IS IT TOO MUCH TO ASK?

 Sir,

We’ve always been looking forward to the day when women will shed their silence, stand up and thwart the slightest attack on the sexuality, dignity and modesty of women.

In the recent years, it has become common practice to neglect, ill-treat and demean women in society. There are some women who are refusing to keep quiet, sit back and watch as our dreams, hopes and ambitions are being snatched from our grip in the name of ‘gender discrimination’. 

As young women in the typical Eswatini society, we’ve grown to know male dominance as a norm, our brothers and fathers, male friends and colleagues as the ‘better’ sex and having access to better privileges than females. This has become a part of us, such that nobody raises eyebrows to gender based discrimination and violence anymore.

There was once a report about a girl who was repeatedly raped by two men, and in exchange for her silence they gave her E1. We feel that besides the fact that she was abused, people were more shaken and focused on the amount of money she got after the abuse.

Rape comes with trauma, it comes with after effects, that poor girl will be scarred for the rest of her life, and yet we think ‘how lame of them to give her such a small amount’? Really, what can you buy with E1?

When the real matter should be what the country is doing to alleviate incidents like these.  And that when a woman reports abuse, the first question asked is ‘what did you do to him that made him so angry’? This clearly shows that people think that when a woman is abused, it’s always her fault and that she must have done something to provoke the man.

Men who abuse women deserve a harsh punishment for the whole country to see that violence is punishable, and that it must come to a stop! 
As much as we are advocating for the female gender, we cannot turn a blind eye to the obvious fact that there are men who are silenced and not given the opportunities given to women. But, where are those men really? Are they not coming out because they find it abnormal for a man to be suppressed? Or is it because our society dictates male superiority that a man who feels inferior becomes a brunt of jokes and ridicule?

Some dignified men, even pastors and respectable leaders are against gender equality. A recent article in the newspaper by a very vocal man who’s not afraid to show his hatred for women, talks about how he thinks women can never win against men.

To set the record straight, women are not looking for gender superiority, but they are fighting for gender equality, a common ground for women to voice out their opinions and ideas without captioning ‘female opinion’ or even the widely used phrase, ‘lidvodzile’, a siSwati word that is used to describe a wise opinion presented by a woman, which loosely means ‘sounds like a man speaking’. Women are simply asking fore equal opportunities and privileges, could that be too much to ask?

Mbuli N

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