Kneel Down…You are a Woman

Still from “Ada Ada” by Flavour

The women emerge from the house in pink laces. Their leader, a sprightly 40-year-old crowned with a big blue headscarf, meanders through the crowd, past waitpersons bearing trays of garden eggs and alligator pepper, soda and beer, plates of Jollof rice, pounded yam and soups. She is careful not to spill palm-wine from the cow-horn cup in her hands as she sways her hips and stumps her feet to highlife music. Her bridesmaids trailing behind her, the leader makes her way through each canopy ignoring calls from male guests, impostors claiming to be her beloved.

“Isn’t it me?”

“Bring it here!”

“Where are you going?”

She knows her betrothed is hiding in the crowd and she must find him. Only him can accept this offering. She dances, she sways, she sings along and walks through interspersed canopies until she spots him seated behind a group of guests. She sashays towards him and kneels when she is before him. She sips the wine before offering it. The groom downs the rest, puts money in the horn cup and hands it back to his bride.

This is the highlight of Igba-Nkwu, the traditional marriage ceremony of the Igbo people. As a young girl of 12, watching my aunt perform this rite filled me with the blissful anticipation of someday kneeling before my husband-to-be, publicly displaying my subservience and asserting the status quo for the rest of our marriage. Today, however, as a 26-year-old Igbo woman, I cringe when I read about a similar ceremony in Flora Nwapa’s classic womanist novel, Efuru. The novel’s protagonist, Efuru, and her first husband, Adizua, finally raise enough money to pay her bride price and appease her father for eloping. But just when Efuru is about to drink the glass of Schnapps Adizua offers her to conclude their nuptials, the gathered people holler: “Kneel down, kneel down, you are a woman.” And she quickly obeys.

I never got a chance to read Efuru in secondary school, but I know my ten or seventeen-year-old self would have been unfazed by that scene of the kneeling woman; by Efuru’s gender being the only justification for her assuming that position; a position her community foists on her. At the time, I was taught my place in society and I did not question it. It was not just naiveté that kept my younger self oblivious, but a desire for the male gaze and the self-affirmation it deceptively provides. This trope of the kneeling woman embodies the female condition in the traditional and colonial Igbo society where Nwapa sets Efuru’s story. In many respects, it portrays the place women still occupy in modern Igbo and Nigerian society.

Efuru is a woman ahead of her time and one of the first indications of her deviance is her insubordination to her father and family when she runs off with the man she loves. She is strong-willed, shrewd and enterprising. When her father sends “strong men” to retrieve her, she resorts to cunning to thwart their mission in a society where the woman is typically subject to the whims and values of leaders, who are primarily men. Besides the depraved practices women in Efuru’s time endured like female genital mutilation, there are more covert acts the novel describes that, till this day, continue to reinforce inequality between the sexes.

It has been 50 years since Efuru was first published and yet women wrestle with societal definitions of femininity—attracting and keeping a lifelong mate, catering to his needs and producing his offspring. Growing up, I did not question this rearing to lure and please, to effortlessly navigate fragile male egos. Whenever my mother delivered culinary lessons she’d regale me with stories of women “chased out” of their husbands’ houses because they couldn’t cook. She had hoped to inspire me to learn this basic necessity for my existence through the fear of losing my spouse. It worked. But it wasn’t just my mother; it was aunties, uncles, friends, teachers, pastors, Nollywood, Hollywood, Disney. In my adolescence, I understood my raison d’être as being smart, pretty, polite, obedient and virtuous enough to secure my spouse. I understood ‘him’ as the destination, not a fork in the road signalling me to a course with merged lanes.

We teach nearly half our population to aspire for dependence, to take self-actualization for granted, yet somehow we expect our nation and continent to ‘rise’. We acknowledge the family as a microcosm of society, but trivialize the events responsible for setting that unit in motion—deeds that persist from the colonial days that Nwapa describes till today—such as paying a bride price and other spectacles that depict marriage as a one-sided submission.

The exchange of money and gifts for another human being incessantly perpetuates the idea of women as chattel transferred from a father or community to a husband. Traditionalists often argue that “this is our culture” and that we are allowing ourselves be “westernized” by seeking to eliminate these practices. But isn’t culture the way of life of a group of people? And if the people or their way of life has changed, doesn’t that imply that culture is dynamic? Do we still kill twins or cast the sickly and handicapped into Evil Forests? Did we not embrace change when we adopted religions brought to us by foreign invaders? And who benefits from the keeping or discarding of select cultural norms?

I recognize the allure of gliding through a public gathering, organized partly in your honour, dolled up and slowly two-stepping to Flavour’s “Ada Ada”, while men deliberate how many bags of rice and bottles of Schnapps to trade for you. I understand hoping your hashtag #X&X trends widely enough to get you featured on Bella Naija, or their Instagram page at least. I recognize this, and I admit my privilege as a woman in the diaspora and member of an upper middleclass household whose patriarch has no interest in receiving a bride price for me.

But those who argue that paying a woman’s bride price is nothing more than a formality, take lightly the symbolism of exchanging goods for another human being. And what a privileged few might enjoy in the name of formality, a disadvantaged many experience more literally. What we enjoy in the name of harmless fun reinforces gender stereotypes that hinder our progress towards equality. We become complicit in the subjugation of women.

A lot has changed for women since Flora Nwapa’s time. In 2014, Nigerian women made up to 42 percent of the total labour force, an increase from 34 percent in 1990. In 2015, former President Goodluck Jonathan signed into law a ban on female genital mutilation. Women vote and hold public offices. Activists and concerned citizens—male and female—relentlessly challenged tyranny when they denounced the abduction of 276 girls, insisting that the lives and the education of girls are important.

Efuru’s experiences are, indeed, different from the experiences of the modern Igbo or Nigerian woman, but in a lot ways the conditions under which women live have stayed the same. There are still gains to be made to ensure gender equality in Nigeria: gains in, to name a few, the ratification of the 2010 Gender and Equal Opportunities Bill that the Nigerian Senate rejected in March 2016 for religious reasons (a ‘reworked’ version scaled through the Senate’s second reading later in September); the abolition of the bride price practice; and the criminalization of female genital mutilation. These campaigns can exist on the street and the page; like Nwapa, we can continue to document what it means to be female in Nigeria and bring normalized elements of oppression to the fore.

The necessity of deliberately seeking gender equality has never been more urgent, with our country experiencing its worst economic crisis in 25 years. In her essay, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving,” the African-American poet, Audre Lorde, writes on the benefits of uplifting African-American women to the African-American community as a whole. For “it is through the coming together of self-actualized individuals, female and male, that any real advances can be made…The old sexual power relationships based on a dominant/subordinate model between un-equals has not served us a people, nor as individuals.”

Efuru was only made possible because Nwapa was a woman ahead of her time. She has passed on the baton and it is up to us, contemporary Nigerian women, to build on her legacy by fighting for and insisting on our equality and economic independence. In her 1981 novel, One is Enough, Nwapa makes a more poignant appeal for women’s empowerment with a Hausa proverb: “A woman who holds her husband as a father dies an orphan.

This story was originally published in The Republic