By Dr Tafataona Mahoso

THERE is no doubt that Zimbabweans are confused about gender which, in the media and in politics, has been reduced to just issues about women.  

Sections 3 (g), 17 and 245 (2) of the Constitution of Zimbabwe assume that gender is a self-evident reality because it means inequality between men and women defined in terms of numbers in posts.

The joint 2004 UNFPA-University of Zimbabwe publication called The Zimbabwean Male Psyche with Respect to Reproductive Health, HIV, AIDS and Gender Issues further clouded the problems of gender by:

• First, attributing to African men in Zimbabwe a unique ‘psyche’ or ‘soul’ without in any way proving that women, given the same social and economic conditions, were not capable of acquiring or exhibiting the same characteristics (such as promiscuity) attributed to the male psyche in Zimbabwe.

• Second, assuming that this unique Zimbabwean African male soul or psyche was responsible for sexual violence against women with no control study or reference to other societies. 

• Third, avoiding any historical analysis which could point to economic structural and other changes over time which could explain the escalating violence and thereby failing to say whether this typical Zimbabwean African male soul or psyche is primordial, inherent, recent or new. 

As Professor James Breasted pointed out long ago, the first fact of history worth noting is that the power and influence of Judeo-Christian religion and civilisation over the West and over Africa would have been moderated and less than it became if the world had been able to read Egyptian writing the same way it read Hebrew and Greek writing.  

In short, Hebrew scriptures are not only derived in the main from Egyptian writing but the entire Jewish civilisation came at least 2 000 years after Egyptian civilisation.  

When the Hebrews are not copying the Egyptians, they are nevertheless reacting to Egyptian civilisation.

This preceding fact is relevant to gender and relations between man and woman because it was Hebrew civilisation, especially the Levite priesthood, who were responsible for overthrowing the female god and society governed by women and for laying the foundations of Judeo-Christian patriarchy which was later adopted by capitalism in its chattel slavery stage and extended during its colonialist and imperialist stages.

Before the male revolution which set up a religion of God the Father and overthrew the goddess, women controlled sex and sex was regarded as sacred and holy, rather than sinful and dirty as in the Hebrew and European traditions.

The revolution included changes in language which still burden us to this day.  

Female priests, who served the female god, practiced sexual rituals as part of their worship of the female god.  

This is understandable because temples of the female god were biophilic centres for agricultural production and human reproduction controlled by women who owned the land. 

The female priests of the female god were powerful women who developed agriculture, owned land and controlled healing powers and reproductive powers.

According to Merlin Stone in When God was a Woman:

“In the worship of the female deity, sex was Her gift to humanity. It was sacred and holy. She was the Goddess of Sexual Love and Procreation.

Women who resided in the sacred precincts of the Devine Ancestress took their (male) lovers from the community surrounding the temple, making love to those who came to the temple to pay honour to the Goddess.”

The temple women, capable of sourcing male lovers for themselves, were called nu-gig or qadishtu, which in their context meant …the pure, the spotless, sanctified women, sacred women, the undefiled.

The Levite revolution set to ban Goddess worship and deliberately to translate nu-gig and qadishtu as ‘harlots’, ‘temple prostitutes’ or just ‘prostitutes’.   

This was a clear perversion of language, since women who controlled sex, reproduction and owned the means of food production did not come anywhere near the true meaning of prostitution.

The Levite revolution also sought to rewrite stories to do with men and women, making sure that women who exercised any power over men were cast in the worst light, including Delilah and Samson or Jezebel and Ahab as well as Lot’s wife and her daughters in relation to Lot.

Therefore, when one reads the Bible, especially the Old Testament, as a historical record, it is impossible not to notice that this is a campaign book against women’s power, against Egyptian civilisation and against all societies where the female god reigned and women governed, such as Mesopotamia (Babylon), Egypt and Palestine (Philistines).  

Very clearly, the cultures and civilisations being denounced are not allowed to speak back.  

They have no voice in the stories meant to tarnish them.

The second major fact of history is that the powers of the female god and the lingering powers of the female priests of the female god could not be wiped out instantly.  

They had to be reckoned with over a long time. This reckoning was achieved by fragmenting the roles of both the female god and the powerful woman.  

Therefore, instead of one female god, the creatress, many goddesses were set up to cater for the residual power of the female god;  the goddess of agriculture, the goddess of love, the goddess of poetry as well as art and so on.  

Women’s roles were also split in a binary fashion between the good woman and the evil woman, with the powerful woman being reduced to either a witch and murderer or to a prostitute. 

Scholars agree that the image of Mary Mother of Jesus is in a fact a diminished image of the female god meant to appease the persistent followers of that female god.  

Mary is made secondary to her Son Jesus Christ. Mary is no longer capable of spiration, that is giving the gift of the spirit. Spiration is now the prerogative of the Father and the Son.

The third stage was to institutionalise the overthrow of the female god and her female priests through repeated rituals (such as Christmas and Easter) which in fact celebrate the dethronement of the female god, now Mary and the other women followers of Jesus; and the elevation of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost into a Trinity in which Mary now has no role.  

In fact, in the original set up before the revolution, the wise men from the East, the Magi, would have come to pay homage to Mary as the female god; but after the revolution, the Magi pay homage to the infant Son, the baby Jesus.  

Repetition of these stories and rituals in the Church helps women and society as a whole to celebrate as sublimate the dethronement of the female god.  

According to Mary Daly, the cutting down of trees and their decoration as Christmas trees is a ritual celebrating the cutting down of the female god and her powers over life.  

The Christmas tree represents, in diminished form, the image of the female god as Mary.

The fourth revolutionary change is to turn up-side-down the legacy of the temple of the female god where agriculture, sex and human reproduction controlled by women used to be regarded as sacred, holy and blessed.

