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15.02.2018 Feature Article

The Debate Is Beyond The Kitchen!

The Debate Is Beyond The Kitchen!
15.02.2018 LISTEN

Last week, social media was inundated with a very trivial issue about women cooking for their husbands. Some misguided feminists are arguing on social media that it is a form of slavery for women to cook for their husbands. I find this argument frivolous. It also lacks two things: the rigour of intellectualism and understanding of the feminist agenda.

I don’t think women have the biological predilection to cook. In fact, cooking has not always been part of human beings. Have people researched into eating culture until fire was discovered? Indeed, in preliterate and the period before fire was discovered, which gave birth to cooking, both men and women were involved in foraging and gathering. If you are a Christian, you may want to ask yourself whether cooking was part of the repertoire of the Garden of Eden before the entrance of sin into the world. In fact, some have argued, rightly or wrongly, that human beings were initially created as vegetarians. Many writers have rightly pointed out how fire and iron, inter alia, provided the impetus for ‘civilisation’.

There is no gainsaying that until fire was discovered, there was basically no argument over who had to cook and who had to sit, watch and eat. The culture of cooking and other forms of culinary skills came about after human beings discovered the use of fire. The discovery of fire, the act of domestication and cultivation of the land prompted sedentary life among human beings. This means that human beings were freed from the daily routine of running about as Abiru or wanderers looking for food and other forms of sustenance. Incidentally, sedentary culture informed roles defined along gender lines.

Sedentary life had different socio-cultural impacts on men and women. In the case of women, childbirth intensified their sedentary life, which also reflected on their roles. It also became obvious that they undertake expressive responsibilities such as cooking, washing, taking care of children and many others. Men moved out into the wild to look for food, till the land, and hunt for animals. The more women cooked, the more they specialised in the art of cooking. It must, however, be stated that it is not in the biological makeup of women to cook. Cooking is not natural to women. It is a cultural practice that is learnt over time. That is why it is not every woman who is capable of cooking. It also explains why some men who give themselves to the art of cooking, cook better than some women. It is not coded in the gene of men and women to cook! Cooking is cultural not biological.

Among the Akan, marriage conveys uxorem and generticem rights to the spouse. In a ‘traditional’ setting, the woman performs domestic chores, while the man provides care, including shelter, protection and security, and health. This, however, is not universal. In pristine Islam, a married woman is not under stringent obligation to cook for her husband. If a woman cooks for her husband or performs other domestic chores, her husband is mandated to pay/compensate her. I know a man who paid his wife for cooking for him. He argued that marriage and its consequences had prevented his wife from practising her accounting job. The idea of a woman cooking for a man feeds in an economic system where the public and private spaces are delineated in gender line. Women must occupy the private space, while men must occupy the public space.

It must be said that the public and private spaces have not always been neatly separated on gender lines. In some African societies, both men and women were involved in economic activities in the public space. In most cases, the idea of female domesticity was part of the logic of colonialism. The Victorian concept of womanhood required the woman to remain in the private space to undertake domestic chores. This logic fed into the different types of education that were provided men and women in British colonies. Women were trained to perform domestic chores, while men were trained as clerks and secretaries to work in the colonial administration.

This is against the backdrop that among the Akan, women played important role in the public space. The office of the Queenmother, Ohemaa (a contraction of the expression: ohene a oye obaa: a chief who is a female) was very important. She was consulted on all-important matters, including the selection of a new chief when the stool became vacant. During wars, women chant momome (morale song) to energise men to fight. Among some Ewe groups, women would sing to shame men who failed to fight. A few of them performed rituals to support male warriors. In some cases, women like Yaa Asantewaa and Nana Dokua became directly involved in wars. The Aba women’s protest in Nigeria in 1929 further buttresses the idea that women were not always confined to the private space.

The introduction of commerce, commercial farming, and contemporary urbanisation favoured men more than women. Land titles, which colonialism introduced, also favoured men. The consequence of all this is that women at the time of independence were lagging behind in their engagement with public activities. Obviously, this is not to say that women were not involved in the struggle against colonialism.

That said, we must indicate that if cooking is cultural, then both men and women can cook, particularly when social structure and economic underpinnings of society change. If more women get into the workforce, and more men withdraw from the workforce, it would mean that there would be role reversal: men taking over the kitchen, while women providing instrumental responsibilities! That is simply a possibility, because cooking is not a biological trait. But the realisation of such role reversal would involve a complete paradigm shift in social structuring. This could be insuperable.

Moving away from cooking, I want to argue that the feminist debate is made more complex if we move from the peripheral to the core issues. From the core, the question is: Where do African women and non-African women converge and diverge in their demands for rights? Is it not possible that by contextualising feminism in Africa, we will find many areas of divergence, as well as convergence, between feminism in Africa and feminism in the rest of the world? It is in line with this interrogation that Prof. Florence Abena Dolphyne, wrote her book, The Emancipation of Women: From African Perspective, after she had reflected over the UN Decade for Women in the 1990s. She contextually argues in the book that African women and European women are not fighting for the same thing. For example, some radical feminists in the West are fighting against marriage, and instead promoting lesbianism. Because in their thinking, it is through marriage that men lord it over women. Male chauvinism is defined on conjugal lines.

My own reflection is that we need to be clear about the whole feminism debate. Women and men must perform roles that are complementary not competitive. We must also know that if we fail to treat the issue well, there will be gender identity crisis. Also, we must understand that aside distinctively ‘biological’ roles, all other differentiations between men and women are cultural imposition and could be negotiated. This is because the notion of gender is socially constructed. But since these cultural roles are sometimes connected to biological framing of men and women, we need to think through critically the notion of role reversal. We must also understand that women and men have potentials beyond cooking. Gender blindness would also not help us in negotiating and charting new paths in gender relations.

Satyagraha
Charles Prempeh ([email protected]), African University College of Communications, Accra

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