5 things we learned from Funmi Iyanda’s drive to ‘destroy patriarchy’

by Ezinne Ajoku

Funmi Iyanda is on a drive to dismantle patriarchy, stone by stone, brick by brick, armed with a sledgehammer. At the How to Fix Nigeria event which she organized in London recently, the TV maven and her esteemed panelists – Fatimah Kelleher, international women’s rights and social development consultant; Elnathan John, the lawyer, satirist and writer; and Dorcas Erskine, Ghanaian and Women’s Protection & Empowerment Technical adviser for an NGO -had a lot to say on dismantling patriarchy.

Here are our takeaways from the enlightening discussion:

  1. PATRIARCHY IS LIKE AN ONION BULB – IT HAS MANY LAYERS

One of those is the “blur between culture and religion that occurs to facilitate hierarchy. It’s an area some people don’t even want to touch because it has so many sensitive issues”. Fatimah queried how we can even begin to deal with it because of its trip-wire nature. Another is what she termed respectability politics; which simply means needing to behave in a certain way constantly or risking condemnation. For instance, how a woman is expected to behave compared to how a man does.  Then there’s the double pronged intersection between sexism and patriarchy and how it cuts across class. She explained that just because there are more women in a particular space, say entrepreneurship or technology, does not mean that patriarchy has been dismantled. Evidently, Patriarchy has built structures so deep and wide that dismantling it would require all the tools in the box-sledgehammer, bulldozer, battering rams etc. I so submit.

  1. STORIES MATTER

According to Elnathan, stories are important in the formation of perception, because when those perceptions are projected unto a reality, they can actually change an entire system. “That type of projection leads to a normalization of a certain skewed system. A normalization of certain laws that are created through conditioning and foisted upon society. And people are told that these laws are immutable” He said this made things worse for men because men are conditioned not to see these so-called laws as a problem. “Because we are often not on the receiving end- we think. But actually we are in the mix in a way that we do not realize; until we are hurt so bad that when we start to manifest the very ugly sides of this patriarchy, we do not know where this is coming from”. These are profound words, which throw up a different angle from which to approach the matter of patriarchy, if we are to make any progress going forward.

  1. THERE HAS BEEN A REGRESSION IN CULTURE- A REGRESSION OF CONSERVATION

Funmi, Dorcas and Fatimah all shared anecdotes from their lives, buttressing the point that things were far less conservative in years gone past. For instance, many devout Muslim women did not see covering their hair as a needful thing to do, much less a commandment and Ghanaian women wore shorter versions of their traditional attire. When Fatimah was asked what caused the change in culture, she pinned it on fear. She said that whenever she tries to raise this topic at home in Nigeria, no one really wants to engage with her because they are terrified. She said that the failure of Nigeria to deliver for its people played a big part in regression. “I think people cling to tradition. They cling to systems of order; they cling to that hierarchy and control as ways of explaining why things have not worked out so well. The narratives seem to be that we need to go back to a more conservative appearance of Islam in order to make up for the fact that we were essentially led astray in the 50’s,60’s,70’s by the promise of this secular society. And then within that, systems of control start to creep in one by one and women’s bodies are often the place of exercising that control. It’s a system of trying to show your hegemony and your power by controlling the bodies of women in your family. And then women are placed in a situation where to be the sole voice, to be the fearless one is very difficult.”

  1. PATRIARCHY SUBJUGATES THE MOST VULNERABLE IN SOCIETY

Elnathan referenced a phrase from Bell Hooks, the “Imperialist Capitalist White Supremacist Patriarchy”. He went on to say that “we punish the most vulnerable in society for our collective problems. Where there is no white supremacy, there are other types of supremacy. You can trace the exact time in Nigeria that women began wearing niqabs. People turn around and look for the weakest person to beat down, when in fact we are all being beaten down”.

What an irony.

  1. PATRIARCHY IS BAD FOR MEN TOO

Elnathan recommended the selfish approach; which simply means getting men to see that patriarchy does not help them either. He had earlier on said that society as a whole does not talk about how patriarchy affects men. And what narrative society sells to men about patriarchy births and grows insecurities. “These insecurities then lead to a certain fragility that is expressed many times through violence, through the rejection of emotion and through the rejection of brotherhood even, through the things that can remove violence from the society. Sometimes just a little hug; sometimes just telling a man I love you. That kind of very simple thing. The kind of thing you have to add ‘no homo’ behind just so we don’t feel insecure”. He stated definitively that the male sense of self is continually eroded by this normalization of this thing called patriarchy. So the way to talk about patriarchy to men is to sell it as something unsustainable. A thing that is not useful for business because it cuts out half of the population. And dominating that half – i.e. women- makes no sense for men because women can be and are indeed beneficial to men.

In conclusion, patriarchy is bad for business, bad for politics, and ultimately bad for the society. Let’s change the narrative.

Leave a reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

cool good eh love2 cute confused notgood numb disgusting fail