The woman’s birth right becomes a ‘birth wrong’ to use Professor Daly’s words.  

It becomes a misfortune to be born a woman.  

And all those born of woman from then on must anticipate

to a lifetime of misery and toil as punishments for the original sin.  

Sex itself becomes a dirty and evil necessity under the new order.

Apart from the Catholic Inquisition and the consequent European witch-burning craze, the fifth stage from the point of view of the South came in two phases: In 1452 on June 18, Pope Nicholas V issued a Papal Decree which condemned Africa and Africans as enemies of Christ who deserved to be enslaved.  

Then in 1494 Pope Alexander, representing the Catholic Church as an imperial authority, divided Africa and Latin America as spheres of influence and colonisation between Portugal and Spain respectively, thereby opening the floodgates for chattel slavery.

These events are critical because there is no model of sadomasochistic brutality against women which exceeds that practised against African women under plantation slavery and apartheid.

The sixth major change was psychoanalytic and psychological sublimation introduced by Sigmund Freud and other Western founding fathers of psychoanalysis and psychiatry. 

Freud borrowed from the colonial, imperialist, sexist and racist anthropology of William Robertson Smith (1846-1894), a Scottish follower of Charles Darwin.  

In his Totem and Taboo, Freud blamed  the brutish and sadomasochistic sexual violence of European patriarchyon ‘primitive man’ and ‘primitive society’. In this way, the idea of sex as a dirty, sinful, violent, destabilising and guilt-ridden experience migrated from the Church pulpit to the psychiatric couch. 

And so-called primitive society was to blame for that nasty and brutish inheritance.  

This is one of the reasons so many proponents of women’s liberation so easily blame ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’ without bothering to research these allegations.

Yet, in real history, nothing could be more ‘traditional’ and historical than the world’s inheritance from Africa (Egypt) of a system for the development of optimal human relationships which we call conscience.  

According to Professor James Breasted, already cited, the same ancient history so blamed for modern capitalism’s ills actually demonstrates “…the unconquerable buoyancy of the human soul.” 

Professor Breasted wrote: 

“But yesterday… through the dust of an engrossing conflict our Father Man (and Mother Woman) began to catch but faintly the veiled glory of the moral vision, and to hear a new voice within, responding to a thousand promptings, old and new. It was interfused of love of home, of wife and children, of love of friends and love of neighbours, of love of the poor and lonely and oppressed, of love of country… and all these which were new, mingling with vastly older reverence, the love of cloud and hilltop, of forest and stream, of earth and sea and sky, and not least of earth’s green mantle which every year burgeoned with life and nourishment for the children of men and women.” 

What makes the UNFPA booklet written by University of Zimbabwe researchers at the Centre for Applied Psychology and Obstetrics and Gynaecology so shocking is that it naively reads back into African ‘tradition’ the contemporary adversarial habits and beliefs of neo-colonial and post-colonial African men, the majority of them converted ‘Christians’!

When I was growing up, we were taught as young men that a man should never sexually force himself on any woman, even his own wife.  

If a woman told a man that she was not in the mood for sexual intercourse, the man should thank her for the honest response because it was for his own protection. 

If the man proceeded to violate the woman’s space and violate her body, he would eventually fall sick and even die as a result.  

The idea was always that the woman knew best and knew many things about her body which the man did not know.  

So, if she refused to engage in sexual intercourse, that was for the man’s protection.

We were taught that this was the reason African men did not sleep in the same bedroom with their wives all the time.  

The man had his own separate round hut near that of his wife and he would sleep with her when she said he could join her in her space.

I was overjoyed to discover the African indigenous origins of this concept of woman’s sacred space from Turnbull’s study of the Mbuti of Ituri Forest, Congo.

“The Mbuti conceive of their universe as a sphere. We are normally always in the centre of this sphere.  When we move in time and space the sphere moves with us, so we remain in the centre, which provides (balance and) security.” 

Therefore, the woman’s space is scared, to be entered only with her consent.

In my dream-like perception of woman’s presence, the sphere around the woman was like a magnetic field.  But the Mbuti concept includes and precedes the modern day concept of privacy.  

It explains why most Africans build their dwellings as spheres, round houses. Turnbull goes on:

“If our movement in time or space is too violent or too sudden, we can reach the edge of the sphere before the centre has time to catch up. When this happens, a person becomes wazi-wazi, or disoriented and unpredictable. If the violence of the movement is too blatant, we risk piercing through the safe and known boundaries of our sphere into the other world. If you do that, you may let something else move (into your sacred sphere) to replace you.”

The preposterous pseudo-theory of primitive sexuality which UNFPA and the UZ researchers used to underpin their hypothesis was first concocted by William Robertson Smith (1846-1894) and popularised by Freud through his Totem and Taboo.   

According to Professor Michael Harrington: “Most anthropologists at the time Totem appeared were aware of how thin the factual data were, which Freud himself recognised at the end of his life.” 

The behaviours now blamed on the supposedly typical African male soul are actually the expected effects of what Professor Daly in Pure Lust described as the modern capitalist sadosociety when she wrote that:

“The (Modern) sadosociety is the sum of places/times where the beliefs and practices of (Western) sadomasochism are The Rule… The Sadosociety, then, is legitimated by sadosprirituality. This is characterised by obsessive asceticism imposed upon others as well as themselves by fabricators of ascetic fixations, who become models and ideologists for those within their spheres of (imperial and missionary) influence.” 

The treatment of African women under chattel slavery and apartheid would be typical of this sadosociety and sadostate and it cannot be taken as a typical and primordial African male practice, even if African males brought up under that influence end up behaving according to its sadomasochist practices and rules.