Fearing educated women

Folklore has it that highly educated African-American women lacked ‘’courageous’’ enough to marry them. Critics claimed that white university officials preferred giving scholarships to female African-American appli-cants with the cynical objective of preventing them from raising self-confident and successful children who would mobilize black Americans to fight for political and economic rights.  They argued that […]

Folklore has it that highly educated African-American women lacked ‘’courageous’’ enough to marry them. Critics claimed that white university officials preferred giving scholarships to female African-American appli-cants with the cynical objective of preventing them from raising self-confident and successful children who would mobilize black Americans to fight for political and economic rights.  They argued that past American presidents who offered cabinet appointments to African-Americans limited them to women. While Condoleezza Rice assumed high visibility as a National Security Advisor; Andrew Young could only be sent to the United Nations despite the critical role he had played in getting blacks to vote for President Jimmy Carter. The UN job held out no contracts to award black folks on whom Andrew Young had expended his political charisma. The highly educated African-American woman is, thereby, turned into a tool of racist warfare against her own men.
This limitation of violence to black women can be punctured with an illustration from an odd event. A white female scholar of African literature wrote on a book titled Orphan. Her mother read quotations from the work and burst into uncontrollable weeping. It was as if the fate of a little boy in rural Africa mirrored her own life story. She had married a classmate who often scored lower grades than her. On following him to post-graduate school in Britain, she started getting her children and also edited drafts of his thesis. His excellent grades from Oxford University later recommended him for jobs in prestigious institutions. He had subsequently urged her not to get a job because it would suggest to his peers that he was not a rising star. She pampered him. Time and biology did not wait. When she read her daughter’s thesis, she realised she had grown from a wife to a host of the violence wrapped around this orphan.
 In the 1960s, C.L. R. James, the Trinidadian social philosopher, argued that white women in America would lead the liberation struggle for rights of women because technology had created domestic tools which freed them from labours like mopping floors, washing clothes, plates and carrying babies.  While the majority could be made docile with 24-hour television soap-operas; Dracula and gun-blazing movies, some would question boredom and banal living. In anticipation of the rebellion with angry breasts tired of serving male whims and ambitions, the silent violence on highly educated African-American females without husbands in their homes, would have been usefully waved as a red flag.
The question of what is lost from fearing highly educated women is being answered in Rwanda. In an interview at Kigali in 2012, a respondent told me that President Paul Kagame achieved 64 per cent of women as members of parliament because women were less likely to challenge him for the presidency. The real reason is probably the high productivity, efficiency and lack of corruption he needed to repair a country wrecked by the 1994 genocide. On 26th June, 2014, Amadou Mahtar Ba told an audience at The Electoral Institute in Abuja that Rwanda’s example influenced a rare collective drive in Senegal by religious leaders, community leaders, intellectuals, media workers, academics and politicians to achieve the enactment of a 2012 law which directs political parties to contest elections with 50 per cent of their candidates being women. Its impact awaits inspection. The lid of a festering historical violence has been lifted.
The Japanese have a corporate culture in which managers are expected to daily drink with colleagues beyond mid-night to recover from a day which combines hard work with nerve-wracking intensive etiquettes of politeness. Tension is relieved by each management staff socializing, drinking, singing for the group and receiving massages by a professional girl-friend. As country which prevents women from employment and manifesting their intellectual prowess, Japan imports male workers from the Japanese Diaspora in Brazil and Peru. Behind the hum of a very Japanese car engine is violence against silenced Japanese women.
In Southeast Nigeria those who abandon education in preference for making money through legal and devious business practices, and later turn around to marry highly educated women, often release latent inferiority complexes through domestic violence against their wives. It is a form of income.  This depletes national security through high intellectual productivity of these women being undermined by repeated bashings and deaths inside homes.
Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is criticised by some as a lackey of Euro-American interests behind the World Bank. Kenya’s minister of planning attributed solid African support for her against Obama’s candidate for headship of the World Bank to her record as a disciplinarian over Africa’s ministers of finance who attend vital meetings carrying ignorance inside briefcases. She, like Graca Machel-Mandela wave flags of millions of Africa’s women who never burst through skies of silent violence. Apostles of national security should dip the goal inside pools of tears rent out by millions of Africa’s women blocked by men who fear their earning high education.