In the days of old, women are never to be found where there is a gathering of men, or it would be termed as an abomination. If there was an urgent meeting in the whole village, it requires the attention of the king, his advisers and the chief elders, but a woman never partakes in it. Women were never allowed to make laws for the whole community. Women were considered to be pure weak vessels. They were taken as properties to be acquired, they were purely home-keepers, cooks, “bed-warmers” and, most of all to assert womanhood, they were the manufacturers of babies. Any woman who was barren was a disgrace to the community. The opinion of a woman was never sought for.

Certain customs in the past never favoured the woman. The woman was unimportant. In the northern part of most countries, “women in purdah” is a well-known Muslim culture. I very much doubt it if such a thing is stipulated in the Qur’an. Women in purdah means women kept indoors, in some form of abyss, away from the light of day. The only person to mate with them is their husband. Any other man found in this “oasis” is to be put to death. It is known for a fact that a man is allowed to marry up to four wives, and not more. But this Muslim culture easily became adulterated due to the secretly and insatiably sexual desires of most Muslim men. Women in purdah actually mean a harem, a collection of women kept together like cattle. This culture, unfortunately, still exists till date despite the wind of change. During the census enumeration exercise, it is very impossible to get access to these women in order to get them counted. If ever one of these women is to step outside, her entire body parts are kept out of sight from the outside world.

The covering of the face of Muslim women with a black veil is currently on debate in the international community. It was even discovered that such a thing is not even stipulated in the Qur’an.

An arranged marriage is also a deep-rooted tradition. It works for some people, but generally speaking, it never works for that highly enlightened woman or man for that matter. With the wind of change blowing in, with the wave of evolution coming in, the era of arranged marriages is outdated and archaic. But, as I’ve said earlier, this tradition is deep-rooted and very much existent in some corners of India and Japan and perhaps other Asian countries. There are several staunch traditionalists who would never subject themselves to the wind of change.

Female circumcision is one tradition that several activists and NGOs are trying as hard as possible to exterminate forever. But that fight cannot be easily won. This barbaric culture is known to be practised mainly in African countries, and several innocent bloods have been spilled due to this tradition. In Kenya, a girl is meant to be circumcised to assert her womanhood. If she dies in the process, she was never a true woman.

In Pakistan, the culture of vani is still being practised. Vani is the tradition of handing over women to resolve disputes. A village council in Sultanwala, a village in Pakistan, decreed that five women be kidnapped, raped or killed for refusing to honour childhood marriages. From time immemorial, marriages are arranged for baby girls to be used as part of compensation agreements between families. This is an order from the village council there. In this case, the women that were married off in absentia are already modern-minded and educated. They were meant to be married off to illiterate sons of their family’s enemies. But the fathers of these women have refused to grant the village council’s request. In a similar vein, a three-year-old girl near Multan, another village in Pakistan, was engaged to be married to a sixty-year-old man. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan called on the president of Pakistan to enforce a ban on vani.

There was an incident that caught the attention of the international community of a Pakistani woman called Mukhtar Mai. Another village council gave a decree that this woman be gang-raped for an alleged offence her brother committed.

According to the Trokosi custom practised within the Ewe culture in Ghana, a family must offer up a virgin daughter to a fetish priest as a way of appeasing the gods for a relative’s transgression. The girl must spend her life as a “wife of the gods.” Currently, there are activists who are fighting to put an end to this practice.

The recent news I heard over the radio in the BBC is that men in South Africa living with the dreaded virus HIV believe that by having sex with virgins, they would be rid of the disease. Unfortunately, they have promoted and encouraged the spread of AIDS and sexual immorality.

In some Igbo communities, it is believed that when the first son of a family dies, the wife of that man is to have her hair shaven and made to drink the water used in washing the dead man’s body to show that she was not the architect of his death. This dehumanising cultural practice is fading away fast courtesy to evolution, but not yet entirely eradicated. Here is a story of a king of a particular village. This king brought peace and prosperity to that village. The people of the village were so happy that they gave him all their support, alongside seven beautiful maidens. When the cruel fangs of death pierced that king, the villagers felt that the best way to honour such a good king was to have those seven maidens die with him. So they beheaded the maidens and kept their heads inside the dead king’s casket. Because of this act, the whole village was besieged with war, famine, hardship, bad luck and disease. Naturally, the good king’s spirit revolted against the murder of the maidens.

A woman could be defined as “woe” to man or could be defined as a “necessary evil”, but the only human being possessed with such an innermost, unique power to make things happen, even from infancy, is the woman. Only God has that power to tame the glory of the female power, not man. There are many more traditions and customs meted out against the womenfolk, untold and unknown and unimaginable. It would help in a tremendous way if these abominable practices are exposed to all for solutions to be fermented and expressly implemented. A woman is a human being. Her rights must be recognised and respected at all times.

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