“Marry
as many wives as possible” in a recent statement by the minister of the second
most important economic office of The Gambia is politically discomforting and
an oppressive language a modern political figure will ever use on women. But
such miscalculated religious and traditional fundamentalism has no space in our
political landscape and must be discouraged by all citizens. Such speeches are
masqueraded with personal and religious moralities which cannot have any
dominant space in our way to democracy and self-determination.
The
Minister of Tourism would have better tell us who he thinks he is to use such
an authoritative language on women. To consider women as equal partners in
nation building will have to do with empowering them with the basic needs and
skills they need for their own advancement.
Mr
Bah has used that religious occasion to manifest transparently the place he
sees or vehemently believe women to belong and has gone up to an extend of
calling on all men to radical self-determination on women. In fact, to this
extend, he has not only exposed to Gambian women his hypothesized notions of
gender equality and he also at the most inappropriate time advanced his
masculine supremacy on women.
The
tourism minister sees women in our society as a complement to men’s
accomplishment by telling Gambians in the diaspora to come back home simply
because they need to marry and should “marry as many as possible” can best be
seen as male arrogance and tendency to own the language to be used in public discourses. Such a self-authorship declaration cannot be
the principle of any political party or leadership or the position of any
political leader in a public office. His stance which must be immediately
clarified as a matter of national concern if we are interested in any gender
equality and equity. Such an actions are terrifying and at the same time
appealing especially at a time when women for the first time should have all
the opportunities to stand for themselves.
Who
told Mr Bah to speak on/for women?
As
a minister of tourism, we would expect Mr Bah to tell us his ministry’s stance
to empower women rather than expect them to be accomplishments in the lives of
men. Such a statement is immoral and
disempowering from a political leader and public official of a ministry that
would have had better mechanisms in presenting equal opportunities for women
and men. The status of women as
conceptually established by Hamat Bah shows his own negative prejudices towards
our mothers and sisters. It is really unfortunate that we still harbour some of
these terrifying masculine threats in our communities and think women are safe.
We will never attain any development with such a retarded paradigm of political
philosophy. Mr Bah must have borrowed his political values from the Roman
Empire – when women were used as means to men’s ends – the metaphor of our
political condition.
We
must begin to develop a political vocabulary that would empire all genders and
which will see all genders as equals in defining our own destinies. To assume that the role of women in our
society is principally for procreation or marriage is both stupid and
embarrassing. The notion of success
cannot be exclusively connected to marriage and procreation. That will be a
very biased and self-defeating political approach. Who is the tourism minister
to play the role of the moral buster when we are yet to see any concreate
development in his industry. He could
have presented Gambians with a focused project of his ministry on how it wishes
to empower all Gambians who had to take the hazardous journey outside our own
borders. It could also do the same for women whose lives he falsely claimed to
be preoccupied with.
My
sincerest recommendation for Mr Bah will be for his ministry to come up with
concrete plans to tackle the pressing needs of the tourism sector which
according to trustworthy statistics is decaying. The tourists markets are
disappearing out of sights living many young Gambians unemployed and as a
consequence compelling them into other adventures. The declining of our GDP is
supported by a lot of administrational incompetence within the previous
administrations and which Mr Bah if he cares should better address and leave
the role of religious fundamentalism to some fanatics who take pleasure talking
down on women. It is not his role to say where women of our society should be
positioned – not even the government can appropriately assume that role – women
will have to define their roles and positions in our society as they wish.
Hamat
Bah cannot make any greater mistake than he has already done – calling on me to
The Gambia – to marry and procreate because he thinks that is both religious
and saver. That statement is simple and a deliberate manifestation of ignorance
and unfounded optimism on his part. He
wishes to create some unworthy attention to his own unproductivity since four
months in office. As a proud citizen of The Gambia, I do not think our
political leaders will be so retarded in thinking as to the extent of imposing
their personal moralities on its citizen. That Mr Bah, a political figure and
the minister for the second most productive or important sector of our economy
will confidently think in such an unrealistic and closed-scream way is a
serious alarm to the countrymen. It is totally a challenge on him after this
misfortunate pronouncement, for Mr Bah to manifest that he is calling on me and
all Gambian citizens in whatsoever conditions we find ourselves back to the
Gambia because, life possible outside The Gambia is now not only imaginable but
also possible within our own borders. But,
even if such a claim cannot be easily defended by Mr Bah given the
present nature of his own industry and the already misappropriation of many
resources and actions by the Coalition Government, we would better expect him
to call on the Gambians not by inducing them to his own moralities (either
religious or cultural). For religious teachings, we have schools, mosques and
other people in society who can better assume that role. But even a religious leader,
who makes such pronouncement nowadays, will be at best regarded as a
fundamentalist masquerading his own wishes on others without any scientific
evidence whatsoever. Where is it written
that marriage necessarily leads to happiness and more than one wife guarantees
the welfare of women? Will Mr Bah allow
his children to fundamentally measure their successes by number of husbands or
wives they are willing to marry? I do not think so, but if he definitely does as
manifested in his recent ill-advised calling on me and other Gambians to go and
marry as many wives as possible, is strongly disrespectful and unpleasable
especially from him. He could have represented his ministry with a progressive
rhetoric unconnected whatsoever to marriage for the general wellbeing of all.
