I’m being cheered on by two amazing ladies from Nyamiyaga and our conversation flips from humour, to curiosity, to interests, to discovery, to compliments and then to something of interest; equity/ equality of man and woman and a bait is thrown and from their point of view, this African aspect is true; in our homes, the fire is never lit by one hand.
You see in African setups; a woman bends to arrange the charcoal. A man searches for dry wood. A child blows gently into the smoke with watery eyes. Then warmth rises for everybody.
That is how our society survives. But along the road, we developed strange ideas about leadership and responsibility. We mistook strength for domination. We began to speak as though dignity were a limited resource that men must guard carefully from women. Hiding salt in a kitchen tin during hard seasons.
But human dignity does not reduce when shared. It grows. We have always known this, even when we pretend otherwise. Long before conferences and declarations, life rested upon co-operation between men and women. Partnerships between villages and mutually recognising the responsibilities of man and woman.
Of course, there were vices too. Men hunted, negotiated, protected and cultivated. Women carried economies on their backs while carrying children on their hips. Neither life stood complete without the other.
When you educate a woman, you do not educate a person. You educate tomorrow itself, a community. This wisdom does not come from conferences. It came from watching life carefully. Human beings were created for communion. Not competition.
The woman is not made as decoration for the man’s pride, nor as a servant for his appetite. She was made as companion, helper, equal in humanity and equal in sacred worth. This does not erase difference.
Some will argue that difference is not injustice, because we know the drum and a flute sound differently, yet together they create music. These ladies from Nyamiyaga argued that the tragedy of modern debates is that many people today think equality means sameness.
It does not. Men and women are gloriously different in body, instinct, emotion and expression. Nature itself teaches this quietly every day. A mother’s tenderness is not weakness.
A father’s protectiveness is not oppression. Masculinity and femininity are not enemies fighting for territory. They are languages through which humanity speaks. And still, history forces honesty upon us.
Not from colonial systems or economic hardships, but often from the arrogance of men who inherited authority without inheriting wisdom. Many women silenced in homes, excluded from inheritance, denied education or treated as though endurance were their only spiritual gift.
We don’t need to attend a gender conference in Kampala or Helsinki, we know instinctively that a household collapses when women are dishonoured. But at the same time, contemporary culture sometimes swings too far in another direction.
Strength is treated as aggression before it even speaks. This also wounds society. We must resist both extremes. For most of us, we are standing on the shoulders of strong women who walked us through hospitals, schools, markets, farms, churches and universities.
Ordinary women carrying enormous yet silenced acts of love and more so economic weight. In many homes, they are the first to wake and the last to sleep. They stretch little money into impossible miracles.
They negotiate peace between relatives who stopped speaking years ago. They preserve culture while adapting courageously to modern life. This is not feminism. It is acknowledging the reality.
A secure man in himself does not fear intelligent women. He does not panic when a woman succeeds professionally. He does not become smaller because a woman becomes greater. Love itself requires equality of dignity.
You cannot genuinely love somebody you consider inferior. You depend on them. And love demands recognition. This is why even ordinary gestures matter. Listening when a woman speaks. Sharing decisions at home.
Allowing daughters to dream beyond survival. Teaching boys that gentleness is not weakness. Civilisations rise slowly through these habits. At policy level, we need to recognise, strong societies result from recognising equality and our responsibilities, building institutions and systems that support males and females in this identity.
Protecting the dignity of women without declaring war on the identity of men. It means investing seriously in girls’ education, maternal healthcare, inheritance rights, financial inclusion and protection from domestic violence, while also preserving the moral and social value of fatherhood, family responsibility and masculine virtue.
Our society will be built by mature men and women standing beside one another, carrying the same firewood toward the same home. Because when the fire burns for everyone, everybody survives. And perhaps that is what civilisation was always meant to be.
The author is a concerned citizen.