What’s in a name? Why assign gender to positions of power?
Saturday March 30 2024
A female boss leading a corporate team in a meeting. PHOTO | SHUTTERSTOCK
To conclude this year’s Women’s Month of March, a reflection on women and power. I want to revisit the fact that some people in my polity debated the titles used for the Commander-in-Chief of the Tanzanian Armed Forces in Kiswahili because they insisted on getting hung up on obscure rules of grammar that have never applied in the country before.
Imagine how deeply one must fear a situation to try and come up with new vocabulary for a job simply because a woman occupies it. It is rarely a good thing when this happens.
I stumbled upon a lecture by the British historian Ronald Hutton about ancient goddesses of sex and war. Or, as he likes to soften it for delicate sensibilities, “love and violence”.
It was very instructive, especially in the way in which the West and the Middle East gradually tamed and then more or less erased their female deities.
Read: EYAKUZE: Thank God there are sisters who give a damn
As I mused about the loss of the Sacred Feminine and what this has done to modern society, what really struck me was a certain lack of balance and the “long-term” view of history in our contemporary lives.
As above, so below.
Some things cannot be taught, nor can they be erased. Just as Africans who were eventually admitted as humans carried the torch of their self-worth in America to fight for every increment of their citizenship in every century from their enslavement into this one, so in women do the embers and fires of emancipation burn.
People do not take to oppression naturally, no matter what the racists or chauvinists tell you. We can’t. Freedom is essential to the primordial drive to survival and remains a drive, there within us even when we are erased from histories and reality is perverted.
Once we were queens…
I saw something in that erasure of the goddesses, especially of sex and war, in the erasure of Africans — especially women — from history and from power. Gone are the warriors, gone were the queen mothers and priestesses, gone were the fearsome witches and fierce daughters of yore, leaving the men unmatched and thus unbalanced.
Read: AKINNIYI: A pathway to boost African democracies
Instead, we have this new African woman, pious wife and mother. Defanged and declawed and dependent, at the bottom of strange hierarchies where she does not belong. And we are told that this is “natural,” against all evidence.
What’s in a name, you ask?
We remember Spartacus, we remember Kunta Kinte. These stories have meaning. Why?
Maybe this is why I had to circle back to the Amiri Mkuu wa Majeshi issue, because I know how powerful language is in conferring — or denying — people their full humanity. The intent was never a linguistic one, it was a recoiling against the requirement that we imagine a woman with sword or gun and shield in hand, defending the realm.
In my Head of State’s every subtle match against the patriarchy I see elements of my own — our own — bid for freedom and survival. And, quite naturally, power in opposition to disempowerment.