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09.03.2019 Feature Article

Men Are, Because Of Women: A Return To Our True Identity

Men Are, Because Of Women: A Return To Our True Identity
09.03.2019 LISTEN

Since the Bible asserted that it was through Eve that sin entered the world, women have never had their peace. In mostly all known cultures around the world, patriarchalism has constructed the world from the angle of a man. This is against the backdrop that many thinkers have argued that the origin of the human family was ingrained in a matriarchy. Friedrich Engels, the German philosopher and closest pal of Karl Marx, has argued that, while the world was sociologically constructed as matriarchy, it was capitalist industrialization that transitioned the family, the basic unit of society, from matriarchy to patriarchy. Some Afrocentric writers, like Cheikh Anta Diop and James Small, have also argued that the African world, focusing on ancient Egypt, was matriarchal. Even so, what we know of the contemporary world is a world we have constructed for men. Peter Sarpong, for example, called the African world, ‘a man’s world’.

Irrespective of how we look at the origin of andro-centrism, what is obvious to us is that the world has not engaged human beings from the point of view of common humanity – engaging men and women from an equal platform. Many of the Greek philosophers did not integrate women into the polis, because women were said to lack mental savvy to contribute to the structure and the governmentality of society. Similarly, in all the known religions, women have not fared well.

The relegation of women to the backwaters of society has contributed to many disgraceful and demeaning cultural practices against women. The burning of widows in some part of India – Sati – (prior to colonialism), the practice of Trokosi, the persistence of female genital mutilation (cutting/circumcision), the enforcement of widowhood rites in some African cultures are a few of the fault lines of our patriarchal world.

In response to the maltreatment of women, the response of some women has been to the extreme. Radical feminists, likes of Mary Daly, are promoting lesbianism because for them it is through a heterosexual conjugal relation that sows the seed of male-centrism. In the end, we have created a home with unfettered feminism. Children in many families lack parental care. Instead of the home becoming the first point of a child’s socialization, the home has become empty. Research from Ghana shows that many children are cultivating abnormal behaviors because the home has been emptied of parents. The neo-liberalization of the modern economy, which has pushed women in droves to the world of work, has further pushed the family down the drain.

In the midst of this conundrum, it is important to note that men are who they are because of women. The question, ‘Who am I?’ has received speculative responses. Rene Descartes’ response to the question was: ‘I am because I think’. The basic response of pre-industrial societies is: ‘I am because we are.’ It must be mentioned that industrial societies tend to construct a human being as an autonomous being (individual qua individual). This gives deeper insight into the works of libertarians, including Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, who rated individualism as prior to communalism. On the other hand, in pre-industrial societies, and following the logic of W.W. Rostow, the individual finds meaning in life, by belonging to a community of other human beings. The tapestry of human life is that the more industrial we become, the less social we define our humanity.

The Bible’s account of the origin of human beings, which claims antiquity, provides the better answer to the question: ‘Who am I?’ The response of Adam to the question provides the primal view of the construction of human identity. In the book of Genesis, God created Adam as an earthly being. He lived in a Garden that God had constructed for him. In the Garden, also called Eden, he lacked nothing. God provided him with everything he needed: food, serene environment, and security. But in the midst of abundance, Adam was not happy. His ontological bent, as an earthly being, did not separate him from nature. But nature did not give him the joy he desperately needed.

God saw the hopelessness of Adam and created a helper, in the person of Eve, for him. It was only after Eve had been created that Adam could construct his identity. The Bible records that when Adam saw Eve, he exclaimed, “This is the bone of my bone, and the flesh of my flesh; she shall be called women, because she was taken out of man” (Genesis 2:23). The exclamation of Adam marked the beginning of the sociality of the creation of human. In other words, Adam became a social being (a rupture from nature) as a result of the presence of Eve. Adam could say, “I am”, because there was Eve. Until there was Eve, Adam could not construct any meaningful identity of himself.

It was Eve, from the anthropocentric perspective, who socialized and humanized Adam. Thus, until there was Eve, Adam was simply an earthly being, who was not markedly different from animals (beyond his ability to reason and possession of speech power). The late Ghanaian sociologist, Prof. Max Assimeng, had a deeper insight into this biblical construction of identity. He defined socialization as the ‘transition of a biological being into a social being.’ This definition is an exact reflection of how God intended the human creative order to be. Since the modern era, the Christian Church as reified this sociality of man through the constitution of the marriage vow. The marriage vow is vested with the logic of helping a man know his incompleteness without a woman.

If the world is to be any better for both men and women, men must understand that women are not their competitors but they (women) exist to play a complementary role. Women are around to humanize men and to help man reconstruct his primordial identity as an earthly being to a social being. As the world has deemed it fit to allocate every March 8 in our the Greco-Roman calendar to celebrate women, by seeking solutions to the multiple challenges that burden them, I trust that men will know that they cannot say, ‘I am’ unless there is a woman. Men must humbly admit that ‘we are, because of women.’

Let me thank two important women who have socialized me: my mother, Agartha Adjei, who has always been there for me, and the one who has taken over from her, Josephine Tweneboaa Afrifa. And to all other women, I say, keep socializing us, for ‘men are, because of women.’

Happy Women’s Day
Satyagraha
Charles Prempeh ([email protected]), African University College of Communications, Accra

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