by Liz Plank
When Edgar turned to me with his big straw hat and canary-yellow polo shirt to ask me what I was doing here, I wasn’t sure how to answer. My producing partner, Ashley, was there as a volunteer filmmaker to shoot and edit promotional videos for The Girl Impact, a nonprofit organization located in Cape Town, Livingstone and Kilimanjaro. The nonprofit was born out of African Impact, one of the most well-regarded and trusted volunteering organizations in the world, to address the specific need for gender equality programs. The Girl Impact creates partnerships between local grassroots organizations and volunteers to help communities who are most in need. A few weeks before leaving, Ashley asked me if I wanted to come with her, using the exact same tone as someone offering you an extra ticket to go to a Knicks game. I was right at the part of writing this book where I felt like I knew less about men than when I started. So I decided to go on the longest flight you can take from New York and see if avoiding all my problems could help me resolve them. Three flights, thirty-six hours and way too much Ambien later, I finally arrived in Livingstone, a large town in southwestern Zambia. Jet-lagged, puffy and hungry, I had no idea I was about to get to know some of the coolest men I’d ever get the chance to meet.
Like every other country in Sub-Saharan Africa, Zambia has a dark colonial history that has had lasting impacts. Zambia’s encounter with European imperialists began with the Portuguese in the seventeenth century. That’s before a British missionary named David Livingstone arrived in 1855 and in the most British colonialist kind of way named the city after himself. The city’s economy was powered by a strong influx of tourism because it contained Victoria Falls, one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World. Zambia also has the largest man-made lake by volume in the world, Lake Kariba. It’s so vast and wide that it’s known for tricking tourists into thinking they are staring at the ocean.
Zambia is a rich and vibrant country, but for many of its people life can be a challenge. It ranks 125th out of 189 countries in gender equality. HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death for adults aged 15 to 59. Zambia has one of the highest rates of child marriage in the world—one-third of girls are married before they turn 18. More than half the population lives in poverty. And almost half of women have been victims of violence.
Just like the United States, Zambia struggles with toxic expressions of masculinity, and as in many other countries with a traumatizing history of European invasion and rule, this is largely a product of colonialism. The British didn’t just rename everything after white people; they also imposed an entire new social order that fundamentally transformed relationships between women and men. Colonial forces upended women’s roles in their respective tribes and unilaterally pushed them into submissive and dependent roles inside the home, using churches and mining companies to promote the model for the “good housewife.” The Western concept of a male breadwinner and a female housewife became a symbol of prestige, a marker of the coveted membership in the African elite. Zambian women were completely excluded from paid employment even in what white imperialists considered female jobs such as domestic servants, because they believed black women were too promiscuous to work in the white man’s home. Like any effective institutionalized system of oppression, it was internalized and perpetuated through norms and interpersonal relationships. Since the superior familial model became one where the man was the breadwinner, some Zambian men came to resist their own wife’s employment because it became associated with a man’s failure to provide for his family. These new imposed economic gender role systems were all-encompassing. The overall attitudes toward women shifted and they became excluded from decision-making and from political involvement. Laws were written without them.
Although every tribe was impacted by colonialism differently, one of the harshest and lasting consequences is the exclusion of women from landowning rights. While women perform most of the agricultural labor on Zambia’s land and produce most of the food that’s used to feed its children (as is the case in most of Sub-Saharan Africa), the vast majority of land is owned by men and passed on to men. Of course, landowning rights are complex and the plurality of tribes doesn’t make it a simple black-or-white issue, but what’s clear is that colonialism certainly didn’t empower women. The most lasting and pernicious legacy of colonialism for all genders was extreme poverty, which helps cement and preserve structures of gender inequality. For instance, given that six out of ten people in Zambia live under the poverty line, for many families getting a payment for someone to marry their daughter is not just custom; it becomes a source of income. Gender inequality becomes hard to solve when it’s both a product and a consequence of extreme poverty.
Given this colonial history, I felt conflicted traveling to Zambia, even as a researcher. While earning my undergraduate degree in international development, I got a master class in why white people have a very long and well-documented history of being terrible.
When white European colonizers weren’t creating borders out of thin air, slaughtering indigenous populations and stripping the African continent of all its most valuable resources, they were practicing modern-day colonialism through predatory loans, treaties and terrible trade agreements. I finished college being so sickened that I chose to leave the field entirely and pursue a master’s in gender studies, because it felt like my people had already done so much damage that even well-intentioned involvement would always end up doing more harm than good. After all, Zambia’s social, political and economic inequalities, particularly those between men and women, had been engineered by its colonial powers. Patriarchy wasn’t born in Zambia; it had been imported—you know, along with smallpox, plague, gonorrhea, syphilis and all the other deadly diseases brought along by the colonizers.
