By Milly G

Maendeleo Ya Wanaume has done it again! They have, with a single stroke, managed to insult our intelligence and expose the lack of their own.

The last time we heard from them, they were haranguing over the paternal rights of one Kamangu (Bless his soul), a deserter who had resurfaced to claim fatherhood to his children after 29 years. Just recently, they went bricks and bats at the sculpture outside the High Court, claiming that the exposure of the boy’s private parts was a mockery of all men. They also said something even more ludicrous about the boy’s pissing, in effect pissing on the work of art with their banal imagination (I have in the past explained what the sculpture is supposed to express). Just like clerics who insist that stained glass windows are the eyes through which the devil peers into the church, and that they should all be replaced with clear glass, MYW is quite a paranoid lot!

This time, the caucus of men is claiming that after carrying out an eight-month field research, they have found out that 1.5 million men in Kenya are physically and emotionally abused. Of all the victims of domestic violence, 48 per cent are men who usually don’t report to the police for fear of ridicule.

This week I have indulged the chairman of the organisation, Mr Nderitu Njoka, as he traipsed from press conference to talk show, peddling alarmist falsehoods and chauvinistic demands. Of all the sins he has committed, I want to address one; that of using culture as a battering ram.

Njoka says that women have abdicated culture and, therefore, disrespect their husbands enough to abuse them. He even says that because Central Province lost their culture first and fastest when the colonialists came, it is the place with the highest number of cases of abuse against men.

"Physical abuse includes battering or inflicting body injuries and emotional abuse includes insults, disrespect, cooking, washing clothes, cleaning the house, washing utensils, babysitting and even rape," says the report.

Hallo? Now, if a woman insults a man or inflicts injury, she is just as liable to answer a case of violence as is a man who abuses his wife. She should take legal responsibility. But cooking and washing clothes hardly seem to me as a possible form of abuse, much less cleaning the house and baby-sitting. As for rape, someone help me out!

Culture and tradition is always a warm cot for men who don’t want to grow up to hide in. After all, the bed is padded with inherited property and social networks of power and influence that favour men, the mandate to make critical decisions in the family and society, legal systems that favour men. In this cot, baby boys are celebrated as kings, and girls are frowned upon as they are a liability.

The man can have as many women as he wishes, but a woman belongs to only one man. Even when men slip up, they are not criticised or corrected, because they are always right. The women wait on their every whim, no matter what that costs. When a couple disagrees, the man’s word is law. Of course men want to coddle in this cot forever. And we women are saying …grow up! Wake up, smell the coffee! This is 2009, the year of our Lady!

Women are often silenced with the words "that is not African" any time they challenge the men. But ‘African’ is not a destination to which we got in the year 19-oh-oh and then froze. ‘African’ is not a dictionary where meanings and inferences are fixed forever and ever, Amen. ‘African’, sorry to burst your patrilineal bubble, is not a woman kneeling with a cup of porridge in her hand and pleading "My Lord…please accept my offering". No no. African, today, is not the African you knew yesterday. Just like you have heard of but probably never experienced some very African symbols and events, like village dances and wrestling matches and drums that speak, get over the good old days when women nodded in acceptance and admiration.

Today, it is truly African for your woman to leave with you to work in the morning, as it is for you to prepare the food for her to cook. It is equally African for a woman to earn more than a man as it is for a man to change his son’s diapers. It is just as all right for a woman to disagree with you because she holds a different opinion as it is all right for you to be wrong. Roles and responsibilities are only set in stone by rigid fools. Otherwise, we’d be wearing hides and skins.

I hope the government will swiftly create a fund for men, if only0 to get these clowns off our backs.