BENIN CITY – Traditional African societies were manifestly male chauvinistic at best and outrightly gender slavish at worst.
The women were taught the “virtue” of patience in marriage as they continued to be the recipients of harsh treatments from their lordly husbands.
While modern African societies have grown increasingly respectful and protective of the woman, they, however, still lag seriously behind in terms of gender equality or women’s rights.
While the marriages of our parents, with all their manifest oppressiveness and gender disparities, lasted, survived or even strived mainly due to the docility and unbridled submission of our mothers to their husbands and families and the unbearable disgrace that traditional African societies placed on a woman leaving her husband, the marriage of modern African couples now trends irreversibly toward divorce and breakups, two practices unknown to traditional African societies.
The trend of failing marriages among young Africans while doubtless on an upswing amongst young couples within the continent, it however explodes into full chaos among Africans living in western societies.
There is obviously lack of empirical data to know the relative percentages of divorce or separation between couples living within the continent and those living in western societies, it is, however, clear from court records and proceedings that an overwhelming number of Africans living in western societies have their marriages either collapsing or on the brink of collapse.
The begging question is why the alarming increase in divorce proceedings among Africans in the diaspora? The answer might not be too far from the liberalism, rights and privileges enjoyed by the women of western societies and the sudden realization by African women in western societies of their new found power and privileges and the temptations to wield these powers.
The sharp contrasts between the freedom of their host culture and the stifling atmosphere of the African gender disconnect inform their decision to ‘rebel’ and assert themselves in their new homes.
One such cases decided in a court in Edo State was that filed by Mercy Obehi Eleh against her erstwhile husband Kevin Oke Eleh after the woman’s sudden realization that she didn’t have to continue to put up with her husband’s chauvinistic and patrilineal attitude.
The court upheld the petitioner’s right under the Matrimonial Causes Act to seek for dissolution of marriage under the omnibus ground that the marriage has broken up irretrievably without even having to prove that the man had acted in a cruel manner that the woman is no longer reasonably expected to live with him. The court duly dissolved the marriage and gave custody of the only child of the marriage to the woman.
In the above cited case and a legion of others, more and more women are becoming aware of their rights especially those living in western societies. It really used to be such an anathema for an African woman to sue for divorce, but time has changed as modernization sets in and ancient oppressive cultures make way for those erected on liberty, freedom, equality and human rights
