Chanting Warrior … Dear Honourable Doreen

It goes without saying that your recent views about polygamy were embarrassing and backward. There is a need for you to critically reflect on your commentary for progress’ sake. For a Minister of Gender and Child Welfare, you ought to know better.

You are part of a country and a bigger world where issues of gender-based violence have been studied and discussed thoroughly. You missed the point. You are not addressing the root of the issue.

For a country that is considered progressive when it comes to pushing for the 50/50 representation in Parliament for example, your views are a contradiction to this progress. Your views raise questions about the kind of women we have in Parliament and their commitment to the empowerment of other women.

Yourself being one of these women and being on the gender portfolio, you are expected to be on the forefront of this movement by offering informed and effective solutions to GBV. We expect you to engage with alternative interventions that truly empower women and their societies.

It is clear that your suggestion for women to consider polygamy as a solution to GBV is informed by your cultural and religious background. Nothing wrong with that, but you need to challenge yourself beyond comforting yet dangerous cultural and religious borders.

You must realise that many religious spaces and some cultural practices have been on the forefront of reinforcing norms and stereotypes that harm and disadvantage women in our communities. What do you have to say about polyandry? Is there place for it in a patriarchal set-up?

This particular performance of yours was symbolic and revealing. It symbolised the complexity and crisis of GBV and how we keep failing to speak directly to the problem of patriarchy.

Your performance symbolised a kind of denial of the everyday injustices that women experience in the names of culture and religion.

More so, your comments were symbols of our collective ignorance to the realities of rape culture as well as every other gender and cultural form of violence.

I would like to urge you to think deeper about it all. This notion of pleasing men and working things out to make them less jealous is problematic. How many more innocent women and children must be dehumanised for you to realise that we are actually at war with each other?

Honourable Doreen, this is a call for you to honour all women that become victims of rape and those who never survive passion killing. Rather talk more about how tough it really is to address this issue by going back to its root cause. Talk about male privilege and how power dynamics reproduce and reinforce the existing inequalities.

Jacques Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja is a theatre maker, performer and educator. Follow him on Twitter

@ChantingWarrior.