Oh my it has been a long time, did you all miss me?! Man this
full time working thing, it is so full on, it just owns my life and it is
particularly hard when you are properly engrossed in what you are doing, time
just seems to sail away. I cannot believe that next week it will be a full year
since I took on this role and to be honest it has only been once that I seriously
considered packing it in and that was for a principle issue rather than a work
issue, but I managed to get over myself and pressed on.
I trust that your mind has allowed you to live your best
life this year! This note is long overdue, but it is only now, sitting in Seoul
with a bit of time to ponder, no one knocking on my door to go to this meeting
or the next that I fully have time to engage with this topic, which in my heart
is very dear and very serious. It was brought to the fore once again a few
weeks when I attended a conference with some pretty inspirational people doing some
great work on this continent, Africa, as well as during the US presidential
elections…
And the topic I speak of is the continuous questioning of
women’s ability.
Now if you are one of those people who in anyway think that
as a man you/we are more superior than a woman in any way, I will say wooow
wooow wooow, take a seat please. And I am not saying this for point scoring or
applause, it is just that I feel hopelessly guilty for being so quiet on this
point because in my mind that such thinking is generally accepted to be…to put
it quite frankly…. bull pooh!
So, I will look at it from my own practical experience
right. So, at home when I was about 6/7 life was hard in Ghana, famine etc. My
pops got a good opportunity in Swaziland and he had to leave us to see the lie
of the land etc. We also couldn’t travel because my ma was pregnant with my
youngest bro. So for 15 – 18 months or so it was my ma and us kids, and to make
matters worse, apparently I was a handful when I was younger, I prefer to say I
may have been perhaps a little misunderstood, but be that as it may, ma had her
hands full, watching over us youngsters and working first whilst pregnant and
then with a new born. Pops too was working hard, perhaps struggling with being
away from the family, having to fend for himself, making sure that the nest was
being well put together for our imminent arrival. Ma was back home, soldiering
hard, working, going to the market, washing the kids, disciplining us, feeding
us, teaching us… If I am honest, I’d take pops’ hardship over ma’s any time. J
Speaking about pregnancy, so as a man, you drop a seed, sure
you have to deal with some level of ‘volatility’ for 9 months or so…admittedly
caused by you TO AN EXTENT, but that is your job, no morning sickness, don’t see
our bodies transforming, don’t have 3-5kgs growing inside of us causing us
discomfort when we sleep and don’t even let me get to the birthing process, we
just stand there and say breathe baby breathe….COME ON MAN!!!
And then the baby is born and mostly guys go to work and
ladies stay home and rear the youngster, breast feed, listen to their wailing,
lack of sleep, change pooh nappies, clean vomit. Have you ever tried to carry
like an infant for say 5 minutes, after a while my darn bones start to cease,
ladies do it for minutes, hours like it aint no damn thing!
That’s not even the end of it, a mama will always be a mama,
no matter how old you are. I am 40 years old and to this day my mother can call
me to tell me to drive safely cos she heard on the news that it is raining in
Cape Town…she lives in Joburg, now that is deep right, not saying pops isn’t deep
with us, but it is a different kinda depth!
Now you want to tell me women aren’t at LEAST, at a bare
minimum, equal to me…GERRAAARRHERE MAAAN! Shoo I’d honestly go as far as saying
in my world they are a superior being to me.
Now that is some of the like simple life things. Let me
relay another experience. So at school right, in my standard there was this
lady, Rachel Mary N. Luzuka, she’d blaze us all in class, like BLAZE…and she
did this for years on end, and to show it was no fluke the woman took the fight
to UCT to show others how much she blazed! Speaking of UCT, if I looked at my
class the top scholars were littered with overachieving women! Whether it was
through natural intellect or sheer hard work they outdid MANY a male
counterpart. She carried this on through the workplace too, excelling in all
her roles thus far. Talking about the workplace as well, if you want something
done and done well, 9 times out of 10 if you ask a woman she will deliver well beyond
your expectations.
I look at the US elections, let’s take the personalities out
of it because both candidates had a way of rubbing people up the wrong way. Judge
the candidates purely on experience and what is required in the oval office,
because in as much as we say change may be good, I think understanding the various
arms of government and the inner workings of the system, is key to be ‘president
of the world’ right?! Now if you look at it just purely on that basis and she
may have made some mistakes in her time, but come on people, Secretary Clinton
was by far, but LIKE FAR, the most qualified and most presidential in her
conduct out of the 2 candidates….BUT LIKE BY FAR!!!
Now it may not be true of all women and it is not saying
that men aren’t equally capable, but come on world, is it not time that we
stepped up as men and applauded these fine beings that our maker graced our
earth with?! You can’t tell me that because you have muscles and can moer
someone when you run out of words to say, which I think shows the limits of
your intellect, therefore automatically disqualifying you as a human in my eyes….but
wait I digress, just because you have muscles, how does it make you any better?
Yes women are….are….choose your words well now Yaw, the word
that keeps coming to the fore is ‘crazy’ but that isn’t the word I want to use,
they have moments of being ‘otherwise to what I may consider
logical’, but my word if we have to weigh it all up, I don’t even get why this
has to even be a conversation?!
I absolutely love these lines from the grandmaster 2Pac’s
song keep your head up:
“And since we all came from a woman
Got our name from a
woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take
from our women
Why we rape our women,
do we hate our women?
I think it's time to
kill for our women
Time to heal our
women, be real to our women
And if we don't we'll
have a race of babies
That will hate the
ladies, that make the babies
And since a man can't
make one
He has no right to
tell a woman when and where to create one
So will the real men
get up
I know you're fed up
ladies, but you gotta keep your head up”
Shine on sisters! And gents…let’s clap for the ladies man,
let’s stand up for the ladies, cos it
sure ain’t easy in some ways…in the club aah wa different story, life’s too
easy J
Stay blessed my people, and if you don’t think you are
blessed and you are sitting at a computer or your cellphone out of the sun or
rain and reading this with your own 2 eyes and able to make sense of what I just
typed, then I would cordially ask you to perhaps take a moment…
