Women’s rights advocacy: Why am I involved?

There are some things in life that start off like questions without answers and end up like answers without questions. I don’t know whether this is going to be one of them but, point is, many friends and colleague journalists have asked me these questions umpteen times: ‘Why are you so interested in defending women’s rights?’ ‘Is it that you have no work to do?’ ‘Did something happen to you in your life that pushed you to become an advocate for women’s rights?’ Others have sought to know whether I grew up in a family where my mother was battered or in a community where violence against women was a currency. Each time we hang out and I reproach a colleague journalist, and they are many in this class, for using vulgar language about women they have had an affair with, as lubricants for their beer, they tell me ‘we know you are a Women’s Rights Advocate’. As time passed by and each time some of my close friends wanted to be funny with girls, they checked to know what my reaction would be. They sometimes worry why a man would take such a public interest in standing up against men who perpetrate violence against women.

Although I have never been bothered about responding to their enquiries with any precision, the truth about the matter is that I have lived lots of instances of violence against women both at home and in my community. My involvement in the defense of women’s rights has not been just to check myself but also to contribute my own quota in righting the wrongs of the past.

I grew up in a typically strong traditional Kom family where discipline was a rule and not an exception. Not discipline in the sense that my father would call you to advice you when you went wrong but discipline in the sense that he expected you to know what was wrong or right and to stay by it. With him, there were no half measures, it was whether you were right or wrong, and the consequences were severe battery. In the traditional Kom way, there was no communication between husband and wife, so one did not expect the reverse between my father and my mother or between him and his other wives. My mother, like his other three wives, was his property, short and simple. If his food was not there on time, or she went visiting neighbours without telling him, she was seriously battered. If she fails to harvest his coffee the time he wanted it done, or delayed with water for him to bathe, she was battered. She had a duty of humility and silence when my father was talking. He would remind her and others when they resisted his instructions that she bought them with his money. He could batter you and ask you not to eat even the food you took pains to prepare for the whole day. Dare not complain.

My grandmother had settled in Abuh village from Tinifoinbi where she gave birth to my mother and she grew to be betrothed to my father, still in Abuh. Both settled in Muteff, a neighboring village. Traditionally, sustainability in marriage was assured by making sure once a woman is given off in marriage, she is traditionally blocked from ever coming back to their compound. This meant that whatever manner your husband treated you in, you had to succumb because there would be no way for you to come back to your parents. Even if you were to have whatever critical thing to discuss with your mother or sisters, you were required to come and stop at a distance from your father’s compound and send somebody to call the concern and you people meet on the road.

Once married off, you were made to understand that if you come back to your father’s compound, you would die. My mother and other women in the community wanted any other treatment but death. Without civil registries at the time, I suspect she must have been married off to my father before the age of 15. Although in an advanced age in their marriage, he and my mother lived a much more respectable family life, it was more because my mother had learned to be submissive than that my father had changed his mentality toward women. Even though I grew up in such a home and community, it was the women in and around my life in later years that challenged me and my thinking and this led to subsequent self reflection. Before then, I had accepted the situation at home as normal.

When I went to the University of Yaoundé in the early 90s and had to live with my brother, who was a lecturer of Telecommunication Engineering, I soon discovered it was a matter of ‘like father, like son’. He had carried along with him my father’s way of life and was virtually doing to his wife what my father had been doing to my mother. With sufficient self-realization and a critical mind, I had to challenge such sexism frontally. Although it almost caused my stay in his house and, by extension, my education, as he interpreted my moves as attempts to destabilize his home, I never relented, given that I never wanted what had happened to my own mother to ever happen to another woman.

The flexibility of the English version of the National Daily Cameroon Tribune gave me the opportunity to commission a chain of opinionated articles on domestic violence using my brother’s home as case study. Given that he was an avid reader of newspapers, I was sure of the impact sooner or later.

My use of pungent examples obtained in our home caused him to approach me to find out why I was betraying him to the public, to which I reminded him, I did not want any woman to ever live the experience my mother and older sister lived in their marital homes. Reluctantly, he accepted and resolved to change. The man who had always communicated with his wife through battery; the man who although educated, had never wanted the wife to be educated and employed; the man who had seen the wife as nothing but property; suddenly changed and allowed the wife all the freedom to pursue her education to any level and to pick up a job. Little did he know that years after he would no longer be alive, the woman would become the sole bread winner for the immediate and extended family. There has never been any better way of proving the adage that ‘to educate a man is to educate an individual and to educate a woman is to educate a nation’ than in this case.

So, why am I involved?

Someone has written that the culture of men and manhood calls for us to take a long, hard look at ourselves. I must admit that initially, I was not as engaged in this fight as I am today. I had convinced myself that I was not a wife batterer or somebody involved in any form of violence against women. When recently, I had a discussion with my older sister, the first born to my parents, she told me almost in tears how she was forced to drop out of school and forced into early marriage in order to enable the three of us, boys from my mother, to go to school. I had a deeper understanding of why it was so important for me to resolve to engage other men to take a stand in order to end violence against women and why working with other men is the perfect place to begin.

The motivation to take this stand, along with reasons for humanity, equality in ending violence against women, girls and children, also includes my need to celebrate the life of my mother, Nawain Nabeng Veronica, who gave all the satisfaction without being satisfied herself. Her humility and tenacity throughout her tortuous marital life, and the wonderful love she showed her children, gave me the privilege from an early age to see that women are incredibly courageous and special. Even though she passed away in 2007, her courage remained my source of inspiration in my fight to end violence against women. That year, I made the decision to spend the rest of my life celebrating hers. That is why soon after 2007, I created A Common Future organization, together with my wife, Dountio Saadeo Relindis, with the sole aim of proposing alternative models of masculinity that are not in opposition to models of femininity the way my father and brother saw it, but that allow men and women to share love, reproductive health responsibilities and decision-making. When my older sister, who today is in her sixties, reminds me that she would have been a better person today if she did not drop out of school for us, I readily mobilize other boys to walk a mile in women’s high heel shoes in a symbolic understanding that she who wears the shoes know where they pinch.

I am involved because of my strong belief that ending violence against women is the primary responsibility of men although society has generally left the fight to women. It is my understanding that it is essential men play a primary role in the solution to end it the way I did in the case of my own brother years back in Yaoundé. A Common Future challenges men to reconsider their long-held beliefs about women, in an effort to create a more just society given that both men and women have a common future.

*Gwain Colbert works with Dignity Television, Cameroon.

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