Between rage and abuse: Why people kill their spouses
In Nigeria, as elsewhere in Africa, the demands of culture and attitudes suppress women, sociologists believe.
“There is a limit to which you can suppress before there will be an outburst,” says Anthony Agbor, development sociologist at the Kwararafa University, Taraba.
“What we are witnessing at the moment is outburst as a result of imbalance in gender mainstreaming. If there is no balance in relationships, there is likely to be an outburst and the outburst is most likely to come from the one on the receiving side.”
Cultural factors give men leverages and positional attributes to women. Sayings abound how women are to be seen, not heard; to be felt, not to feel or express themselves.
“The stooge attitude we have created has created a backlog of suppressed social action,” he says.
African societies give men a right to receive incomes, keep it to themselves and use it to better themselves. The woman doesn’t even have to know about it. A woman exposed and working beside men gets to know she can earn same or even higher.
“And then she comes home to see a man who does not want to take that into recognition and feels like the woman doesn’t have a position in family structuring, decision making around the family, society or community,” says Agbor.
“This denial of outlet to express yourself is technically an endangered action that predisposes women to be built the way they are.”
Another scenario. A man can dress how he likes, drink as much as he wants, enjoys as much as his wealth can carry, but a woman hasn’t got the same opportunities. Instead, she is predisposed to venereal infections, childbirth with little or no hope of surviving.
“And all the man puts up is, ‘I can provide income to take care of her maternal fees and if she gives birth, I can get her a home to bring back her child in,’” says Agbor. “That’s all.”
That’s recipe for disaster, sociologists believe. What’s missing is compatibility. Agbor did a study defining compatibility as better off as not plus-plus but plus-minus, where strength and weakness prop up each other.
“There is a level to which a man can express his strength and he should be able to admit his weakness, as well as the woman,” he explains.
It all comes down to patriarchy, and it is “dangerous when you look at the position of Africans and Nigerians in contemporary times,” says Agbor.
“We are yet to actually define our culture and tenets of relationship. We want to copy the white man’s lifestyle but we don’t want to really understand what makes him behave in the manner he behaves.”
For one instance, traditional rites for contracting marriages are being downplayed in favour of western-styled “white weddings” yet the clinging on to traditional rites is strong.
“If we are neither here nor there, this conflict in thoughts and positioning is what is bringing out this upset,” says Agbor.
Sociology proposes a couple of theorems. Acculturation. That’s “adopting the culture of strange societies without knowing the consequences and placing it higher than our own culture,” says Agbor.
Another is cultural diffusion. “We have allowed the intrinsic side of western culture to penetrate our core culture, and now we are sitting on the fence; are we really Africans, or Nigerians, or westerners?
“We want to empower our women but we are afraid of them dominating us, then why are we trying to empower them? We want to create a balanced gender relation but we think the women are too powerful to be given equal