But after doing my due diligence on The Girl Impact and learning about their commitment to training and employing locals and creating independent sustainable programs that wouldn’t rely on volunteers, I felt like going on this trip could be the best way to put my development degree to work: conduct my research respectfully and share some of my insights with the organization.
One afternoon, I decided to take a break from conducting interviews with locals to offer up one of my most valuable talents and taught an aerobics class for a group of women from the Girl Impact program who had requested it. When the organizers heard I had a knack for aerobics, they asked me to give a class because the women had been requesting one for weeks. I was delighted they were familiar with Shania Twain’s greatest hits and so blown away by their dance moves that I didn’t even really end up leading the class—they did. Afterwards, we ate my new favorite postworkout snack, off-brand Cheetos with orange soda, and talked a bit about womanhood and naturally the conversation inadvertently pivoted to men. It’s worth noting that because these women had self-selected into the Girl Impact program, they were certainly more cognizant of or at least open to discussing matters relating to gender. Out of the six women who came, half of them had been abandoned by their husbands. One man told his wife he was going to go out and find a job. He never came back. She was forced to raise their children on her own. No partner. No income. No assistance. She had not received any education as a young girl, so she had no job to fall back on to make ends meet. Priscah, a strong-willed, energetic and young entrepreneur, told us about going into a deep state of depression after her husband disappeared, leaving her alone with their three boys. She said she stopped hoping for him to come back two years after he left. When I asked her if she would take him back if he suddenly reappeared, she looked out into the distance and gave it a thought. She then looked back at me, warm tears rolling down her cheeks, and shook her head no.
I thought about the unforgiving cruelty of the man you need the most also being the person who betrayed you the most. I fought back tears listening to these women’s stories, angry at these men I would never meet but knew I would hate forever. I’d asked myself what was wrong with men before, but I found myself more desperate for an answer than ever. I knew many women back home who had suffe
red similar hardships, had been abandoned by cowards, but watching these women have to do so much with so little was a different kind of viciousness. It felt like these women had been left to die. They possessed a kind of superhuman resilience that even I couldn’t fully grasp the power of. When I broached the topic of domestic violence, I could see a stark generational divide. Although the young women in the group condemned domestic violence and said it was never acceptable, the older women looked away or remained silent. And I get it, from their perspective: Who was I to tell them what was right or wrong? I’m not married. I don’t know their life. I myself stayed for months in an abusive relationship. The web of abuse is complicated. You can understand the problem, be an expert in the problem and still become another statistic that you read about.
The next day I was asked to co-lead a gender equality workshop for a group of young boys with one of the local program coordinators, Audrey. Although speaking with these incredible women the day before had been eye-opening, the boys were the reason I had really come all this way. The people who ran the Girl Impact program had realized early on that you can’t educate a girl without educating a boy, so they had recently developed an arm of the organization to focus on targeting boys in the community. It was new, but it was an ambitious program aimed at offering different outlets for boys and encouraging them to use their influence in their communities to uplift girls. I agreed with this approach. You can “empower” girls all you want, but if no one is speaking to the boys and men about gender equality, too, the work can be fruitless or even counterproductive. I thought about microfinance programs, a kind of development program that became popular in the early 2000s that I had studied in school. It became one of the most respected and highly revered models for development. The first of its kind was called Grameen Bank and it was founded by the pioneer for the program, Professor Muhammad Yunus. He won a Nobel Peace Prize for it in 2006. The concept was simple: loan people in struggling economies small amounts of money so that they can develop their own sustainable businesses. Many of the loans happened to go to women because they often didn’t have access to loans in the first place, and they were also the most likely to pay loans back on time. Although microfinancing became a very popular grassroots development tactic that made real differences in increasing women’s economic opportunities and their control over resources, researchers also noticed that in areas where many women were receiving microloans, there also tended to be spikes in men’s violence against women. While these programs were effective at helping women challenge what it means to be a woman, they weren’t properly addressing the obvious side effect of how that would challenge what it means to be a man, too. Similar to the way that American men who aren’t the primary breadwinners are more likely to engage in domestic violence as I discussed earlier in this book, “manhood-restoring activities” aren’t unique to one country or one part of the world. In fact, how common they are and how severe the consequences can be should give us enough of a reason to focus resources and energy to try to address it. Sure, women were being “empowered” both psychologically and economically through microloan programs, but without the proper education of their husbands, that newfound freedom had become a literal threat to them. The solution is not to keep women oppressed so it doesn’t threaten men; it’s to clear women’s barriers to success while working on men’s ability to understand how female empowerment benefits society (and them!) as a whole. In many communities, freeing women from gendered constraints might be as important as freeing men from them, too. I still remember learning about targeting men in policy and development work while earning my master’s degree. For one assignment, I recall being tasked with arguing about whether gender equality programs should invest resources in men, too. I couldn’t believe this was even up for debate. The answer felt self-evident. If we are changing the roles and responsibilities of women, it is crucial to plan for how this changes those for men. Perhaps the fact that we were even asking this question was the reason we were still light-years behind the goals industrialized countries had set for programs aimed to aid women economically, politically and socially in developing countries. Whether it’s in Zambia or anywhere else, when our approach to gender equality is exclusively focused on women, we cannot effectively solve anyone’s problems.
