Patriarchy

A glimpse at the feminization and masculinization of poverty by patriarchy

When women are confined to the home performing only the necessary domestic duties of wife, child-bearer and nurturer and cook, a "feminine" stereotype is established and entrenched. When women either by choice or by force end up in domesticity, there are dire consequences for both women and men as follows: patriarchy is entrenched and there is an escalation of commitment on all fronts to attack those who dare defy this feminine stereotype. 

What is rarely discussed though is the pauperization of families by patriarchy. This is a new phenomena that has arisen as a result of failed or limping economies across the globe. By force and a false sense of honor, many men continue to be willingly ambushed by patriarchy, taking on the role of bread winner, when many no longer have the desire, inclination capability nor capacity to. 

No one person has got the monopoly on great ideas. 

Meanwhile, in domestic land, the women's intellectual capacity would have been eroded over many years of domesticity. The pressure for men to uphold patriarchy mounts and unable to cope, many opt for deviant behavior, such as child abuse, violence against women, drunkenness, extra marital relationships, suicide and so on. The once revered traditional family based on a shaky foundation of patriarchy falters and then falls and society is left with many unanswered questions. 

This scenario is being played out in Zimbabwe right now. Zimbabwe has became a nation where patriarchy is failing leading to both the feminization and masculinization of poverty. 

~ Gloria Ndoro-Mkombachoto ~

 

Worthy pursuits

Yesterday we were having one of many conversations with my family on ultimate freedom and its dimensions, the pitfalls of fanaticism, extremism in Christians and other faith based groupings, materialism and how it has altered the joy and happiness mankind was supposed to experience and so on.  One remarked at how the statement   "....those who are hopelessly enslaved are the ones who falsely believe are free", kind of summarises the discussion on freedom and that got me thinking again about what I have discussed in another forum here on FB.

Why do we need so much, when we already have enough and can still do with less? Why are we thumping our predisposed arthritic feet on a treadmill to nowhere. It was here before we came. It will still be here when we leave, this curse, fuelled by materialism called money!

There three important things worth pursuing:

1. A healthy lifestyle so that you do not need medical aid. The medical and pharmaceutical fraternities are bagging it, whilst we all toil to afford medical aid. It is not normal. It is called enslavement. It is public subjugation and we have signed on to it.    

You spend the rest of your life paying for medical aid and not using it and when you really need it, post 50 years, if you are blessed nowadays to live that long, your propensity to generate more income as it declines inhibits you from affording it. It is a glaring fraud of our times. Legalised fraud because all those premiums you paid will not be paid back to you. 

Even with medical aid, when your day comes, the best medical mortals will not be able to help you live longer!

2. Financial freedom does not necessarily mean having your loot stashed away in some offshore account for that rainy day or time when you are disabled by aged.

It means, knowing how little you need and require on a daily basis and fighting everyday to maintain a balance, an equilibrium that suppresses the advertising induced wants and focus on the needs. The need to spend time with loved ones, the need to stay connected with those that enrich your being, the need to do an act of kindness to strangers everyday, even if that act of kindness is just a smile, the need to read more and be wiser each day, the need to be more pragmatic, practical and prudent where life matters are concerned and so on and so forth.

3. Mental freedom is peace of mind. You certainly cannot have 3 without 1 and 2. Peace of mind is a preserve of the few. The lucky few. The courageous few. The fearless few. Those from amongst us with the boldness and relentlessness to challenge the status quo as it is defined to all of us by the power elite.

The enslavement that we find ourselves, in today's so called "civilised and modern" world, is systematic, public, legalised fraud meted on us with our consent under the illusion of freedom.

The tragedy of strength

Those who came before us, our grand mothers and grand fathers, our aunts and uncles, our communities etc, always taught us to be strong. Weakness was condemned and despised. And strong we became. 

Strength to overcome adversity is important, vital and a necessity particularly in Africa where as a woman you grow up being objectified all the time and given more or less the same status as children..."a bus travelling from X to Y carrying 80 people had an accident. 40 people died including 16 women and 12 children..." the story lines always remark.

But strength can be burdensome. Strength can be a heavy load to carry. Strength can be lonesome. Strength can be a liability because as you remain strong and grow stronger, you can unconsciously minimise those around you. People around you can become weak, not because they choose to, but because your strength overshadows without empowering them, it sidelines and is overarching without tooling them on how to be strong.

