Leonard Chitunhu.
After unleashing all manner of ill upon the then known world, Pandora peered inside the box, and all that was left, was hope. She wrapped hope around her knuckles and fought back.
The Roman Senate never heard a woman’s voice. Athenian philosophers rarely saw a woman ‘just taking a jog’ in the streets. The Imperial Chinese discarded female babies in the wild to fend for themselves. Society taught the ‘rib of man’ to hide her naked hide from the naked eyes of men. Not only that, but God Almighty sanctioned it. Loving religions lambasted women, music verbally murdered them and literature literary demonized them. The evils of the medieval, the blunders and plunders of the misogynous have harassed women of all ages, for ages. Historically, ‘the ‘broom riding witch’ would be beaten and burnt at the stake. Today, a woman cannot be beaten for burning a steak. Womanity has taken giant steps from the Garden of Eden where it all started, to smoky witch trials presided by the Holy men, to being sidelined from socio-economic systems, to full emancipation. No longer are they shackled to a kitchen sink. So how did women come from burning at the stake to burning bras in the streets, and where are they now?
Feminist’s grievances were unequal pay, political marginalization, non-maternity leave, discriminatory property rights and an inaccessible educational system. Womanity’s suffering led to the women’s suffrage. The unsung heroines like Lucy Stone and Alice Paul burned to stand up for freedom like the Statue of Liberty. Feminism came in three waves, the first in the 19th century/20th century, the second tsunami in the crazy 1960s-1970s and the third typhoon started in the 1990s until today. It was politically, socially and economically beneficial. Ironically, the two World Wars of iron and steel accelerated the women’s liberation movement. During the war, the need for labour in the industries had opportunity banging on the doors of women. From being property, women got the right to own property. The icing on the cake was of course the rise of Britain’s Margret Thatcher in 1979. This revolution was not won by wading through rivers of blood or hiking over dead bodies. Victory did not come by the babbling of a machine gun. It came by speaking up and writing down.
Today’s women are now free to open their own doors and change their own car tyres. They have also perfected the ability to stand on their own two feet in a crowded room full of sitting men. The fatherland, Germany, is now under the thumb of a woman-Chancellor Angela Merkel; therefore, Hitler is ice-skating in hell. In the West, women are riding high on the crest of a wave, without a hungry shark in wet pursuit. Jack the Ripper, the Roman Emperors and Schopenhauer must be turning again, and again in their graves.
Though the battle is won, the war is far from over. The white flag is red, not with honeymoon virgin blood, but with the essence of innocent female victims. In certain places, having the life-giving organs can mean potential death. Whilst women in the west listen to Rock, women elsewhere listen to the sound of rocks smashing their skulls. Women in the west shave their armpits with razors, whilst other women like sheep; quietly lose their sexual ornaments to a searing razor. Whilst some women drive fancy cars to work, complaining about bitter traffic jams, women elsewhere are trafficked far off to cure men’s sex drive. The jean wearing, job having, politician voting, posh car driving female enjoys the liberty that her forcibly prostituted, Islam-fashion wearing, circumcised sister cannot. Has the latter been forever left behind by the feminist freight train and left to choke on the dust clouds?
The Lords of the Prostitution Rings are getting fat on the proceeds of forced prostitution. The International Labour Organisation states that sex trafficking makes 31.7 billion dollars a year. If you were a cartoon, your jaw would be on the floor. Having picked it up you would continue to read. 2.5 million females hail unwillingly or unwittingly from 127 countries to sex work in foreign lands. The young girls have more to lose than their virginity. Torture, murder, disease and drug use are the dangers of the sex trade. The ‘sexportation’ is mainly carried on from Central-Eastern Europe to Western Europe. By 2012, it is estimated that 1, 48 million women will be putting the vice in service.
Two million genital mutilations occur every year in Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan, Egypt and other parts Africa. Some unlucky girls meet death before being formally acquainted with life. Anemia, gangrene, kidney failure and HIV are some of the hazards that come with mutilations done in the name of religious chastity. Not only does it mutilate the body, it mutilates the mind. The long arm of the law seeks to bar this practice, but the slippery arm of crime evades it, and commits this grotesque practice in secrecy. Algerian women have no property or marital rights under the Family Code of 1984. Governments in Tunisia and Morocco do not give their women the right to residence, to travel, to work, to own property without male supervision.
Honour killings flourish in some Islamic regions, as the legal codes of the Muslims seeks to rule the unruly. Besides waging a ‘war on terror’, the Taliban are also masters at terrorizing freethinking women in the Afghanistan. The Shia Personal Status Law in Iran was passed in the March of 2009 making it impossible for women to live independently from men. In Sudan, the Indecent and Immoral Act of 1991 makes dressing immorally a punishable offence. Even rumors of infidelity could spell d-e-a-t-h. Arranged child marriages are still a norm in remote villages in the ‘middle of nowhere’. In India, deviating from arranged marriages means hanging; hanging like a piñata whilst ‘smelly chocolate and salty urea’ oozes out. The horror!
Nevertheless, where there is a wheel of justice, there is a way. The Fourth UN Conference for Women was held in Beijing in 1995 supporting gender equality. The South African Centre for Applied Legal Studies was formed in 1992 under the Gender and Research Project to promote gender equality and human rights. United Nations and various NGOs will continue to nag their way to female emancipation. Amsterdam hosted the KIT Gender in 1999 with the aim of reinforcing the integration of women into the political system. Bilateral donors, the UN and its affiliates have given away large sums in an effort to engender institutions worldwide. The United General Assembly launched CEDAW, the (Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women) in 1979. It was signed by all nations except six (Iran, Nauru, Palau, Somalia, Sudan, Tonga) in order to give their mothers, daughters and sisters the privileges that right the human wrongs. Even though power is deaf, Islam Feminism cries against the misogynist interpretation of the Koran. Afghanistan and Saudi Arabian women protest against the wearing of the burqa, because not only does it get hot in that outfit, but also it is quote unquote, the visible symbol of female subjugation. U.S.A passed the Islamic Bill of Rights in 2004 in to give women the right to fully worship Allah. The voice in the wilderness will never shut up!
Britain signed The Prohibition of Female Circumcision Act in 1985 to curb this nuisance and February 6 marks International Day against Female Mutilation. The Egyptian government banned circumcision and organizations worldwide fight the social plague. The World Health Organisation initiated a programme in 1997 to nip mutilations in the bud. In 2000, the American government passed the Traffic Protection Act and works in conjunction with international Task Forces to intercept the slave trade. NGOs also work in the native homes of returning sex slaves in an attempt to rehabilitate them.
Come 2021, when people think of human trafficking, hopefully they will visualize people languishing in traffic jams at eight am, not young women languishing behind brothel doors at eight pm. Perhaps one day women in the Wild Wild Middle East will stand up for their rights and not take it lying down. The misogynous culture may soon join the dodo and the dinosaur in the dusty books of history.
War, not woman is the necessary evil. The world must not cease to wage war on women’s woes. Will the women of 2021 wave bon voyage to forced circumcision, forced prostitution, and forced marriages? 2021 might see the full emancipation of Islamic women and their counterparts, who are wrapped around in their own suffering. 2021 might cut out forced circumcision, erasing the razors. Forcing forcible prostitution out the back door like the cow dung it is. Womanity and sexuality will be celebrated instead of being crushed. 2010 sees it exploited and objectified in various media outlets. Better that, than burning stakes, circumcising razors and secret brothels. After all, you cannot spell emancipation without m-a-n.