As we drove through the winding rugged roads leading us to the flag football field where we would be doing the workshop with the boys, I feared no one would show up. “It just rained, so the boys might not be able to cross the river,” one of the program organizers said, staring outside, skeptical. What if I came all this way just to find out that the boys weren’t interested?
Since the program was still at its inception and only a few boys had shown up in the first few weeks, I went in with zero expectations, but I ended up being pleasantly bowled over. Only one boy showed up but we recruited three others who had come to the field to play football. “Who needs football when you have gender equality workshops?” said no 8-year-old boy ever. Although they were reluctant and a bit silent at first, within a few minutes into our conversation about gender, I was fascinated by what the boys were teaching me. They had never been to America and didn’t have phones or televisions at home. They lived halfway across the world, yet they had all been taught a version of the same myths that boys have been taught in North America. They all had heard a version of “boys don’t cook,” “boys don’t sweep” (clean). These boys were barely 7 or 8 years old, and yet they were already fluent in the male code they knew they were expected to follow and obey. I was halfway across the world and yet I was hearing the same gender stereotypes that I had heard from the mouths of the boys in North America. Boys don’t wear makeup; boys don’t wear leggings; boys do the work; women do the cooking.
What was the point of this? Why did we teach this to boys?
Audrey and I had a set of activities planned, and the first one was role-playing. Inspired by the Always commercial that reclaimed the expression “run [or hit or throw] like a girl” from something that’s demeaning to something that’s empowering, we had the boys perform different actions like “run like a girl” or “throw like a girl” to see how they would react to that language. They acted out every action exactly the way American boys would do it: representing femininity as both inferior and humiliating. When we asked them to explain their choices for the behaviors that they reenacted, we could see the gendered myths they had dutifully absorbed. When I asked them how they acted out “talk like a girl” they said, “The voice for a girl is small and the voice for a boy is big.” They also believed “men have more energy than girls.” But the most revealing part of the activity came when we asked them to “play football like a girl,” and that was the only time there was no discernable difference between those actions and the way they had acted out “play football like a boy.” Although it could be due to a number of factors, I couldn’t help but notice that right next to our field, a girls’ flag football league organized by The Girl Impact just happened to be practicing. Interestingly, when the boys were instructed to play football like a girl there was no difference between those actions and the way they acted out a boy playing football. Although I couldn’t assign any correlation or causation to it, it made me marvel at how strongly our environments can dictate our gendered realities and truths. Because the girls were casually kicking ass right next to us, it wasn’t just unfair to depict them as lesser; it was inaccurate. It wasn’t lost on me that I was working with a small sample size of only four boys, but it still struck me to see all of them not even blink twice on this particular activity. It wasn’t scientific, but it sure was fascinating.
Shocked the boys were still listening to me, I kept moving on with another exercise, an interactive one about masculinity, using a drawing of a man with bubbles that associated to his head, his mouth and his heart. I pointed to his head and asked them, “What does a man think about?” Their answers ranged from “trying new things” to “stealing,” “driving” and of course, the inevitable “wom
en.” When I pointed to the man’s mouth and asked, “What does a man say?” the first thing one of the boys said was, “Have too much pride,” which was followed up with, “They put down their friends.” When I asked them what the voice of a man sounds like, they said, “Too big.” I was genuinely surprised so much of what they brought up felt like negative behavior. It was clear that these boys had already developed a critical perspective on the way that men acted around them. It was revealing that none of the things they said a man says they viewed as particularly positive. Since I was working through an interpreter for large portions of the exercise, I also don’t think they ever really understood what answers were expected of them, which made their assessment even more honest and raw.
Another notable moment was when I pointed to the man’s heart and I asked them what a man feels and their first answer was “sad.” Although they had all repeated to me that boys aren’t supposed to cry, the very first emotion they could think of was the one they had been instructed to avoid. Perhaps the mere act of talking about emotions helped them tap into them. When I asked for an example of when a man feels sad, the boys said “When a man admires a woman and proposes to her, but she says no.” Hearing them speak openly about men feeling sadness when being rejected gave me hope.
