Matricentrism and Patriarchy

[Tumbulu]

2. another interesting post!

Last edited Thu Apr 5, 2012, 11:23 PM - Edit history (1)

Wow, seabeyond, you are something!

I do think that this is really a great topic. I do think that it is delicate and difficult to figure out how to raise our children .......

I lived in West Africa for a year. There the women produced the food crops, gathered the wood for fires/cooking. Cooked all the food, took care of all the children and then gave the men the food to eat first. The women and children only got the food LEFT OVER after they ate.

The men's job was to pray, make fences, and perhaps grow a cash crop (money from which they kept).

In this society women really were the source of the power and the men appeared to be jealous (at least to me). The men were obligated to beat their wives once a year- if they did not then some unknown man in the village dressed up in a terrible costume would come around and beat them with thick sticks- and I mean really beat them. So, the husbands would beat wives once a year to avoid something worse.

I felt that all this horror came from the fact that the men absolutely completely were dependent on the women and knew it. And did not like it either. The little boys were taken away from their mothers and placed with the men at around age 12...they did not want to leave their mothers and become the monsters that they perceived the men to be. I could not figure out why the men were so useless (imo) as even though I pray a lot and value it, I do not see why one cannot pray WHILE working. Why this culture felt it was so important for the men to be kneeling and praying for hour after hour while the women did all this backbreaking work- did I mention hauling water on their heads? - I do not know. But there are other cultures where the men are supposed to be praying all the time and women do all the real work, this model is not unique to the part of West Africa that I lived in.

Needless to say this system outraged me......and still does.......it was my glimpse into a horribly brutal patriarchy. What we have here in the west is in a type of flux. I often wonder how it happened and how what happened for us can be translated into the lives of women in other parts of the world- women like the friends that I made in West Africa whose lives of outrageous injustice (at least as it appeared to me) never seemed to get them down.