To be strong is to draw from a power located right at the core from inside you, the self. That process of drawing from within the depths of yourself is personal. The outcomes are overt but the process of delivering the outcomes is covert. You can only tell people to be strong but there is no manual on "how to". It is a personal journey influenced by those that were around you when you were growing up.

The tragedy with wielding too much strength is that should you ever stumble and become vulnerable and require particularly emotional support from those around you, the beneficiaries of your strength, if your strength disabled them over the years as you became the only reservoir from which strength could be drawn, there will either be resistance or failure to rise up to the challenge that is making you vulnerable. Vulnerability therefore becomes a luxury. 

That is why many strong African women I know just get on with it. There is no time to notice your vulnerability and seek that help one gets from air conditioned offices on the couch, where they recommend popping all sorts of small pills whose names are taboo to mention! 

That has been my very own personal experience. Nowadays, often, I wonder whether it was a wise thing to be strong. I wonder, I ponder, I experience self doubt, I question and even quietly weep, but I do not regret it because I was never taught weak. Strong is all I know. Strong has always been the Alpha and the Omega. I do not know how I could have been anything else but strong ~ Gloria Ndoro-Mkombachoto

And then...

After telling a waiter this morning that waiters are the ones that destroy people's businesses because of shoddy service, shortly thereafter, I ended up nicely tucking my tail in between my legs with humility. 

I had been dropped off at Sam Levy to do this, that and the other. As the driver was still far running errands, I decided to go to The Deli at Sam Levy. There were no free seats. I did not want to wait so I walked across to Millers Cafe by the front of Food Lovers' Market. It was almost empty with one or two people trickling in and out.

I settled in reluctantly and started replying emails. I was given the menu, decided on what I wanted and continued with my online activities. 

Forty minutes later, the driver called and told me he was going to be another thirty to forty minutes late. That is when I realised I had not been served. There was noise in the restaurant of staff chit chatting. I waved to one of the waiters and irritated, told him to go next door and see how the competition, The Deli was doing. I went on and on about how standards had gone down, how they were destroying the business at a time when many would-be patrons just cannot afford going out anymore. I was in my element and on and on I blurted out a whole lecture on customer service as if I was a stuck record.

Satisfied the message had been heard, some five minutes later, I ordered. The coffee arrived first in five minutes and the rest in fifteen minutes. By the time the main arrived, I was full from the coffee, so I nibbled on the ribs and asked the rest to be packed away for my dogs. I proceeded to ask for the bill.

Another twenty minutes later, the driver called to advise me that he was outside. I stood up, went to the front counter and quietly requested my bill, exercising restraint, with difficulty and literally biting my tongue so that I do not speak another word. The bill was presented. 

Then the frantic searching for my purse began. First I thought it was too dark in my big black bag so I put on my glasses. Then, everything in the bag came out, followed by shaking of the bag vigorously.

The purse was nowhere to be found. I called the helper at home who advised me that I had left it on my desk in the study where I was working before I left.

I asked the cashier how much? He advised $11. I told him to ask someone to follow me to the car where the driver saved the day. 

At the counter, I had wanted to say this last word, "Sorry, no tip, the service was shoddy." The missing purse, saved them from hearing that. How do you refuse to pay a tip of less than $2 when you are "claiming" that you have left the purse at home!!!

These are hard times, I could very well have been lying. Others do.

Moral of the story : Before giving unsolicited talks on customer service in a restaurant, please make sure your purse is in the bag :) :( :) :(

Manage your ego and succeed in life

I have met many young people who think that one needs a magic wand to get ahead. They are looking for a quick deal, a quick opportunity, in essence a quick fix to get money and success now. Conspicuous consumption and the I-want-it-now-this-very-moment mentality is now the order of the day amongst these impressionable youngers. They judge success based on the visible, material abundance on display. They do not care how the person got there. They do not ask, what business are they running, where do they work to achieve this conspicuous wealth. All they strive for is to be the same, to be like them in order to be successful.

What I know for sure is that the rules for success have not changed. They have remained the same since time immemorial. The is no short-cut to sincerely, consistent and dedicated hard work. Determination, focus, tenacity,   perseverance, honesty, authenticity and consistency are all key ingredients to success, but it is your attitude that is the determining factor, the most important factor of all. Skill, education and experience are important, but without a managed attitude, an ego that is constantly put in check, success will be elusive to many.

