Clearly, not every tradition is worth preserving and celebrating,” I said, taking over the task of Complainer-in-Chief. “You’re talking about what Moslems do to women. Look what Hindus do to women. First of all, it is the women who marry the men.”
“What do you mean?”
“In Nigeria, the man pays a bride price to marry his wife. In India the woman pays a dowry to marry her husband.”
“Now, that’s upside down, isn’t it?”
“The Times of India, as well as India’s other leading newspapers, are full of classified matrimonial advertisements, mostly from families seeking a husband for their daughter. The young woman’s assets are listed—her physical beauty, of course; her education and degrees, diplomas and skills obtained; her family’s caste and pedigree; her parents’ employment and rank; and the wealth of dowry she will bring. An Indian businessman of my acquaintance used to lament that he had two daughters and was struggling to accumulate a quarter of a million dollars for wedding and dowry for each daughter. That was twenty-five years ago; today he would probably need half a million dollars for each daughter.”
“I think I’ve read about this,” said Taiwo. “And heaven help the bride who doesn’t bring enough dowry . . .”
“Some greedy husbands team up with their relatives and murder the wife for not bringing dowry they consider enough.”
“Murder?!” exclaimed Ogbuagu. “Surely that’s going too far!”
“That’s right. And the authorities do nothing about it. The murderers go scot-free.”
“Amazing!”
“It’s much like their treatment of the caste they call Untouchables. Those men, women and children do all the hard and dirty work. They are slaves in every sense of the word. They too are murdered at will. All the glamour that is India is built on the repression and inhumane exploitation of the Untouchables.”
“Yep! Slavery has never been abolished on earth. Slavery is very much alive. Just try Sudan and Mauritania.”
“I mean, Arabs pour kerosene on a woman and set her on fire for bearing only daughters and no sons.”
“Thank God Nigeria is not quite that backward.”
“Oh yeah? But in your village they cut off a girl-baby’s clitoris, and sew up her vagina, making sexual intercourse excruciatingly painful when she grows up, and normal childbirth impossible.”
“Somebody’s village but not my own-o!”
“Atrocious! This is the 21st century, for God’s sake! Those primitive ages are gone and should be gone forever!”
“Well, at least you Igbos, willingly or by force, you stopped the horrific tradition of killing twins,” said Taiwo. “That is something to celebrate.”
“And wouldn’t you know, Yorubas celebrated twins while Igbos murdered them,” said Ogbuagu. “Just doesn’t make sense.”
“But the Igbos, shame on them, still victimize women for not bearing a male child,” I said. “They chase her out of her matrimonial home, or they persuade the husband to marry a second wife.”
“What if the second wife bears only girls also? You know some men don’t have the man-making Y-chromosome.”
“That’s rare. But you’re talking high microbiology! I’m talking commonsense and decency. A woman who is so unfortunate that she is unable to bear any child at all is hounded out of her matrimonial home by the husband’s United Family—led, not by the father-in-law as you might expect, but by the mother-in-law and sisters-in-law.”
“Women continue to be their own worst enemies, yeah?”
“That’s right. In Igboland, ignorance reigns. They have no knowledge of what makes a boy or girl-baby—that it is not in the control of the woman any more than the man. And they don’t even care.”
“They have no idea what causes sterility in man or woman . . .”
“They don’t believe a man can be sterile. It’s always the woman that is to blame.”
“Even the more enlightened ones: they go to a doctor, get tested, and discover that the problem is with the husband, that he has a low sperm count, or is otherwise damaged. The husband and his family go into a conspiracy. They hush the matter up, keep it a family secret, and continue publicly to blame the wife. Soon they hound her out, or quietly poison her so she can’t expose their supposed family shame. The murdered wife’s family make a few threatening noises, and the matter ends there.”
“Na wah-o!”
“Yes, being sterile is about as ‘shameful’ as being mental, insane or mad. No Igbo family can tolerate that.”
“It used to be that no family could tolerate having a thief in it. But virtually every family always has at least one thief in it. Those families cursed by the gods have several.”
“So what happens?”
“Well, to end the collective disgrace, the family would either offer up their thief to be taken to the forest and quietly executed or sold away into slavery, especially after the Europeans came with their never-never land of no return version of slavery.”
“Or the family would quietly execute the thief themselves! Anything to save face and keep the society safe.”
“Yes, rather than one firebrand destroying the village in a conflagration, put out the firebrand.”
“But that was then. What of now?”
“Oh, just look around and see where the thieves are. . . .”
• Concluded
Onwuchekwa Jemie
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