2. THE SUBSERVIENT WOMAN

Trevoh Noah once said “The way my mother always explained it, the traditional man wants a woman to be subservient, but he never falls in love with subservient women. He’s attracted to independent women.”

I had known men like this but I was blind to the one who lived in that green house with me. He was educated. ‘Disciplined’ he always claimed. Had a well-paying job. And like most traditional men, who having acquired a well-paying job, a house and a car, deem themselves capable of ‘running a family’, he felt it was time he started one too. But he’d have to get himself a wife.

The wife. Only, she wasn’t the first option, or the second. Most possibly not even the third. There were more educated women before here. Teachers, Lawyers…Women with good-paying jobs. He brought them all back home, but they just weren’t chosen. Then there was her. Young. Still at school. Jobless. Not yet figuring out her place in this world. In hindsight, I would say she never did find ‘her’ place.

He would go on to pick her. Pluck her, Not quite out of love, no. Not any of her physical qualities. No. He would go on to choose her because he saw in her an attribute that would make her an easy prey. Attributes that would make her easy to subdue. He saw in her a flame he could put off without getting burnt. He saw attributes that those other women lacked. They had good jobs, so they would always have choices. She was barely sailing through school. They had voices so they’d speak rather than blindly follow rules. She had a voice, but she lacked intellect. They had broken through cultural norms that limited them. She did not see a world outside of culture, nor religion. She believed in the same things the women before her believed in. Even when it clearly froze them in place. She believed in a God who rewarded long-suffering.

Maybe it was the culture that obscured her vision. Maybe she just never learnt to put herself first. Through the time I knew her, she never did put herself first. It would be him, or the children, or some other relative. When they fell she fell too. Somehow, their burdens became hers too.

I believe one would have known from the first Kola nut breaking that they were polar opposites. I wish someone would have told her that she had options, that she should take her time regardless of what age she was. I wish someone would have told her that he wasn’t a catch, that there would be other men perhaps just as rich, perhaps not, but they would love her most abundantly and she would revel in it. I wish someone would have told her that when he sent her back home with that pregnancy, it was okay to not go back. It was okay being a single mum. That having a ‘bastard’ was a far better option than having a potential abuser for a spouse. That the God she so faithfully served was showing her the red flags before they had the chance to knock out her out.

I don’t know why she chose him. But I know why he chose her over the other women. It’s not that he wasn’t attracted to them. In fact, he must have been. They just weren’t subservient enough. He saw in them something that could not be caged, could not worship him as their saviour, could not be ‘disciplined’ and he couldn’t stomach it.

So what did he do?
Now unlike the traditional man Trevoh Noah refers, he picked a subservient one even though she lacked all the qualities he was attracted to with the other women.

It was a loveless union even before it began.