Cry the beloved Zimbabwe

Today the 25th February, 2015, I salute everyone who calls Zimbabwe home and who has decided to stay under the harrowing circumstances we find ourselves in.

I salute you:
- for holding on to the umbilical cord when the Mother long severed ties with both the cord and baby.
- for putting up with the economic hostility that has altered your social lives in more ways than one and choosing not to chicken out through suicide as others are doing.
- for bearing the unbearable.
- for accepting the unacceptable.
- for tolerating the intolerable.
- for your deafening silence in order to prevent many from loosing leg and limb.
- for harnessing your Creators' gift of discernment and in the face of attacks from all directions, you have chosen to remain first class citizens at home in a world where citizenship is a source of exclusion and a justification for further attack.
- for being courageous and waking up every morning, energetic, yet agonising, wearing a smile-like mask that hides our sorrow, the thorns in our hearts and the bleeding wounds.
- for minding your own business where there is nothing else to mind but your very own business.
- for being quietly helpless where helplessness means self preservation.
- for recognising that we are so far gone, it is better to cower, survive and live than to shout from rooftops and be shot at.
- for your hope, that all shall be well, one day, some time, sooner or later, one way or another.

I salute you all, my Zimbabwe family. Your courage is contagious. It gives me strength and hope.

The Elusive Virtue of Suffering in Silence

Recently, in conversations with close girl friends we have realised that our discussions have shifted. The most part of our girl talks centre around the changes in our bodies and that of our partners, the impact of those changes on our lives and the health implications. We are surprised, yes, surprised, that getting old just creeps up on you and is a very personal, often unwelcome and sometimes indescribable experience. We are aged between 48 and 58 years old, are a bunch of informed, educated, well read, travelled and cultured girls. 

Do not get me wrong, we have never been this self centred and self preservation focused before. We have been there, done that and burnt the t-shirt. We still work harder and smarter and most of us within our collective are business owners. Amongst us a few have done our version of national service - development work, in country and abroad and some continue to do that. We are also very focussed on charity work, because there is a need out there, but most importantly because we derive a lot of joy from giving. Be that as it may, increasingly, we have realised that we have been gravitating more and more into the me-myself-and I-and my girlfriends space.

Some of our mothers are still alive and we were wondering why they never suffered the same ailments that are bedevilling us, never had the operations we have had from hysterectomies, liposuctions to gastric by-passes, never had to tattoo their eye lashes, never taken Prozac, never seen a shrink or even had Botox injections for non- surgical face lifts, yet they look wonderfully young in their 70's and 80's.

We have been asking, how come we did not know that age just creeps up on you like that and in a non- negotiable, very undemocratic fashion, arrests some of your most valued freedoms - like having a tiny waistline and flat stomach and not have to worry about wearing those dreadfully awful spandex tights, we have come to call bambazonke (hold every thing in and tight) - that you have always taken for granted, locks them up and literary throws away the keys.

So two of us with mothers alive, asked, why they never told us these very important ingredients of life so that we could have been better prepared. The mothers both said, they were raised in an era where, privacy was guarded at all costs and most importantly, you were meant to suffer in silence, in fact, there was pride and dignity enshrined in silent suffering. Certainly, a tall order for our girl friend collective.

Privacy, never mind its cousin silence are little known words in the days of our times. Living in a world supposedly signalling the end of privacy and confidentiality and giving rise to a new era of full disclosure, my girlfriends and I are surprised that even with the confines of a nuclear family, when we dare share the details of the body pain, itches or twitches we are experiencing, even our young adult children, with a high propensity for sharing on Facebook, twitter, google, Instagram and you tube, would complain, "Mom, you are sharing way too much information!" It turns out, that even the generation that puts much more of the "social" in social networking is much more discerning what personal information they want to hear...particularly if it is from their mothers.

Where does that leave us, we wondered. The obvious answer is, in the same situation, the same box as those who came before us, our mothers. But, perhaps our mothers bore the silence because their generation whilst ageing at the same pace as us were healthier and better prepared to remain silent.

We resolved that we were not going to be silenced. We were going to be heard, come rain or sunshine. We were not going suffer and die in silence. For us, the dignity and pride our mothers found in that, is elusive.