Igbo Culture & Chimamanda’s Strained Relationship with The Nigerian Manosphere.
Chimamanda Was First an Enemy, then Friend, and now a Frenemy.
Chimamanda has a curious and checkered relationship with Nigerian patriarchy advocates, even if she isn’t aware.
My family members are always teasing me about my feminist values, and I love that I have a circle of intelligent young people that I can share opinions with, even if we don’t agree on all points.
So, today my sister told me about a recent Chimamanda interview where she’d said she would not kneel in a gathering where our Igbo culture expected only women to kneel.
However, if the men would kneel too, she would. After hearing my sister talk about the video, I hurried to Youtube.
As I’d anticipated, brothers were in the comments deriding her position, with many of them saying, if she stood before the King of England or the ruling British monarch, they were sure she would kneel.
One comment stood out for me though. The guy said;
Men and women are not equal and even God made it so.
I’ve addressed this errant lie before, but I will again before moving back to Chimamanda.
If we were to address equality from a scriptural standpoint: Genesis 1:27, Galatians 3:28 is clear; In God, there is neither male, nor female and we are one.
It is the same quality of Spirit He breathed into us.
In fact, what modern bible versions interpret as 'man,' in the sense of a male human from Genesis 1:27, is the word anthropos, and It means mortal, human being, mankind.
'Male and female made He them' fleshes this divine intention clearly. Men and women are equal but dissimilar. And this dissimilarity is an intentional, divine wisdom.
It is the mark of ineptness to equate equality with sameness or interchangeability, and this is the mistake most make on this subject.
When they consider the saying that men and women are equal, how their minds interpret this is to mean that the both genders are the same or have similar inherent capacities.
In economics, certain goods are considered SUBSTITUTE GOODS.
These are goods that are so similar that they serve the same purpose to the consumer who may readily interchange them, when their preferred is unavailable. E.g Coke and Pepsi.
This is different from complementary goods in which, the demand for one is linked to the demand of the other, and if the demand for one goes up, a higher demand for the other also occurs. Example; A phone and a charger, plates and spoons etc.
Degrees of complementarity is another topic, but you get the point.
You know that fruit that looks like apples and tastes like it, but is shaped differently and sold at the same price as apples comparatively? Equal but dissimilar.
Men and women are equal in God's eyes but dissimilar. This is why equity as a concept when speaking of gender issues will never be sufficient.
Equity speaks to the conscience. Equality speaks to the form of what is. Equity is an appeal to compromise. Equality asserts a state of things.
Does this equality diminish upon marriage? Let's return to the Bible again. In 1 Peter 3:7; Paul says;
'Ye husbands, dwell with your wives according to knowledge, giving honor unto the woman as the weaker vessel, as you're equals/joint heirs in the new life of God's grace....'
Have you wondered why Paul used the phrase "unequally yoked," with reference to marriage?
Because in Jewish biblical times, a yoke was a wooden bar joining two oxen to each other, and to a burden which they were to pull. An unequal yoking occurred when one Ox was stronger or taller or shorter than the other, causing the load to not have direction.
Final proof. In Genesis 2: 21, when God realised Adam needed companion, He said, 'I’ll make a helper, comparable to him.'
The hebrew word there is "Ezer kenegdo." Ezer is the root word for Ebenezer which means helper. It is a military word for strong. The same word was used repeated times in scripture to describe men of valor, and God used it several times to describe Himself and what He is to His people.
Kenegdo means fitting, aligned, compatible, appropriate, in sync, corresponding.
Ezer kenegdo we can surmise, means a strong force similar to, compatible with what it was created for. Just like iron buckets don’t have plastic handles, and steel doors don’t have wooden handles.
Within marriage & outside of it, men and women are innately of equal quality. Of course,the scripture despite this, has certain expectations of submission it places on a christian wife, but this demand wasn’t required because a man- and by extension a husband- is innately of superior stock compared to a woman.
How do I know this? Jesus was used multiple times by the Apostles, as a prototype of what both love and submission ought to look like.
In Phillipains 2:6; Paul writes that;
'Jesus, although himself equal with God/ being in the nature of God/Himself God, did not consider this to be something to be grasped, and made himself of no reputation..... '
In essence, his very semblance with God the Father, and his nature of being God himself, did not deter from His being obedient to the Father. This was the model of submission that Paul and Peter envisaged from a wife in a Christian marriage.
Again, to establish the egalitarian nature of a marriage relationship, a converse burden is placed on the husband, one that checks his supposedly prime powers so much that where correctly followed, he may appear to carry the heavier weight of selflessness.
He is required to love the wife as Christ loves the church, a love that saw Christ being led to the cross to die, for bearing the sins of His accusers.
Back to Chimamanda. Those closest to me know that I’m a big advocate of the Igbo culture. Second to my identity as a christian, the definition to which I feel most connected to, is my tribal identity.
But the traditions of our people are not flawless or inerrant. If anything, they were normative rules that emerged from ancient men as products of what felt most convenient for them.
