By Farayi Mungoshi

WALKING into a pub in Birmingham one day I find Gonzo sitting alone with a Stella Artois on the table before him.
I can tell he is deep in thought, but I can’t guess what is worrying him, after all, he just got his asylum the other week – and his wife has just given birth to a baby boy (now three months old).
He is supposed to be celebrating.
After sitting down at his table he immediately offloads his load on me.
He is debating whether he’d done the right thing to seek asylum because now he can’t go back home.
“I thought that’s what you wanted,” I said.
“I thought so too, but this country has turned our women against us,” he moans.
He goes on to tell me how he has been changing their son’s diapers, and washing dishes in his own home.
I looked at the 40-year-old with sadness.
This is something unheard of back home.
“I have no option because I can’t even afford a maid even if I wanted one, I would have to pay her more than I get paid.”
I sat back and looked at him.
“I am not complaining about doing house chores Fatso, no please don’t get me wrong I know we need to help each other, but when the wife expects me to wake up and prepare her food when she comes back late from work and to tend to the baby every time while she snores that is called abuse.”
I realised then that Gonzo was not the only one being abused in the UK in the name of equal rights.
The other day a friend of a friend was complaining about how his wife had changed ever since arriving in the UK and now she did not allow him to answer her phone anymore.
“Five years we’ve been together, now that we are here, she tells me not to touch her phone.”
The men felt the system favoured women and the women were now abusing their powers and expecting the men to do something they were not brought up doing.
How many Zimbabwean men would own up to washing nappies while the wife is sleeping, not because she is tired, but because she expects him to do it?
It is not easy to teach an old dog, new tricks.
Questions arise as to whether there was true love at the time the woman agreed to marry the man?
Or maybe it was expected of them to get married and they feared turning 30 years without a husband.
Was it payback time?
If they were abused then did they even try to talk to their husbands about it or they were too afraid?
“When you used to come home late from the bar back in Zimbabwe how do you think I felt? Now the ball is in your court, deal with it,” a friend to Gonzo’s wife would often tell her husband.
I grew up knowing that a woman watches over and runs the house while the man is out hunting hence the saying, “Musha mukadzi” even with a weakling for a husband she would cover up for him, and when he stands among others, he would be counted as a man.
How then did we get to the point where most of the women now feel our way of living is prejudice towards them?
I would later ask one lady we called Tete (Aunt) why she married a white man.
She told me that she admired how men in the ‘new world’ assisted their spouses in the house.
“I could never ask a Zimbabwean man to do the dishes, sweep the house or wash nappies. It is just not in their nature.”
After all had been said and done, Gonzo looked up wearily and said, “I am going to give her a good hiding, if they arrest me or deport me so be it.”
When I asked if he was not worried about the children he said they were doomed already.
“How can I expect them to respect me when there is no one to show them that I am their father?”
He reminded me that children in the UK have more rights than parents and they can get you jailed for disciplining them.
“Look around you, most families here are dysfunctional, black and white alike – the ones that seem less affected are the Indians and Pakistanis.
“Do you know why?
“Because they have stuck to who they are despite being in foreign land.”
I nodded in agreement as I remembered my neighbours in Hockley, they were Indians, the grandmother did not even know English despite having been in the UK for over 25 years.
“I just hope we scrutinise these ‘rights’ before swallowing them just because they are from the West otherwise we will all end up divorced.”
He sipped his beer.