Female Activists and South Sudanese Men in the Firing Line: Activism for What and for Whom?
By Makneth Aciek, Kampala, Uganda
Thursday, May 04, 2023 (PW) — I have been following an interesting conversation between “Nilotic gentlemen” and their radical sisters, the black Amazonian feminists. One woman lamented a lack of confidence among her community’s male folks to ask educated women’s hands in marriage or take them out for a date, which brothers took as an insult to their manliness.
I am yet to learn what is meant by “educated women”. However, on romance issues, men fear women; even male warlords approach ladies they admire with trepidation! Man naturally feels small in front of the potential object of his love; it doesn’t matter whether she is untutored or a college don. That fear becomes a crisis when men have nothing to offer regarding material resources.
Regarding reproductive strategy, women are naturally fastidious about what they want in men; it is naturally hard to fully meet women’s standards. Nevertheless, their crushing force of sexual selection and their proclivity to shame or reject men have been a positive part of human evolution. No well-cultured, conscious woman will have an unawakened man for a husband; this fact is even clearly captured in the creation mythology of Abrahamic religions, where Eve shared the fruit with her inept man (Adam) and made him self-conscious.
The ability of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is a natural phenomenon; it is the key to the adaption and survival of people. Women have societal mandates to create and impose manhood ideals on men. In Nilotic communities, there are many stories of women applying numerous devices to limit unscrupulous behaviours among men- ranging from composing songs to employing jokes- to mock men who fail to take up responsibilities. In times of war, they shame the coward for being brave and defend the community. In times of food scarcity, they compose songs that limit greed and corruption.
This is no longer the case in our societies today; the volumes of negative tweets and comments on social media when women criticise men demonstrate that we have forgotten where we came from. Men no longer appreciate the positive values that nagging women bring to all aspects of their lives. Women seem not to understand the predicaments of their male brothers; this has led to aberration in our societies.
Our people have lived through eras wracked by ceaseless invasion and chaos, leading to fundamental changes in how they understood their reality. The painful experiences of the Atlantic slave trade and the colonialism series have created a chronic crisis of manhood in our societies. Men hardly provide for their families because the economic institutions which we inherited from colonisers are not in conformity with our cultures and way of life.
When women challenge their husbands to be men and secure the means of survival for their families, men find it difficult to turn that challenge into action that would rescue their beloved ones from economic hardship. What men experience in such a situation is shame, and when women insist, they turn shame into anger, and the result of that anger is domestic violence. We talk about domestic violence in our villages, but no one cares to talk about the economic situations underpinning them.
To restore normalcy in our communities, there is an urgent need to engage young men and women in a constant dialectic about the past and current circumstances we live. We are facing a time when new economic systems must be established for our civil populations. This requires us to use our cultures to negotiate new changes occurring in our communities.
Continuing with wicked practices in the name of culture deprives our society of the values it needs in the immediate tomorrow; on the other hand, careless demolition of people’s traditions in the name of modernity is an invitation to the emergence of confusion and mess; so, balancing these situations requires understanding and little sensitivity. To transform our cultures, we must master them first and discipline ourselves to understand the necessity of those cultures and transform them in keeping with the spirit of solving people’s problems.
Yes, there is a crisis of manhood in our societies, but what tools are these so-called educated activists using to help boys and young men overcome the crisis? Manhood is an ideal that society cultivates in its male, it is a state of mind, and it takes a village to organise a mind. Communities create their men with the tools they have directly at hand as their environment dictates; faulty tools will produce faulty men that prey upon cultures.
The tools used by those who claim to know better are foreign; the ideals used by most of our educated sisters to address the crisis of manhood in our societies were developed by people who once enslaved and colonised us. Those are the tools and ideals used to destroy our manhood in the first place, so they will never help us overcome our predicaments. Out of those tools, monsters will emerge in the name of observing culture: men who are ignorant about the history of their peoples! Men who think and believe that child marriage is originally part of their culture.
Signs of malaise are abundant and salient all over South Sudanese villages; this should be seen because of social collapse in our societies, but most of us seek in vain legitimate explanations and solutions in the arena of politics; others go beyond our borders to import explanations and solutions at the expense of our shared cultural values. But in the end, a true explanation or solution shall be found only if we take the reality of our communities seriously and operate in keeping with the local peoples’ expectations and desires.
People in the villages and cattle camps desire modernity and progress, but they would want the path of modernity and progress to stay within what they believe to be their traditional heritage. Those who agitate for modernity without paying attention to people’s feelings inevitably breed new consequences which make people unresponsive to their call. People would rather dismiss and stigmatise them as “social dropouts” who are ill-bent, tearing up the old communal bonds and declaring war on habitual ways and customary laws.
Activists need to base their work on improving the socioeconomic realities of our people as the only solid avenue of social advancement. They should preach less about morality and focus more on the economy; this entails introducing new ideas that will modernise people’s traditional means of production; otherwise, the whole activism project will be reduced to opinionated vagueness. This is what we are experiencing already!
Most of our activists have based their activism on personal ambition; their driving force is not necessary to transform societies but to create an achievement for themselves. They lack the whole phenomenon of intentionality, which is at the heart of our people’s emotional experiences; their opinions don’t update our societies; they instead cause controversies- dramatising important subjects like gender equality as a war between men and women.
Our communities need a more compassionate, open, and less controversial vision of activism; this requires activists to look at their positions not just as a way of making a living but as an opportunity to truly articulate the major social grievances in our communities. We shall only have an informed opinion about the plight of our people if we base advocacy work on a distillation of the observed behaviour among our civil populations.
The author, Makneth Aciek, is a concerned citizen who can be reached via his email address: mkdagoot@mail.com
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