Gender debate: Why the girl child cause is glaring male parent case

Students

School girls walking in Eldoret town, Uasin Gishu County. Our daughters love us, believe in us and trust us with unwavering and unquestioning loyalty. We male parents thus have a crucial role to play in the emancipation and empowerment of our girl children.

Photo credit: Jared Nyataya | Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

  • Every day should be a day for the girl child, and every child.
  • Our daughters love us, believe in us and trust us with unwavering and unquestioning loyalty.
  • We male parents thus have a crucial role to play in the emancipation and empowerment of our girl children.

“It’s a Pity She’s Not a Boy”. That, complete with quote marks, is the ironic title of the autobiography of one of the most remarkable women in East African public life.

Joyce Rovincer Mpanga, now aged 89, is one of the earliest female graduates of Makerere.

After earning further degrees from London and Indiana, she entered Ugandan public affairs in the early 1960s, serving as, among other roles, a repeatedly-elected MP, a minister in several portfolios, and Secretary of the East African Examinations Council.

Few “boys”, could have achieved half as much as that. Indeed, the title of Mpanga’s book is a gentle jibe at her late paternal grandfather, who made the pronouncement when little Joyce was introduced to him.

But the title, and the book, came back to my mind last Tuesday, October 11, as we marked the International Day of the Girl Child.

Though expressed many decades ago in rural Uganda, and in spite of the phenomenal achievements of women like Joyce Mpanga and her peers, her grandpa’s regret that she was not a boy still rings relevant today.

Patriarchal society

The regret encapsulates for me the many odds stacked against the girl child in an endemically patriarchal society. Grandfather’s regret implies that the “proper” gender to be is male, and being female is some kind of aberration or abnormality.

Does this sound frightening? Well, it is frightening, and it is as dangerously absurd as it is wasteful. You cannot adequately run society on the assumption that half of humanity is a regrettable deviation, either to be tolerated at best or to be curbed and even destroyed at worst.

This is gloomy but sadly real and true. Misogyny, the hate of women just because they are women, is real and widespread.

Sexist violence, including femicide, the killing of women because they are women, is a deadly reality with which we live every day.

This week, I heard of campaigners inaugurating a space in a European capital that they named the “Femicide Cemetery”, in protest against murderous sexist violence.

We in Kenya, too, are observing the grim first anniversary of the murder of athletic star Agnes Tirop in Iten. You may remember that another female athlete was killed in Kirinyaga at just about the same time as Agnes was murdered.

How and where do we begin to celebrate the girl child in this dire environment? First, we must dismantle the whole of the centuries-old, culture-hallowed machinery of patriarchy and male supremacist presumptions.

This is nothing short of a revolution, and I cannot pretend that it can happen today or this year. It has taken us centuries to get to the pathetic lopsided state of society where men are lords and women are property, playthings and disposable chattels.

Conditions cannot be changed overnight, but neither should it take centuries to effect significant changes.

This is why I am speaking of a revolution, a radical gender relationship change. A revolution should be, among other things, focused, fundamental, systematic and accelerated.

With our eyes fixed on a sensible and equitable, merit-based rather than sex-based society, we struggle for the deliberate changes that would bring about this society in the shortest possible time.

I use the term “struggle” deliberately because I know it is not easy to make advantaged people give up their privileges and opportunistic “superiority”.

Men who think that a “boy” is the thing to be will not just hand over their powers and positions to “girls”, however deserving these might be.

Yet hand over they must, and every tactic must be deployed to make them do so. Persuasion is one such tactic, and this brings me to what I want to tell the men with respect to the girl child.

Men, and specifically fathers, can be persuaded to lead the revolution of the emancipation and empowerment of the girl child.

Fathers, our daughters love us with immeasurably profound and intense love. I mentioned this to you when I was reacting to the heart-warming and award-winning movie, “King Richard”.

It is, as you may remember, the true life story of Richard Williams, who, against all odds, home educated and coached his daughters, Venus and Serena, into two of arguably the greatest tennis players of our times.

I argued that Venus and Serena loved and excelled at their sport largely because they loved their father, and he loved them.

Anyway, I was speaking as a father who has experienced the love of a daughter, my girl child.

Unique relationship

My witness from this experience is that this relationship is absolutely unique and incomparable to any other kind of relationship.

Our daughters love us, believe in us and trust us with unwavering and unquestioning loyalty.

We male parents thus have a crucial role to play in the emancipation and empowerment of our girl children.

If from the earliest age, we pay attention to them, listen to them, talk to them and assure them of our love, our respect for them and our belief in them, they will reciprocate and they will grow up stable and self-confident, because “daddy said” they are bright, smart and “capable”. If we raise them with encouragement and positive appreciation, they will grow into free, assertive and level-headed women.

The problem with most of us, however, is that we are often “missing in action”, and here I am not speaking of those execrable miscreants who breed and breeze off like dogs.

Even we, decent folk at home, glad and willing to provide for our children in every way, often have “no time” for our children.

Yet, more important than any material goodies you can give to your children are those precious moments of quality time you spend with them, talking with them, playing with them and, especially, listening to them

. Let us start now preparing for next year’s International Day of the Girl Child.

In any case, every day should be a day for the girl child, and every child.

Prof Bukenya is a leading East African scholar of English and [email protected]