African Laughter - Doris May Lessing [132]
The chairman says that women are not built physically for driving buses: they can’t climb up to the top of buses to lift down luggage.
A woman: ‘Suddenly we hear about our weakness. No one mentions our weaknesses when we are planting the crops and growing the crops and hoeing the crops and harvesting the crops and cooking the food and bringing up the children and building the houses and putting roofs on the houses…’ she would go on, but the chairman stops her: he is not the chairman of this meeting, and some women shout at him, saying so.
He says, ‘It is your duty to do these things for your husband.’
‘And whenever we criticize the men for being lazy, then suddenly the talk is of Duty.’
‘But,’ the man insists, full of calm conviction, ‘it is your duty.’
At this, in comes that older woman who has to speak for tradition: she says there was good in the old days and the baby must not be thrown out with the bath-water, freedom for women is for outside the home, but inside the old ways are best. ‘Well spoken, mother,’ says the chairman.
Groans and laughter. There seems to be something in this particular mix of people that makes for confrontation. Yet it is not ugly: there is laughter, joking, nothing of the cold vindictive hatred of men some feminists make their rule and try to enforce on others.
‘Why is it there are still so few women in leadership?’ a man asks. He is not being provocative.
‘Because men say that equal rights do not mean they should look after children and cook food.’
‘My husband sits around waiting to be served even when I have done all the work and I am sick and he hasn’t worked all day.’
Another woman says, ‘I came home from the field yesterday, my husband says, Why isn’t the water ready for me to wash?–I put on the water, and he says, Why is my food not ready?–I take the washing water off and I put the porridge water on and he says, What is this, why have I not washed?’
The traditionalist woman says severely, ‘Some women are too lazy to build a fire large enough to take two pots.’
‘But I did not have time to go for firewood because the goats were in the field and I had to protect the plants. You forget, now the children are in school, we do not have their help.’
A silence. Everyone wants the children to be in school, but their labour is missed. The women’s lives are even harder.
‘And,’ goes on the complaining woman, ‘my husband would not help me with the goats when I asked him.’
‘Because it is not men’s work,’ says the chairman.
‘What then is man’s work?’ enquires a woman sweetly. She is one of the large formidable females who, I am told, are often the will behind a local women’s group. She is typically middle-aged, her children are grown-up, she may well be without a man. She is likened to the market mammies of West Africa, financially resourceful, hard-working traders. But here she does not have her niche, as she does in West Africa: she still has to make a place for herself.
The chairman confronts her, ‘God has ordained the differences between men and women.’
At this one of the white participants, from America, asks, ‘Then why are the roles of men and women different in every part of the world? Now everyone moves about the world so much, we know how different all the cultures are and we can no longer say, God has ordained this and that.’
A woman remarks, with humour, that she has never travelled further than Harare, to visit her sister, and there her sister complains about her husband just as she does.
And now the subject of Maintenance, which has been discussed with passion at every meeting. There is a new law, welcomed by liberals and progressives, that men abandoning women must be made responsible for the children. In the villages this law is seen differently; the respectable married women are angry.
‘Already our husbands have two families, a new one in the town, leaving their real wives at home. They spend all their money on the new women. Our children go hungry. These town women