Njoki Karuoya
It is interesting how the talk of late is of how the needs of the boy-child have been thrown aside at the expense of the girl-child, for whom all efforts have centred on. When you hear the men talk, decrying the abandonment of the boy-child, I always wonder, who has forsake him?
For long, the boy was the favoured child. Even today, majority of communities and families still pride in having a son within their midst as the boy-child is still considered prime by many people.
Choicest bits
He was the one who received the prime cuts when the meat arrived, got served the choicest bits of food, was saved from doing all the tedious chores around the house, allowed to play for as long as he wanted and enjoy the wild, was granted the rare opportunity to sit with the elders so he could begin to learn what his role in society would eventually be, was allowed to go to school to learn the ‘white man’s ways’ so he could uplift the status of the community.
He could have sex from the moment he was circumcised, with no eyebrows raised as to the extent of his conquests, instead receiving accolades when he deflowered many girls and married many wives, and who automatically inherited the family property that included land, homes, livestock and other possessions.
The boy-child’s future was so privileged that at birth, he was welcomed with more cheer and applause than the girl-child, whose future was considered bleak, routine, heavily-laden and not one to envy. Because she would be used to earn the family some wealth, the girl-child was heavily guarded so that she could remain pure and win a great husband.
In some communities, the obsession with safeguarding the purity of the girl-child led to the cruellest form of genital mutilation, with the objective being to seal the entry into her womanhood until she was married, when her husband would officially ‘open up’ his gateway and be her first.
The younger the girl, the higher her bride price and consequently, girls were married off from age eight, only to give birth a few years later and, on average, every year after that until she died in childbirth or got ‘saved’ by the entry of another wife.
So I wonder, at what point did the boy-child descend from being the glorious gender to the forsaken one? At what point did attention veer away from the son(s) of the house to the poor maidens?
Greater heights
Was it when all those gender activists (often referred to as feminists in an attempt to cloud them in a negative, contemptuous veneer) agitated to right the balance between the boys and the girls; demanding that girls, too, be allowed to go to school, to inherit, to play as much as the boys, to distribute household chores, to compete for the same jobs and perks, to marry the men of their choice and at the age they desired, to have the number of children they desired, to no longer have their vaginas mutilated in the most painful and vicious manner, to receive quality reproductive health care, to vote and to sit with the elders and lead their societies to development and greater heights?
When the women activists were doing these for the girls, where were the men? Weren’t they responsible for moulding the boys into responsible adults who would take on the mantle as the leaders of society and the heads and providers of their homes?
Where are the role models for the boys to emulate? Can the real men — those who demonstrate charismatic leadership and guidance to their families and communities — please stand up and be counted?
If the needs of the boy-child have been forsaken, if the boy-child is going astray because he lacks the right guidance into how to grow into a real man, then the woman cannot be faulted just because she has been knocking on all doors to lobby and campaign for her cause. Neither can the Government be faulted for not ‘providing’ mentorship.
Who is to blame
The blame, as far as I’m concerned, lies squarely at the feet of these boys’ fathers, uncles, older brothers and other senior male relations, who have absconded their roles as mentors and their responsibilities as guardians.
