inextricably linked as partners.
But even if one were to go with the rib extraction story, it would be important to understand that ribs encase and protect the vital organs such as the heart and lungs; facilitate respiration by allowing the lungs to expand and contract; maintain the shape of the thoracic cavity; and provide the platform where red blood cells are produced. Can men, therefore, really live without women?
The biases in the popular narratives need to be neutralised. In the claim that women are inferior because they allegedly came second in the order of creation, the feminist counter-narrative is that God is a master artist who developed a sketch first (man) and then perfected it in the form of a woman. Who then is superior?
The writer is a lecturer in Gender and Development Studies at Seku ([email protected]).
