Why you should never just mess around with a boxer

“Ashakum” is the polite expression a Mswahili uses to signal that what he or she is about to say may not be particularly pleasant or comfortable to the listeners.

I start with ashakum because my rap today could sound rather politically incorrect from a grandpa, an academic and a self-declared male feminist.

I’m just beginning to realise that writing a column like this is a bit of tightrope walking. On the one hand, most people expect you to tell them a good story, reveal to them things about people and times that they were not lucky to witness, as you did.

On the other hand, the “real” scholars want you to pontificate and expound ponderous hypotheses and theories with global and cosmic significance, preferably in appropriate grandiloquent, erudite parlance, barely comprehensible to the general reader (As exemplified here).

So, ashakum. I was deeply amused by the well-publicised story last week that Kenyan men, piqued at the apparent growing preference for women in public affairs, were embarking on their own version of a Lysistrata.

They would withhold their “favours” from their partners for a certain length of time.

EXPLOSIVE PERFORMANCE

Quite an old “weapon”, as Aristophanes’ comedy, dating from the fifth century BC, about the women who boycotted their war-loving men, suggests.

It reminds me of Mumbi Kaigwa’s explosive performance, a few years back, as the leader of the striking women in Aikin Mata (I can matter), Ola Rotimi’s Nigerianisation of the Greek classic.

But our Kenyanisation and masculinisation of the intimacy strike raises a host of questions. The first is, of course, how enforceable is this course of — inaction?

Secondly, why direct it towards (or is it misdirect it away from) the women? After all, it is not the women who favour themselves, as the men claim, but the policy-makers, who are overwhelmingly male.

And what if the women were to shrug off the men’s downing of tools, heave a sigh of relief and just enjoy a quiet spell of respite from the “usual bother” by men? Who knows, the women might even ask for an indefinite extension of the strike.

In any case, there are those of us men who do not believe that women are in any way favoured, and that the few political, social and economic gains they appear to be making are the result of their own relentless struggle against centuries of discrimination and oppression.

How would “Maendeleo ya Wanaume” persuade us to join the strike?

NO ULTERIOR MOTIVES

We are decidedly on the women’s side, even without ulterior motives.

Indeed, many of us are convinced that “maendeleo ya wanawake” (women’s emancipation and empowerment) is the best thing that can happen to “maendeleo ya wanaume”.

It cannot be a case of either men or women. We either sink or rise together, as human beings.

If our society has been wallowing in misery and backwardness (“shenziness”), one of the reasons could well be that, for ages, we had failed to empower a half of our human resource.

The strike call sent me reminiscing on our university days, where there was at least some semblance of gender equity.

Our female colleagues at Makerere and, to a certain extent, Nairobi, were referred to as “boxers”. I don’t have any recollection of their objecting to the name.

It had started as a joke, way back in the mid-1940s, when the first female students were admitted to Makerere and were housed in one of those lovely dark wooden houses, which were for a long time a main feature of the campus.

Their male colleagues nicknamed the wooden hostel the “Box” and its residents became “boxers”.

Apparently the name was so popular that it was inherited by the multi-storied hostel that was later put up for the women.

So, the Box and the boxers became part of East African university legend, with replicas on several campuses.

NO NONSENSE
But, as is common with language, in the course of time the term “boxer” came to acquire several significant connotations with reference to the popular image of the East African university-educated woman.

She was seen as a fighter, a strong, self-confident woman who didn’t take any nonsense from anyone.

And she had to be. In those days the struggle was not just about affirmative action and the like, but about being accepted as a human being at all.

Thus Sarah Ntiro, the first East African woman to get a university degree, was literally thrown out of a Mathematics course at Makerere because a chauvinistic British lecturer just wouldn’t have a woman in his class.

Later, on her return from Oxford, Ntiro had to personally protest to the colonial Governor against being paid a lower salary than her European colleagues at the famous Gayaza High School. You had to be a boxer to cope with such challenges.

REMARKABLE BOXER
Another remarkable boxer, Josephine Nambooze, probably the first African woman in East and Central Africa to qualify as a medical doctor, happens to be the only female “old boy” of my alma mater, Namilyango College.

She had a burning desire to do high school sciences, which were not offered at Mount Saint Mary’s, her school.

So, Nambooze had to commute some 20 miles every day to Namilyango, where some far-sighted teachers had arranged for her to attend the boys’ science class.

At Medical School in Kampala, she was the only woman in her class, but with a shorter, three-mile commute from the Box to Mulago Hill.

Prof Nambooze is now honourably retired, with a public health facility named after her.

Such were the Makerere boxers on whose foundation the later luminaries, like Rose Waruhiu, the late Wamere Dadet, Micere Mugo, and, in our own day, my friend and former boss, Prof Ciarunji Chesaina, modelled their illustrious careers.

Who ever said that they were “favoured”?

You would have to be pretty daring to try and mess a woman of this calibre around. Meanwhile, we will be waiting for our current affairs team to update us on the progress of the strike. Ashakum.