If brain defines a man, what does  a woman lack?

What is a “nearly man”? The Nation explained it as anthropoid,  including one “nearly man” species. It and its relatives are what are described as anthropoid, a Latin-rooted adjective meaning “humanlike”. Yet man has lost many of its original gender constraints. In biology, “man” now refers to both genders.

SWOLLEN-HEADEDNESS

But even that poses one question. What does the term “Isle of Man” mean? It lies just off the Atlantic system, which contains England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Yet the term “Isle of Man” implies that there is no human female on it. The problem, in other words, is that the word “man” has recently become also gender-specific.

Even the related German term menschkind has only recently come to refer to the whole species, gender notwithstanding. The words “mankind” – and indeed, even “man” – now include grandmothers, mothers, aunts, nieces and sisters.

That is perhaps why nowadays nobody attempts to pluralise the word “man” by adding an “s”. For, if you had no mother, even your male swollen-headedness would be spectacularly stupid. Indeed, upon what does the human male base his extraordinary gender arrogance?

If the brain is what defines humankind, then, mentally speaking, what does the human male possess that the human female does not? The problem is thus composed merely of extraordinarily empty-headed male conceit.

MALE CONCEIT

In human society, it is a kind of gender arrogance, which stems from extraordinarily wrong-headed upbringing.

That, indeed, is the answer to the question. It is the only reason that such brainless male gender conceit continues to thrive even among the most educated and most civilised human societies all over the world. It is that the female has for such a long time been mentally and culturally repressed into surrendering to the status quo.

Now, the female even serves as the chief exponent of that example of the tiny-headedness of the “educated” class of the male gender. The question is: Why has such a brainy species allowed such stupidity to be its social torch? The answer: In order for the female herself to gain access to certain essential life-supporting materials.

HORN-HEADED

Numerous such materials have been locked up in social cupboards tightly controlled by horn-headed male social bigots called fathers and uncles. That is the greatest fight that faces humankind from now onwards. As a male, If you have a functioning brain, it may soon occur to you how urgent it is to help liberate your aunts, cousins, mothers, sisters and other kinswomen.

Yet a time is coming, and – as the English version of Jewry’s book puts it – “now is” when your empty-headed male conceit will be reduced to greatly less than nothing. Yet even that raises one metaphysical question: A coming time? No, the Christian book stresses that now is. It says that the crucial time has actually come. As our national Swahili cousins would put it, the time might, indeed, have gone zamani zile za Harun.

SUPERSTITIONS

That is how the Swahili would have put it had they had written the Bible, the book that profoundly facilitated Europe’s capture and enslavement of the human mind. For the book was written zamani zile za Harun, a phrase by which our own Swahili natives seek to stress the fact that it occurred extremely long ago.

If the judgment time came and went, all the blessings which it carried will — in William Shakespeare’s celebrated phrase — have “vanished into thin air”. However, the choice would have remained wholly our own. Had we rejected the “blessings” allegedly tied to it, we might have rejected also Europe’s ethnic superstitions that pass as world religion.

Philip Ochieng is a veteran journalist.