In a time when patriarchy was at its most uncontested state, and the whims of men were enacted as communal standards, many cultural practices as we have today evolved from the selfish preferences of our forebears.
Do we throw away all that our culture represents because we consider parts of it to be obnoxious? God forbid.
But should we hold fastidiously to its gangrenous offals just because we don’t want to seem to be departing from our identity?
The same Ndigbo who proudly say that when an idol oversteps its boundaries, we show it the wood from whence it was carved, now act like it should come to us naturally to bear the weight of unruly figures of prestige?
Clearly, the issue is not that these men have an interminable passion for the culture of our people. The issue is the threat that women like Chimamanda, and ideals such as the ones she promotes, have on their dubious, unquestionable ranking in the Igbo cosmology.
What is interesting is, prior to this time, Chimamanda had been the darling of the Nigerian manosphere branch for a while. Perhaps it started with when she said she couldn’t identify with a feminism built on wickedness, which many Nigerian men believed to be the version practiced by Nigerian women. Instantly, she became their sister on the other divide.
Then perhaps her increasing fame globally, came with it, the grudging acknowledgment that she not only put Nigeria on the map, but the Igbo tribe as well. She wore her Igboness with unabashed flair, wrote books with untranslated Igbo phrases, and even went on to be recognised with a chieftaincy title.
Arguably, the culmination of their mounting affection for her happened during the months that led to the last Nigerian general elections, where she showed full-throated support for Peter Obi, and the Obedient movement; two figures Igbo men identify with.
Not to mention, for a while, her feminism seemed to lack the rabid and hostile quality which Nigerian feminists on social media have recently been known for. She appeared to represent a brand of feminism that was elitist, lady-like, conforming even, and preferred dialogue in Queen’s English to the ranting, scathing tirades that psuedo-feminists online adopted.
Odelora was for a while, a conceding figure; no longer the polarizing symbol of western ideas that threatened to upset the African morality with her feminist balderdash.
But you see, I knew it would not last. I knew that Chimamanda had not become flaccid or de-fanged. Perhaps, something about her residence in the West had shaped her feminism, since the thrust of feminism in the West is unique and different from what it is in Africa.
And this is okay. I have written repeatedly on how that it is disingenuous to expect feminism globally to take on the same face, when women in different societies are fighting for different things, based on the degree of their permitted freedom and most pressing challenges.
I knew that while Chimamanda’s recent conversations may not dabble into the domestic life of married couples and other incidental matters thatreceive hot takes on Nigeria’s branch of social media everyday, it didn’t mean she was now neutered.
Her feminism had simply taken the shape of the agitations of the society she interacted with more.
How do I know? In one of her public speeches, she’d once talked about who should hold the other’s coat if one person was indisposed. A few years ago, she was in the news for stating in an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News, that, "trans women are trans women," a statement she received heavy backlash for.
She has consistently shown support for LGBTQ rights, and once protested when a reporter referred to her as Mrs Adichie.
What do all of these point to? Clearly, that her preoccupations as regards civil rights are sometimes light years removed from what the average Nigerian women are bothered with. We don’t have these conversations of who should hold the other’s winter coat when someone’s hands are busy.
Trans individuals are largely considered as comic characters in the Nigerian space, not to talk of being considered legally women.
The larger population of Nigerian women would readily change their names upon marriage and happily answer Mrs, even amongst feminists, and by all means, no one is having that conversation about LGBTQ rights’ legitimization in this country.
Now, with her recently saying she would not kneel in a cultural gathering except the men present were kneeling too, a horde of backlash- reminiscent only of the type she received when 'Purple Hibiscus' came out, and we first started to hear of her iconoclastic worldviews- has been unleashed against her.
She is no longer the paddy of a wide section of the manosphere.
This is funny because I remember the fawning comments some of these men left on her social media handles with each milestone she achieved in recent times, chief of which was her chieftaincy title.
When my sister first told me about this statement by Chimamanda, she asked me if I would also object to kneeling in a traditional setting where only the women were required to.
It reminded me of a comment a follower left on my post on Facebook a while ago, where I’d praised the wife of disgraced Lagos doctor, Femi Olaleye who recently bagged a life term for molesting his wife’s niece.
This male follower in clear disagreement with Remi Olaleye for exposing her husband and ensuring justice took its course, asked if I would do the same thing if in her shoes, as if to bring me face to face with the stark strangeness of her actions.
I told him that I wasn’t sure what I would do, quite frankly. But if I didn’t expose a defiling, randy husband to justice, it would be out of a weakness in my character, and not because it was the right thing to do. Thus, seeing another woman do it earned my respect.
The same thing applied in my response to my sister about Chimamanda’s position. If I was in a traditional gathering where only the women are expected to kneel, I can’t tell for sure what I would do. But if I do kneel, it would be me making a concession to a cultural expectation I considered too iron-clad for me to fight.
And to see another woman strong enough, and spined enough to follow the high road, she would earn my respect- even if I was groveling on my own knees.
