Chronicle Editor
Richard Runyararo Mahomva, The Pivot
AT what point does society celebrate stinginess? Common virtues tell us that it is not acceptable for anyone to be tight-fisted (ukomela/kuomera). Be it from a man or a woman being stingy should not be a celebrated trait.
Stinginess defies all religious and cultural courteous. Whilst being economic is very acceptable as it entails prioritising needs over wants and avoiding all extravagance, ‘‘being stingy stinks’’ –says a female friend in response to the social media hyped Stingy Men Association (which I am a member of by the way kkkkk).
The on-going debate about the morality or irrationality of this social media existent fraternal front for stingy men has since produced a multiplicity of counter insurgence voices calling for the fall of this ill-perceived cabal of stinginess. While some of us with a bona fide allegiance to this association and have clear moral convictions of our membership to this cause, our counterparts from the other gender have responded by launching the Stingy Women Association.
The clear innuendoes of ‘sexually othering’ members of the Stingy Men Association by the so-called ‘Stingy Women’ are quite louder. The counter-discourses of stinginess have escalated with one side (men) stating that it will not offer monetised terms to relating with the ‘stingy other’. The Stingy Women Association has further taken the stalemate to another dead-end with an ultimatum which states that relationships will be up in flames after Valentine’s Day if the Stingy Men Association’s oath is sustained.
Now it makes sense why we have this inter-gender social media war, Valentine’s Day is around the corner. Most probably the Stingy Men Association is a pre-emptive initiative to water-down the high gift exchange expectations among some couples on 14 February. This also comes against the backdrop of another famous social-media imaginary Men’s Conference.
For the past two years or so, the imaginary Men’s Conference has attracted a wide delegates list. The coincidental scheduling of this conference with Valentine’s Day week is strategically set to evade the ritual of buying gifts for fellow lovers. In as much as the Stingy Men Association, Stingy Women Association and the Men’s Conference are all virtually existent and imaginary, they all raise a pivotal truth about transactional sexual relationships we find ourselves in today’s world.
This reveals the clear manifestations of capitalism in all facets of human interaction. As objects of capital, all our social relations are denominated by either cash or kind. Even the most precious of things, -love becomes subject to commodification. In some instances, we find ourselves having to pay the price for infatuation as we now live in a world of ‘side-chicks’ and ‘side-dudes’.
Under the pretext of this time immemorial normal, all adult relationships come at a cost, hence the inter-gender nuances of stinginess. For me, the problem is not about stinginess as it all appears. However, at the centre of this whole narrative is the underlining reality of poverty. Throughout society, poverty has always been dehumanising and imposing subhuman identities to those it strikes.
As such the adaptation of stinginess as a subtext of being and association is one major sign of the reality of poverty. No one likes to be associated with a vice or at the very least embracing immoral traits like stinginess. The normative construct of our time entails that men must take care of their women’s financial needs. Therefore, when men abandon this traditionally expected burden and find solace in identifying as stingy, then we have a problem.
This type of problem and dilemma is much bigger than the assumed and abhorred identity which is easily construed as organised negation of a socially acceptable gender responsibility. Therefore, when men coalesce under a confederation of stinginess we must be worried and interrogate what genuinely informs such comfort in an identity with so many socially unacceptable connotations. This exposes the wrath of capital as it decapitates human dignity.
Whims of capital as it were sub-standardise society to reinvent identities which sanitise impoverishment.
To a conservative reader of inter-gender relations, the rise of the Stingy Men Association is unacceptable as it gives leverage asymmetrical reciprocity of adult relationships. In response, the female other must starve the male passions of the flesh. What it means is that in as much as the male side of stinginess is demonised the female dimension of stinginess must be celebrated because it punishes a supposedly deliberate commitment to be stingy.
However, the problem with this reactionary position is that it neglects the fact that the fundamental reason for the birth of the Stingy Men’s coalition is not necessarily deliberate in its plot, but it is systematically driven than it is morally grounded. The immorality in this paradigm of stinginess is in essence symptomatic of a bigger social reality which is poverty.
As proven by history, poverty takes a corrosive disparage to all morality. Poverty reduces human beings to subhuman social statuses and fraternal comforts. This is why the ‘female body’ has been dragged into this debate as a symbol of marginalising the pleasures which men solicit from women. Whether consciously or unconsciously, every female body pledging to commit to the imagined reciprocal punishment of the stingy male body (and the pleasures it solicits) assumes market commodification.
The transition of these two stinginess imaginaries to reality substantiates the price tag of love and what it means to be loved in this dollar sign era. This is the reality of capital –to which we are all commodities. With society being victimised and giving in to the dictates of capital, the essence of humanity suffers extinction.
On the other hand, in as much as this debate exposes society’s conformity to capital, it also brings to light our ‘suffering in silence’ inter-gender situation. Out of desperation, men assume identities which undermine their expected social obligations.
Put into perspective, the Men’s Conference and the Stingy Men Association all seem to have strong African origins or an exaggerated attempt to speak into the broke experience of African men. One is compelled to think that the above said association and conference represent an emasculated Black manhood.
Given Africa’s marginal dimension of existence as a result of the twin evils of imperialism and neo-imperialism, we can argue that colonial domination continues to reproduce itself in a manner disempowering the African being. A looted, plundered and exploited continent only produces broke and emotionally broken men. Surely, Black patriarchy is under siege and perhaps this should awaken us to questioning the very essence of Black masculinities.
It is also important to interrogate the damaging effects of colonial subjectivity and the normative of what it means to be a man in Africa.
On the other hand, I argue that Black patriarchy is epistemologically constructed as a monster/ predator as noted by the way the assumed identity of male-centred stinginess is harshly judged without any desire to understand its underpinning basis. In response I feel the following questions must be addressed:
Does Black patriarchy even get hurt; does it have emotions? Does Black patriarchy cry? Why is it that Black patriarchy is mostly marred with a bad reputation compared to its other co-existential global patriarchies?
Does black patriarchy love violence against Black women? Are we not narrowly discussing Black patriarchy from a neo-liberal ontological decapitation orthodoxy and forgetting the traumas which Black patriarchy struggles with today under the vestiges of imperialism?
The questions above articulate the problem of gender unevenness as it relates to masculinities, misogyny and sexism in African and the continent’s interface with Anglo-American stereotypes and superficial norming.
The questions demonstrate the unfinished business of liberating the being of the African from imported imaginations of how we should relate across our genders. Perhaps our attempt to understand African patriarchies must be anchored on African feminisms and localised experiences of what it means to be an African man.
Richard Runyararo Mahomva (BSc-MSU, MSc-AU and MSc-UZ) is a Political-Scientist with an avid interest in political theory, liberation memory and architecture of governance in Africa. He is also a creative literature aficionado. Feedback: [email protected]
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