Very recently, the public has been awash with comments from popular media personalities on how men ought not to take part in kitchens.
E.G., weeks ago, we woke up to a trending video in which Andrew Kyamagero, a news anchor and media personality expressed his disagreement on sharing domestic roles with his wife. On a 5-person televised show named “Bump Love”, Andrew retreats to his culture and identifies as a Muganda man who can never heed his wife’s request to fix a meal for himself even if both of them have just returned from a hard day’s office work.
The request – by a wife to husband to help microwave a meal – is emphatically termed as ‘abominable’, at least as a male host is heard retorting – ‘God forbid’. Utterly surprised by the thought of a wife request for such help from a husband, Mr. Kyamagero tells the audience:
“You are pointing me to the kitchen, that’s not my office! I am a man; my job is strategic at the very top. You are sending me in operations, I won’t come there. And as a Muganda man I won’t beat you, but I won’t eat food. You are pushing me now to pay attention to the other restaurants that have the good food that I want.”
Days later, comments appeared on X on how women should stop cooking noodles for their men. That “a winning woman will just prepare a good meal and prays that the king will like it when he returns back home!”
The argument is that as a man, his role in the home is of great significance and that he can never stoop so low to go into the operations of the kitchen. In this one-minute-visual clip, the audience is alerted to the fact that a wife’s request of that nature is transgressive and possibly emasculating, likely to trigger male reaction.
While he suggests that he would not beat his wife, which is a pervasive physical violent reaction in most of our societies, he nonetheless indicates that he would not eat the food and would walk away to restaurants that prepare such. Whether this conversation was meant for humour or public counsel, there are a number of lessons we could possibly pick a story that has trended on X for days.
The submissions are not strange to us at all. Mr Kyamagero’s comments are perhaps not the first to be heard publicly and maybe there is more ‘public counsel’ we may encounter from men on the issue of their presence and active participation in domestic care work or other issues of gender concern.
Sometime in 2006, the Uganda Demographic Health Survey findings cited popular attitudes to wife-beating in which a significant number of women and men justified wife beating if she burnt food or failed to perform other domestic chores like looking after children, arguing with a husband or going without telling a husband among other justifications.
As a society, we have been in this position of justifiable violence towards women, including witnessing a surge in men walking away from homes and abdicating family responsibility in recent times. What makes Kyamagero’s comments trendy and worth our attention is the social position he occupies in Uganda’s social imaginaries.
He is a young, educated, married man with a professional career and commands a popular media following of a youthful generation. He undoubtedly has an influential voice in public fora. He has equally been active in public spaces that are pro-gender equality especially promoting male role models and champions for gender equality, what the current gender development discourse would term a “male Champion of gender change”.
These positions make his public commentary a substantive performance for a number of reasons
Face-to-face with gender backlash
This conversation springs from a recognizable point of progress in women’s and girls’ rights to education, professional career, work and economic contribution to the sustenance of economies. This women’s progress is no longer doubtable.
As such, it becomes unfair, amidst such progress to hold-onto cultural norms that designate women to the domestic realm, expected to single-handedly shoulder the burden of unpaid domestic care. Discussions on care work have since evolved beyond looking at men’s shared role in the domestic sphere as about educated and professional women ‘instructing’ and commanding their husbands around to take on domestic work.
Conscious efforts at individual, community and state level to recognize care burden in homes, strategic efforts towards reducing the burden, mechanisms to redistribute such work, reward those who participate or even having key actors in care work represented in equitable policies to address these burdens, are already in place for us to appreciate.
There are wider options available to men and women as well in addressing domestic work. To constitute men’s sharing in such a burden as abominable is an erosion of all this gender progress so far registered.
Normalizing violence against women
The public confession that “as a Muganda man I won’t beat you but I won’t eat the food” is not necessarily a peaceful protest. In fact, it is a pointer of how a wife’s request for assistance in domestic work can and indeed triggers men’s violence against women.
While one may desist from physical violence – beating their wife, refusing to eat her food and walking away from home is equally a form of emotional and psychological violence. It sounds unreasonable to hide in culture to publicly confess and therefore legitimize and normalize violence against women.
We need to re-think being a man in progressive world
As we progress, we need to rethink our cultural positions, especially the place of men and men’s practices in a fast-changing work. As one social media commentator noted, “At a time when the world is working so hard to get men up to speed on healthy family relations in view of the changing world, voices such as these from popular personalities roll back progressive efforts. We need to rethink what being a man is in this current times. As the Katikiro of Buganda recently reminded us “Okubeera omusajja tekitegeeza kwemanya ssajja oba okujagalaza ebirevu. Wabula kitegeeza okubeera n’obuvunaanyizibwa”
Being a man does not mean emphatic and public claim of manhood. Rather it means taking responsibility. As men continue to cope with new realities – gender equality, women’s empowerment, taking part in active parenting, or taking part in household chores, these new experiences provide possibilities of building towards progressive cultures and gender-equal relations.
For our mental health we need to strip ourselves of this straight jacket of who should or shouldn’t be in particular spaces.
The author is a lecturer in the School of Women and Gender Studies, Makerere University