Hate the game, not the player

Women’s rights groups in Kenya have planned protest marches on January 27, against the alarming cases of femicide in the country. “This is a national crisis – we are not doing enough as a country to protect women,” Audrey Mugeni, the co-founder of Femicide Count Kenya, an NGO that documents the number of women killed across the country each year, told The Guardian.

The paper reported that last year, Femicide Count Kenya recorded 152 killings – the highest in the past five years. Representatives from the nonprofit say the actual number of killings is likely to be much higher. Not only is the number of women killed likely to be much higher, but, tragically, it is likely a lot more women will be killed in Kenya and elsewhere before the situation gets better.

This is because men’s violence against women today is driven by deeper structural forces beyond the usual deranged misogyny, the impunity of patriarchy, power, and control. Three of these are the post-1990s structural adjustment economic order in most of Africa; technological disruption; and the unintended fall-out of some of the economic and social reforms on the continent of the late 20th Century, and the now the 21st Century.

Structural adjustment and economic reforms of the last 30 years, destroyed or weakened some of the old institutions that controlled our economies; like cooperative societies (which were male-dominated), and the markets controlled by municipalities. We now have smaller people-centred cooperative and savings societies and clubs (chamas in Kenya), and the numbers of roadside and informal markets have probably grown by anything up to 10,000 per cent in some African countries as urban populations exploded.

Mama Mbogas

These changes brought us Mama Mbogas and ushered in the grand age of powerful market women. Men were generally left behind or fell by the roadside. At the Many 2005 International Press Institute’s World Congress and 54th General Assembly will be held in Nairobi, co-hosted with Nation Media Group, Coca-Cola’s vice president for Africa told a story about how this looks like on the ground.

He said he had recently visited Nigeria, and he was taken to meet the Lagos distributor of Coca-Cola in West Africa. He had expected they would take him to an office in a glass building in a nice part of Lagos, but instead, they led him to the massive and chaotic Balogun Market. In the middle of the market, the distributor, a hefty imposing Mama seated on a stool, shouted her commands. She worked all her West African magic from her stool in the market. Fascinated, he sat down to talk to her.

She asked him where he came from. He said he came from Berkeley, California. She said she knew Berkeley very well. “How?” he inquired. Three of her children go to the prestigious University of California, Berkeley, and she visits them whenever she has time. It is a familiar story in Kenya, Tanzania, and wherever you look in Africa today.

You rarely see men sitting on the ground on roadsides or markets selling stuff. You hardly ever see men carrying boiled maize and bananas to sell to workers at building sites. The result is that most of the profits in the mid and lower-end urban explosion, and lucrative informal and post-structural adjustment economies are pocketed by women. It has created an ever-increasing number of men without or with less money than women and crashed with a patriarchal world in which these surpluses were theirs. Feeling dispossessed, they are lashing out in anger.

Post-Cold War democracy

Added to this, the post-Cold War democracy movement in Africa brought many reforms. One of them was the repeal of the unpopular colonial-era poll tax. Poll tax was a backward tax levied on every adult (mostly men), without reference to their income or resources. Brutally enforced, many men were jailed for failing to pay it. The colonialists introduced it to force “natives” to get into the money (capitalist) economy, so they could earn to pay it.

However, with its removal, the main reason many men in the rural areas worked disappeared. More women, however, are working in the small trades and agriculture, and with the old extractive cooperatives now sell their produce, and keep the proceeds. So you have large numbers of dependent men who don’t work and are mocked for “not even having a poll tax ticket” to show their worth. Their response is to lash out.

Technological changes have not helped. Most of the successful Africans selling stuff on sites like Instagram and Pinterest are women. Even Satan’s business has been upended. In our stressful urban world, commercial sex is big business. The people who made the most money in that ungodly market used to be the male pimps. Then dating apps and Facebook came along, and now fellows can swipe right, cutting out the pimp.

These changes have left men in a difficult place. Instead of hating the game, they are hating the players. In addition to better policing, public policy to protect women needs to be more creative to work in these realities. They presently aren’t. Sadly, by the time they do, the body count will be very high.

Mr Onyango-Obbo is the author is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3