No, forget it, I will not serve you tea

“Madam, serve me a cup as well. In fact, why don’t you serve all the men tea today?”  I stared at him, sure that he was either joking or taunting me for an eruption of the legendary tempers that my people are said to exhibit. PHOTO | FILE | NATION MEDIA GROUP

What you need to know:

  • “Madam, serve me a cup as well. In fact, why don’t you serve all the men tea today?”  I stared at him, sure that he was either joking or taunting me for an eruption of the legendary tempers that my people are said to exhibit.

  •  “Please explain why I should do that,” I replied as I carried my cup of tea and sat down, keeping my cool.

  •  “Food is sweeter when served by a woman, you know,” he said, then added something in a language I did not understand. There was a sudden burst of laughter from those who understood the joke.

I was a secondary school teacher some years back, in another corner of this country. I am short, so I would be forced to strain to make proper use of the blackboard, something my students found quite amusing.

My subject came after biology, and the six-foot teacher who taught it had a habit of leaving his notes and scribbling intact. Due to my height, I could of course not rub off the writings on the top half of the board.

The discrimination that short people go through is a topic for another forum though.

In that school, I was the only teacher who was a different tribe. As often happens in such a case, my fellow teachers as well as students were curious about me. Healthy curiosity you would say, but also negative, in terms of the connotations and stereotypes that we all tend to ascribe to, if not exposed to other cultures other than our own. I too was guilty. I thought of the others as ‘them’ and they referred to me as ‘the girl from that tribe’.

“Is it true that women from your tribe come with a 10-year guarantee of marriage?” one teacher once asked me.

“Yes”, I answered, “and by the end of that period, she will have streamlined you!” I replied matter of fact. It was actually the first time I had heard of that description about the women from my community.

DO YOU CARRY A KNIFE?

“Do you carry a knife, and have you ever attacked someone with it?” another teacher asked after I told them about an interesting story a doctor friend had told me about a case she was handling at a local hospital back in my village.

For a while, it was nice to be the exotic one, but soon enough, some comments got to me, so I too let them have a taste of their own medicine.

“Have you ever bewitched someone?” I asked the teacher notorious for always pointing out that I talked “funny”.

Tea and other hot beverages was kept in flasks at the corner of the staffroom. Once, as I poured myself a cup, the teacher said to me;

“Madam, serve me a cup as well. In fact, why don’t you serve all the men tea today?”  I stared at him, sure that he was either joking or taunting me for an eruption of the legendary tempers that my people are said to exhibit.

 “Please explain why I should do that,” I replied as I carried my cup of tea and sat down, keeping my cool.

 “Food is sweeter when served by a woman, you know,” he said, then added something in a language I did not understand. There was a sudden burst of laughter from those who understood the joke.

“I am here in my capacity as a teacher, just like you. The only people I serve are my students. If you want tea, you know where to find it,” I said, clearly not sharing in the joy of the joke.

He did not take the reprimand graciously.

“That’s the problem with women from your place. You are strong-headed, rebellious, you sit on your men, you are only good for one thing…” he said and added a couple of other terribly annoying things. I might have proved his theory about knives right, had there been one in the staffroom.

Now, I will be glad to serve tea, or cook for my husband by virtue of being his wife, if that is what works for us, but in an office environment, there is no way I will run around making tea and generally serving and submitting to all the men in the room.

The rules of marriage, for instance, wives submit to your husbands and husbands love your wives, do not apply in the corporate world, otherwise there would be chaos. In the office, you wear the employee or boss hat, but at home, you wear that of the wife or husband, and everything that comes with that hat.