Africa After Gender?

15. “Give Her a Slap to Warm Her Up”: Post-Gender Theory and Ghana’s Popular Culture

15 “Give Her a Slap to Warm Her Up”: Post-Gender Theory and Ghana’s Popular Culture Catherine M. Cole Sexism in West African popular theatre is so ubiquitous that it “goes without saying” and has gone without extensive commentary in the growing literature on this topic.1 Africa After Gender? provides an opportunity for further re®ection on the dynamics of gender in West African popular culture, an arena that because of its popularity offers a unique window on social and cultural life.2 Theatre is a particularly expressive form of popular culture, for performers are notorious for adapting their shows with great agility to current trends and local issues. Usually performed in African languages, popular theatre vividly represents how gender is enacted, expressed, and understood “on the ground,” especially among the working class, who are the form’s chief innovators and patrons. Given the reliance of popular theatre on audience participation and the capacity to espouse contradictory meanings, it is dif¤cult to locate precisely what this genre might be saying about anything, especially about a topic as complex as gender. Nevertheless, for this present book, which contemplates the slippery idea of an Africa that is somehow “after gender,” I wish to explore how the concert party, Ghana’s popular theatre, has depicted women, gender, and the difference between the two. What do we mean by “gender” in Africa? How does the western concept of gender relate to indigenous African knowledge systems and social categories? When and why did “gender” as a concept gain currency in Africa such that it is now a household word, as common in lorries and chop bars as it is in the houses of Parliament and the boardrooms of nongovernmental organizations? Gender’s popularity in Africa may be explained in part because the term is simply more palatable than “women” or the even more incendiary term “feminism.” One notes the distance between, on the one hand, the theoretical musings about a “post” gender question in recent scholarship (largely emanating from scholars residing in Europe and the United States) and, on the other hand, the lived realities of actual women on the ground in Africa. For while gender posits an inclusive, relational analysis that intersects with, but is not determined by, physical sex, those who are physically sexed as female in Africa still have far less access than men do to material resources and political power. That discrepancy must not slip from view. Helen Mugambi, in her essay in this volume, catalogues the many advancements and achievements women have made in contemporary Uganda. They have assumed prominent roles in Parliament, law courts, the university, and politics. Yet even with these formidable accomplishments, women are still frequently the victims of domestic violence. And the overall public perception is that such violence is condoned as justi¤able behavior. Mugambi analyzes the case of Dr. Wandira Naigaga (Kazibwe), the country’s vice president, who revealed that her husband, Charles Kazibwe, a prominent civil engineer, had beaten her. The public discourse surrounding this revelation exposed a high public tolerance of such acts, even when it is the vice president of the country who is being slapped. Mugambi asks, “If, in the midst of all these buoyant developments , there are people who think that it is frivolous for the Vice President of a country to object to being slapped ‘only twice’ by a man who thinks that he has the right to assault her because he is her husband, where exactly are we in the gender engagement process?” Mugambi’s argument brings us back to the nitty-gritty realities of daily life and to the possibility that a discourse on gender that is liberatory, re®exive, critical, and uniformly applied to men and women is nascent—at best—in Africa. In contrast to the very real slapping of a prominent female politician in Uganda, let us now consider a slap from the ¤ctional realm of the concert party theatre genre from Ghana. At the beginning of the Jaguar Jokers’play Onipa Hia Moa (People Need Help), Ko¤ Nyame Bekyere praises his wife Ama Comfort because she caters to his every need. When Ko¤ is hungry, she prepares food. When he wants her to sleep, she sleeps. When Ko¤ is feeling “happy in the house” and Ama comes near him, “I just look at her face, and give her a dirty slap. ‘Chang!’ She will only say, ‘Agee! Agyae ee!’ And then laugh it off” (Jaguar Jokers 1995a, 1995b, 6...