Clemencia Jacobs
13 November 2009
column
There's always jokes going around in the office that I am single-handedly trying to turn the Economist into a gender equality advocacy paper and that I am turning into quite the feminist.
Maybe my colleagues are right, I don't know.
And I should probably be using this platform to write about how the quality of service in the country sucks or how the current surge in violence between political parties so close to the national elections has people running scared that Namibia is becoming just another African country.
But I think I will talk about gender issues. I can already see the irritation on the faces of my male colleagues, but I, we, need to talk about this. Just the other day I was at a party where a man felt he had the right to start feeling on a woman. Not because they had a romantic relationship, but because he felt he had the right to and because she was wearing a short dress. The more she said no, the more he touched. He even went as far as lifting her dress to see "what is under there".
She shouted, used foul language and even bit him at some point. He had the audacity to want to beat her up because she said no. At that stage I felt like beating the hell out of the man, but I'm no Mike Tyson or Muhammad Ali.
Anyway this had me thinking about how men view women as their property. How, by the virtue of being a women, you have to be violated.
I am sure many women like male attention and that is okay. It is the grabbing and groping that is way out of line. I was walking down Independence Avenue when a guy, who probably should have been somewhere working instead of being up to mischief, came up to me and started to feel on me.
He was talking about how he wanted me to have his babies and a whole lot of other junk. To say I was angry would put it mildly. I was stark raving mad, especially because I was helpless.
How the hell do you protect yourself against this kind of abuse? I am sure some people would shrug it of as just a joke or some guy trying to show how macho he is.
With this kind of behaviour it is no wonder that so many women are raped, beaten and killed in Namibia. At times you hear about how the community was looking on while a woman was beaten by her husband or boyfriend. And afterwards we want to cry and riot when we were just standing by to let it happen. A nurse at the Windhoek Central Hospital was killed by her boyfriend recently because she wanted to end their relationship and according to reports, one woman is raped in the northern regions everyday. What's wrong with Namibian men? Or maybe we women are at fault?
Some people argue that women in Namibia and Africa in general, are responsible for raising children because men tend to be absent. So if women raise their sons with the right principles they would not become rapists, wife-beaters and murderers.
But what if your son turns out that way even if you were brought up right? I think it is a personal choice. You choose how to behave, you choose what your values are. And some people just choose to be dead wrong.
It is time that we as a society sit back and think about where we are heading. We cannot allow our brothers, husbands, fathers and sons to continue mistreating us any longer. It is time for change.
There are some good men out there and it is time that they too jump on the bandwagon and start fighting gender violence. It is about time that we start respecting and loving each other again.
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