admingoes the old saying. If this is true, as it seems it is, what impact have the African First Ladies had on their husbands, who are generally said to have mismanaged Africa in the post-independence era? Or are they mere “flowers” decorating State Houses, writes TOM MBAKWE.
THE brutal expeditions of Stanley in Africa finally offered Leopold the chance to land his prized jewel, Congo.
Stanley made two “journalistic” trips to Africa, first in 1869 to find David Livingstone, on a mission for a US newspaper. The second was in 1874, for Leopold, where, starting from Zanzibar on the eastern seaboard with 356 people (mostly Africans), he “attacked and destroyed 28 large towns and three or four score villages” (his own words) as he plundered his way down to Boma and the mouth of the Congo River on the Atlantic coast.
Through this brutality, Stanley was able to colonise Congo for Leopold. And, while Leopold ruled Congo as his personal fiefdom, as many as 10 million Congolese died at the hands of his agents, according to Hochschild’s research.
In fact, Leopold’s brutality knew no bounds. As more Congolese villages resisted his rubber order (quotas for tapped rubber were set for the villagers), Leopold’s agents ordered his army, the Force Publique, to raid the rebellious villages and kill the people.
To make sure that the soldiers did not waste the bullets in hunting animals, their officers demanded to see the amputated right hand of every person they killed.
As Hochschild puts it: “The standard proof was the right hand from a corpse. Or occasionally not from a corpse. ‘Sometimes’, said one officer to a missionary, ‘soldiers shot a cartridge at an animal in hunting; they then cut off a hand from a living man’. In some military units, there was even a ‘keeper of the hands’, his job was the smoking (of them).”
The inference here is that the inability to have sexual relations with women does produce psychological problems in men, such as Stanley and Leopold II experienced, and pushes them into abnormal behaviour.
If that man happens to hold a responsible position in society, like Leopold, his performance is bound to be adversely affected, as Leopold’s was in Congo.
Sex boycott
In effect, the sexual need, by nature, is so vital to a man’s health that whatever his social standing – he could be president or king, gardener or labourer – he literally has to be on his knees to meet the need. Which gives the satisfier of that need (the woman) enormous power over the man.
Chinweizu is emphatic about this in the Anatomy of Female Power: “As any negotiator will tell you, the more desperate your opponent is for what you have, the more favourable the terms you could get him to accept.
“Or, as one woman friend of mine told me: ‘When it comes to sex, the one who wants it less holds the power’. Thus, an addiction which makes a man more desperate for sex increases woman’s power over him.
“On the whole, contrary to men’s ego-boosting illusions, man may be the brawnier and brainier sex; woman is not the weaker but the wilier sex. However helpless and sentimental woman may appear to be things which matter to them, they are less sentimental, less naïve, more cynical, more ruthless, and more tenacious than men.”
Knowing this, women (as individuals or as a collective) have used the “sex boycott” in the past, and still continue to use it as a weapon to get what they want. Yaa Asantawaa, the Asante queen in Ghana, was said to have used a sex boycott to force the cowed Asante men to take up arms against the British in 1900.
In April this year, Belgian women threatened to impose a sex boycott to force the predominantly male politicians in the country to agree to form a coalition government in the national interest. A sex boycott is a powerful tool. It is in this context that even the prudish Christian Bible is peppered with admonitions to women to be considerate in their sexual relations with their husbands.
In First Corinthians 7: 2-5, Paul writes that “to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband. The wife has not power of her own body but the husband; and likewise also the husband has not power of his own body but the wife. Do not deny yourselves to one another except it be with agreement for a short time that you may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again that Satan may not tempt you for your incontinency.”
Paul goes on to tell Christians that “it is better to marry than to burn with lust”. In a way, this injunction goes to the heart of the problem that the Roman Catholic Church, which has unnaturally prevented its priests from marrying, has had with the clerical abuse of boys. It all helps to prove the fact that sex and all its discontents is a very serious subject, even to the men of God. It is so important that some of the men and women I interviewed, while researching this piece, insisted that, to them, their definition of marriage is “80 percent sex and 20 percent of other things”.
