I was taken aback when I went to Kano a fortnight ago and as soon as Ahmed saw me, he asked.
“Mama my birthday was on Monday (i.e 26th July 2004) but you didn’t write me a letter.” As if I didn’t know, or I will ever forget the first time I became a mother.
“What letter?” I asked.
“Like the one you’ve written Ummi on her sixteenth birthday in the newspaper.” He answered.
“But Ummi is a girl and you are a boy.” I pointed out.
“Why shouldn’t a letter be written to boys but girls?” He insisted.
Well, probably because a boy and a girl are different. And while I deemed it fit to write a heart rendering letter to Ummi on her sixteenth birthday, telling her and advising her about what she may or must face as a woman, I hardly deem it fit to write for a boy as he attains his eighteenth birthday.
So, as he said what about them, boys? Oh I have lots of advises for them, but much later in life, if God grants us long life.
As for now my constant advice to them is to always say their prayers, avoid bad companies, to be obedient and to read hard in order to maintain their good grades.
Well, what about the boys? I hope Ummi’s letter will not look like I am playing favourite. I hope they will understand that a girl is different from a boy, I mean she is vulnerable and therefore needs extra care and protection. For instance a woman could leave her sons alone all day long without worrying, but she couldn’t leave girls alone, not knowing what may befall them.
One woman who was divorced but refused to vacate the husband’s house observed: “A boy can sleep in the street, but a girl needs special care. So I refuse to leave and let my daughters go astray. Now Nafisa has started her period, if the children were all boys I can leave, but certainly not when there are girls among them.”
One man once told me that parents indeed favoured sons against daughters, as he had witnessed. A girl was fighting with her younger brother who was stronger than she was. He was beating her while both parents were present, but they didn’t stop him.”
I would like to believe that the above episode is an exception to the rule. I came from a place where daughters are loved and pampered. But this is not to say that boys are discriminated against.
At any rate, daughters are precious and special and I can never understand why some people don’t want them.
But perhaps I do, probably the little sweet daughters will cease to be so as soon as they start growing up with no prospects unlike sons that the world seems to revolve around.
As for me a girl needs extra love for the simple reason that the world bows to a boy or else how much could a girl take, the burden of her womanhood that vividly tells her she would have been better to be a boy or clearly favouring her brother against her? As in the fighting episode above?
While boys are not left out in the scheme of things, so to say, who bears the brunt of socio-economic hardship more than women?
Who bears children, gets divorced and as if that is not enough, gets separated from her children, the fruits of her womb? Who gets to squat in her brother’s house and tolerate all kinds of rubbish from her brother’s wife since she doesn’t have anything doing and as such doesn’t have a kobo to call her own?
Who becomes a widow with children to look after and so source of income? I can go on and on.
What about boys? Well, what about them? I echo Ahmed’s question.