Mr
Bah must know that marriage is not the main objective of my life nor is
procreation. The minister of tourism has
transgressed into private boundaries without any careful consideration of the
disturbances he might cause. His recent
trumpeting is not only a misguided ideology but a way of talking about things
that does not matter. Things that are
and should be a matter of preference – each doing it according to her most
continent way. To be silent on such discourses as citizens will be the
introduction of an orthodoxy in a secular state that is finding it difficult to
interpret democracy and attain to matters of public goals and concern.
WHY
MARRIAGE?
IS IT NOT BRINGING OTHERS INTO HARM?
The
assumption that passing on our genes to others through marriage can only be
good and a sign of human superiority is appropriately mistaken. To speak
against a strong held belief like marriage that continue to harm generations
but which is nearly unanimously seen as good and as a human speciality, is
nonsensical. Human procreation is being seen as a necessity and no matter what
it must happened! Such miscounted adventures are generally of little good to
the humankind and of 100 per cent harm to those we bring into being. One strong
justification why we procreate is not because of love for humanity (or the
children we bring into being) but because of our own overestimated selfish
interests we might never attain. Since we cannot determine the material and
spiritual preferences of our unborn children, we cannot claim to love them. So,
we only procreate to pass on the generational harms we bore and that we see it
necessary to be passed on. Therefore, since we cannot for certain create a
material and spiritual paradise for those we want to bring to being, it is
wrong to procreate at the first place. This long held protective taboo does
continue to harm us even deeper, the more we bring into existence those lives
we know nothing about or can do anything sufficient to confront the harms they
will have to bear when they are allowed to exist, man must not procreate at all
and if she should marry, it must not be based on the irrational traditional
conception of marrying for procreation.
Men,
in as long as they can impregnate and women, in as long as they can conceive,
the two most of the times take sex basically for procreative motives. Why? And
what if there is any, the ramifications of this fallacious pattern of
generational stupidity? To procreate is to be certain that the person one wants
to bring into existence will live well without any harm whatsoever. And if we
do believe for certain that our children will not survive in a perfect and
tranquil paradise on earth where they are able to attain what they want, then
we are merely producing more harm by bringing them into existence. Procreation
is a battle in an already overcrowded world where even if there can be a
perfect market distribution of resources, certainly, not all will be
better-off.
My
thesis is not grounded on any dislike whatsoever for children but in fact, my
profound love for children not to exist at all, so that, they are safe from
pointless possible harms that will certainly happen to them for the mere sake
of their coming into being. But even educated and rich parents cannot calculate
more than their egotistic aggregate satisfaction for procreation. And
supporting procreation on religious and social grounds is a sign of immaturity
in a world that is literally busting at the seams. Busting at the seams in
economic, social and environmental terms. We are simply procreating without
having to think critically whether or not we are causing more harm than good if
we bring others into mere existence. The transcendental nonsense that continue
to teach us that it is well and fine to procreate are fundamentalists whose
existence in the first place should be seen as a mistake by the generations
before them. For the fact that we procreate and educate our children in our own
ways, is induction into their freewill and not scientifically arguable to be of
any good to the child. Those who do not exist know absolutely nothing about
harm. Since they do not exist, at the sight of a problematic world like ours,
it is better not to have existed and will be a great and avoidable mistake and
a harm to procreate. Not only are we not able to guarantee the perfect
happiness of others we want to bring into being, it is also impossible for us
to predict what they would like and to supposed that we (will ) know what the
world should look like for them is a traditional malpractice never studied to
manifest how the living could have been well-off had we not populated this
little endangered space of ours called the planet earth.