To men, the power of the sexual need is such that a lot of them go to ruin if they are denied it. As such, some find solace in adultery and promiscuity.
Others resort to heavy drinking, and domestic violence to express their pent-up frustrations. The personalities of others just collapse. A shortcut has been divorce and remarriage.
Because of the psychological and emotional problems involved, some of the African men I interviewed harked back to the days when their fathers and forefathers were able to marry multiple wives with no social opprobrium attached.
“Yes, men would say that, wouldn’t they?” Said a Kenyan woman I interviewed for this piece. “If, for the sake of their mental and emotional health, men need multiple wives, why doesn’t society allow women to have multiple husbands in return? Women too have mental and emotional needs to look after.”
It is a good point, but the men I interviewed were unanimous that many women take woman power and nagging beyond acceptable limits and thereby become a health hazard to their husbands. “Like Delilah, they can send men to their early graves,” one man said.
Which brought to mind what one British taxi driver said to this writer back in 1991. “Why do women live longer than men?” he asked me, before answering the question himself: “because they have no wives.” His view may not be politically correct, and many women and women’s groups may fume about it, but many of the men I interviewed insisted there was a grain of truth in it.
Back in Africa
So how does “woman power” work in Africa, and especially on the African leadership? One Ugandan man I interviewed said: “a DSK event in Africa would not have the sort of media play it has had in the West, our media and society have no time for such things.”
His contention was that “Since multiple wives, though out of fashion today, are still allowed by our societies, it is not a big deal for an African man, or even a head of state , to dump his nagging or badly behaved wife and go for another one. Africa is not Europe,” he added for good measure.
Despite his bold statement, there is evidence showing that woman power still works for ill or good in African State Houses. Currently, one president in Central Africa, unable to cope with his wife, is said to have sent her away to live in the USA.
Another president, in East Africa, has been compelled to have a second “unofficial” wife because he could not cope any more with his “official” wife’s disruptive influence. Today the second “wife” goes about town with an official motorcade but, officially, the president insists that he only has one “official” wife, and parliament and everybody turns a blind eye to the second.
In the Southern African region, one “jealous ” First Lady is said to have built up a bad reputation for terrorising not only her husband in the State House, but all besides. Not wanting any scandal to leak out, her husband has done his best over the years to cope with her misdemeanours.
In Central Africa, another president is said to have arranged the death of his first wife (she was shot) when he could no longer cope with her. He has since married a younger woman. In North Africa, it is said that the greed of the former Tunisian First Lady and her family was responsible for the demise of President Ben Ali’s government, and the emergence of the Arab Spring that has convulsed the Arab world, from Egypt to
Libya, Yemen to Bahrain, and now Syria. In West Africa, one First Lady was known to be the dark power behind her husband’s government. She revelled in the appointment and sacking of ministers and other officials who crossed her. In effect, it was a buy-one-get-one-free situation as she acted as the unofficial co-president.
End tail
In conclusion, it is pertinent to ask again; have the African First Ladies had any impact on their husbands? If, as many Africans say, the continent has been misgoverned over the last 50 years, then the First Ladies cannot escape blame.
They have power invested by nature to steer their husbands in the right direction. If they fail, and their husbands go off track, they naturally become guilty by association. After all, as Chinweizu says in The Anatomy of Female Power:
“The wives of elite men are, of course, the best husband managers. These are the grandes dames or grand matriarchs who expertly manage the foremost male managers of vast organisations.
“They are the type referred to when, at testimonial dinners, it is said that behind every successful man there is a woman. But what, it may be asked; does such a woman do to her man from behind?”
The power that women have over their husbands’ actions and even over rulers is demonstrated by Chinweizu when he quotes what happened (and still happens) in traditional Africa: “As part of the intricate system of checks and balances in some traditional African societies, women exercise the most effective sanction against misrule. When a king becomes intolerable to his subjects, a procession of grandmothers will march naked to his palace. No ruler survives this final and dramatic repudiation by the mothers of his subjects. Usually, the threat of this march is enough to bring erring and dictatorial rulers to heel.”
Perhaps this may be too extreme for modern First Ladies to do, but it shows the enormous power they have in their hands to make their husbands do the right thing and govern properly.
Online Reporter