By Masimba Musodza| On Monday, Zimbabwe’s social mediaspace was flooded with comedienne Mai Titi’s Facebook live blubberfest a lá Olinda Chapel in which the Brenda Fassie look-alike narrated the story of her love life and how badly it has turned out. She pleaded with her audience not to judge her or seek to silence her.
I am not going to seek to silence her, but I will most certainly judge her and every woman in our society in her situation and say that it is high time they grew up and made grown up decisions or live with the consequences of their imprudent ones.
In that respect, I am not attacking Mai Titi (real name Felistas Murata Edwards) personally, but the culture that breeds women like her and feeds their delusion that they are somehow heroic in their folly and martyrs to a system they have no control over. Nor am I gloating over her current problems, a mental breakdown and living with HIV etc, but looking at these as the consequences of the choices she made as an adult, consequences which she almost certainly she could have avoided if she had made a different set of choices. I am basing my opinion solely on what she said about herself in that video, what has been said by other women in such situations and my observations of Zimbabwean society.
Mai Titi’s story highlights a problem in our contemporary culture as Zimbabweans that is yet to be addressed by those individuals and institutions which shape and direct culture. Women are raised to believe that men are like vending machines; if you put the right coins into the slot, you get precisely what you want! Give the vilest degenerate enough sex, food etc and he will become a loving husband and father. If a husband is cheating, underachieving, violent etc, it is because the woman is not trying hard enough against the competition.
She needs to dress better, perform better in bed, give him more money, put up with his judgemental relatives and spiteful girlfriends and pray to Jesus, while he is not expected to improve his behaviour in any way. Staying married to her is enough. Such a view has been articulated in public by no higher ranking woman than Mrs Joyce Mujuru during her tenure as Deputy President of Zimbabwe. Mai Titi has herself has appeared in a leaked video, where she is teaching younger women how to keep their men by demonstrating sexual techniques that will knock out rivals.
Because of such an outlook, many Zimbabwean girls are not afraid to enter into a relationship with a man who sounds alarm bells.
Even when they find out the nasty things about their partner, many girls will tell themselves, and receive reassurance from a society that firmly believes this, that they can change such a man. It is with such a mentality, such an absolutist view of relationships, that many women are shocked to find that the man they gave their money, their body, their time, against the advice and exortations of friends and family still went on to betray them. By the time they face the reality of this betrayal, the damage has been done in terms of financial and material loss, mental health problems and physical health problems, including HIV and AIDS.
I think that the stakes are higher than they were a generation ago, when many couples start out with very little and then build wealth together, ending with the man running away with it all to give to his new woman. Many Zimbabwean girls of today have accumulated wealth before they enter a life-long relationship. Some look at this wealth as investing in a man who will rise to be a better provider. I recall the case of a Zimbabwean woman in the UK who met a Nigerian man. She looked after him for three years while he studied at university, and sponsored his mother to come over for the graduation ceremony. He then returned to Nigeria, the plan being that she would follow and they would have a traditional Nigerian wedding. He blocked her on Facebook etc, and she discovered from mutual friends that he had found himself a well-paying job in Canada.
Zimbabwean men, on the other hand, are raised not to expect a good woman out of every female they encounter. If I were to do a Facebook Live video lamenting how the prostitute I picked up in a sleazy township club and decided to wife up took all my money and left me with a terrible disease, I doubt that I would get the kind of sympathy and adulation that our sisters are getting. No one would call me “strong.” I would be just that stupid guy who should have known better. In our brave new world of gender equality, why are we not holding women to the same standard?
Women need to offer real incentives for behavioural change. The average Zimbabwean woman knows from the examples set around them that they stand to lose everything- name, dignity, property, children-if they are caught in adultery. So, those that indulge will take measures not to get caught. Men, on the other hand, do not have such incentives. The Zimbawean philanderer can stay in the marriage if he wants to, or go on to marry another nice girl. He can remain in public office, as our line up of government ministers and other officials shows. Yet, these are the men that many Zimbabwean women choose.
I have said it before, and I will reiterate; until arranged marriage becomes a feature of Zimbabwean culture, no woman has the right to complain about the man she has chosen for herself. We need to stop making role models of people like Mai Titi, but deplore them for their lack of guidance. They are not “strong”! They are not “queens.” They are not victims of “patriarchy.”
Speaking of “patriarchy”, did anyone else notice the virtual absence of men in Mai Titi’s video. The man she was complaining about was raised by a single mother of several kids by different men. Mai Titi herself was already raising a child without the father in sight. She mentions her own mother, but no father. And then the White Man in the UK who sends her money. It would appear that strong male role models were absent in Mai Titi’s upbringing, which is probably why she fell in love with Tapiwa. You can also look at the men in the lives of women with similar stories. When Olinda was waxing tearful in the same space, we never heard about her father or Desmond’s.
Women need to abandon the daft notion that any man can change simply because of prayer, good sex, cleaning, cooking, giving birth to children and tolerating violence. Women need to stop acting like little children that can be coaxed with lies and glib promises. If they really valued the things they stand to lose, their property, their bodies, their sexual and mental health, their dignity, they would take measures to protect them.