Who owns Women's Day?

 

 

Those were the times when the day would never creep up on you like the proverbial thief in the night, because you felt the tremors announcing its advance from a distance. It was not just the media that hyped it up; it was in the very air around you. 

 

You knew the difference between women by anatomy and women by inclination, determination, vision and other attributes. There were women who grabbed the day with their two (feminine) hands and shoved it into your face, all wrapped in that bright label and seal that said: We are women, do your worst.

 

And it was hard to do anything, let alone your worst. As those few women sold the day to the nation, other players — a carefully picked word, players — jumped on board… The Government. Civil society. Academia. The art world — singers, composers, thespians and painters. Oh, it was the fad, being for women; with the women.

 

But like with everything that comes to Uganda, the day’s heat died out by and by, yet it (the day) is still there on our calendars. I am no calendar designer, but I doubt that Women’s Day is one of those days many remember that it comes annually, unless they have an old calendar before them to copy out the red-letter days.

 

Oh, let us just re-examine that last bit: Does Women’s Day still matter that much? To who? Who still finds capital in marking or celebrating Women’s Day? The moment you answer that, you know whether the women’s cause is still on track or not.

 

Let us look at the women themselves — women of all shades; women all over. What, in the first place, was the women’s cause? And who came up with it?

 

For, while there were women who said subjugation of women by  men was the problem, when those women took the gospel to some rural places, the women down there lifted up their busuutis to above the knee and chased the ‘modern, emancipated city women’ back to town, saying they (the rural folk) were not complaining. ‘Do you want us to lose our men?’ they asked. Not that those women were happy. They indeed were living terrible lives under their men, but city methods were not going to solve rural marital issues.

 

Away from the urban-rural divide, there were also issues between social classes, the privileged and under-privileged. There were disparities between the married women and the single, those in leadership against those who were not. The question then was, whose issues were at stake here, and who could solve them, how?

 

That is how the NGO fad thrived on this women’s cause thing. Fight for the amorphous (not in shape, but identity) woman. Seek funding to fight the woman’s cause. Build yourself a fortune. That is how the Government also cashed in on the cause.

 

‘Design’ policies to cater for the woman, then compose a song reminding her that were it not for us, where would women be? That is how artistes came up with plays, songs and poems (I wrote one of those award-winning poems, even before I formed an opinion on women’s lib) and got so much money, they wished the fad could last a theatre-time.

 

So here we are, under the same regime that popularised many of these things, like Women’s Day, Valentine’s Day, Mothers’ Day, etc, but if you sought to know and understand what goes on between one March 8 and the next; who works to promote the woman’s cause, and who benefits from the cause… you will be constrained to wonder: Who owns Women’s Day? What is the cause, what are the pertinent issues and what are the solutions? Or maybe it is me who is still in the dark about these questions.