My maiguard was looking downcast. I asked him what the matter was and he replied with the obligatory “I am fine sir”. I was not convinced. I probed further and he finally opened up: his wife was expecting another baby — and, going by the scan result, “it is a girl again”. He has had three girls and is desperately looking for a boy, despite the economic situation. He was plainly frustrated and trying to blame the wife. I took time to explain to him what they taught us in O’Level Biology about XX and XY chromosomes and how it is the man, and not the woman, that determines a child’s sex. I could have been talking to a wall. As far as he was concerned, his wife was the “Abi-girl”.

I then went slightly off-topic. “But why do you even think you need a male child? I don’t have a son and I have never felt like I killed somebody,” I joked. He said he wanted to perpetuate his family name. I laughed intensively and asked: “Do you know how many Musas we have in West Africa?” It’s not as if we are talking about Mansa Musa. I told him a bit of my family history. My surname, Kolawole, is my father’s first name. It is not my “family name”. My grandfather was Gabriel Komolafe. My father was Kolawole Gabriel. He chose his father’s first name as his own surname. His three younger sisters answered Komolafe before getting married and discarding the name entirely.

In other words, the Komolafe “family name” was not perpetuated and the last time I checked, heavens have not fallen. But it even got more interesting some years ago when I asked my grandmother (God rest her soul) a bit of our family history. She said Gabriel and Komolafe were my grandfather’s baptismal and middle names. Basically, his surname was

his own name! The family name is Adigun but he refused to use it because it was associated with the family cult, she said. I was aghast. In a world where people are fighting for male children to perpetuate family names, my own father and grandfather wilfully discarded theirs. Else, I would be answering Simon Adigun today!

Not that my story swayed the maiguard. Not that I gave up either. I told him that since he has brothers who have male children, the family name would survive. If my family wants the Kolawole name perpetuated, I said, my younger brother has a male child so “Kolawole” is already “preserved” (whatever that means). His response made me laugh the more. “Oga, you know you are a big man, so it may not affect you. It means a lot to have male children in my community. Otherwise, nobody will respect you.” But I can tell he loves his daughters dearly. He finally arrived at what might be his real worry: “If I don’t have a male child, I will not be entitled to family land in the village.” Oh dear!

Although I joked it away by asking him to buy land in Lagos instead, something hit me hard and stuck out at the end of our one-hour conversation: the odiously chauvinistic mentality of the traditional, patriarchal part of the African society which can still not understand that a female child is a full, complete human being. The girl-child is seen as a handicap and, ultimately, a nonentity. A bosom friend of mine who had a son after a succession of three girls was congratulated by a family member who told him pointedly: “Finally, you can now say you have a child!” Can you beat that? The reality is that some still have blighted brains about the female gender in 21st-century Africa. It is what it is.

As we can see in the case of my maiguard who would not be entitled to family land because he was yet to have a son, some traditional African communities do not only discriminate against the female gender, they also visit the consequences of the chauvinism upon the parents. The National Assembly has just voted on a number of proposed amendments to the constitution and — surprise surprise — the female-specific bills were flung out of the window. The most glaring gender bias was in citizenship by registration. Section 26 of the 1999 Constitution allows foreign spouses of only Nigerian men to become citizens. An attempt to extend this right to the women was defeated.

Source: The cable