“He will drink his own piss one day, if he has not already.

How else does a man

spend the night in the gutters of Isale Eko, reeking of alcohol and used condoms
and aphrodisiacs and urine except that he has drunken and is drunk from his own
urinals?”

The triune company exploded with laughter, like the sound of machine-gun fire,
steady and in rapid bursts, tearing through the moist early morning air of after-
rain and almost warming it by a noticeable margin.

The youngest member of the three, Mama Bobo, a slender woman in her early post-
thirty years bore the hallmarks of a woman in her prime. Her only child, fondly
called Bobo, was straddled to her bosom with an Ankara wrap that was fraying at the
edges and looked like it had seen very many better years.

Her companion who sat to her left and was still taking in the hilarity of the
statement uttered by the third member of their discourse, in guffaws, was a woman
who would never see sixty again. She was as stout as she was broad and round and
was enthusiastically chewing a twig of Pako, an invention of local dentistry,
widely thought to have the dual powers of a toothbrush and a dental floss.

The speaker and third member of the triune however was a dark-skinned woman of
average height and weight. Her eyes were shifty and darted to and fro, like the
pendulum bob of a grandfather clock, as though they were been permanently under the
control of a drunken puppeteer. She wore a white T-shirt with a green collar and an
imprint that read “Goodnight Baba Akoh”, a memorabilia from the grandiose burial
ceremony of her late father; a ceremony that incurred costs still being serviced
more than a year later.

The second member of the company, Mama Agba- an appellation she earned by being the
oldest married woman in the neighborhood stopped laughing for a second, looking
lost in thought and then said,

“Arewa, at least, has a man. A man who drinks his own urine is better than none;
one day, he may assume the cloak of responsibility and amend his ways. A woman
without her man is nothing”

“Not so, Mama Agba”, the visibly enraged Aunty Akoh interjected, smashing a
clenched right first into her cupped left hand as though to lend credence to her
dissent. She had retained the name of her father after marriage and vehemently
proselyted to anyone who cared to listen that the adoption of her husband’s surname
by a newlywed bride was a culture that needed to be outlawed and abolished.

“What is the use of a man like Arewa’s husband, a man who steals his wife’s hard-
earned resources, gambles some, sluts away some and dinks with the most? What is he
but a cancer that must be purged, a gangrenous limb that must be cut off?”

“But a woman needs her head…”, Mama Bobo opined.

“A thousand curses be upon his damned head. I am the head of my life and so should
every woman be. This nonsense, men are the head, must and will end. Who appointed
them head but their selfish patriarchal system? They can be head of their massive
egos but nothing more. It is a nonsensical notion that a man assumes leadership of
his family by virtue of his gender. My husband, Akin, knows this very well.”

Mama Agba suppressed the bubbling soup of laughter that rose in her chest at the
mention of Aunty Akoh's husband, Akin. Everyone apart from his wife and daughter
called him Baba Philo and poked fun at him, behind his back, for his perceived
unmanly tendencies. While the men in the community spent their weekends at Arewa's
beer parlour, wetting their lozenges with beer and peppery Nkwobi, he slaved away
in his wife's kitchen. Whenever
and football, they would lament
came from marrying a woman from
superstitious man insisted that
amorous relationship with Aunty
influence over her husband; how
steaming bowls of peppersoup to
for salt?
the men's conversation drifted away from politics
that he was under Aunty Akoh's spell. No good ever
another tribe, they said. One particularly
Egbeji, the notorious witchdoctor, was in an
Akoh in exchange for granting her a supernatural
else could one explain a man ignoring Arewa's
help his wife hold her pot cover while she tasted

Mama Bobo adjusted her wrap and gently positioned the head of her child to reach
her bosom. The young lad needed no encouragement, greedily snapping at his meal
while his mother grimaced at the sensation of pleasurable pain that shot through
her chest to her upper arm. When the boy had temporarily had his fill and
contentedly burped, his mother felt relieved enough to rejoin the conversation.

"Every institution has its head and for marriage, I believe that power lies in the
manliness of the husband. There are limits to what a woman can do. I shudder to
think of what will become of my delicate hands the day I begin to till Baba Bobo's
farm."

"Baba Bobo does not till the ground with his man parts, young woman!" Aunty Akoh
replied. "Manual labour will not kill you."

"But it surely will shock you", Mama Agba replied, eliciting raucous laughter from
herself and Mama Bobo who had not taken kindly to Aunty Akoh referencing her
husband's manhood. The joke, of course, was in an ill-fated event that occurred
during Baba Akoh's famed burial ceremony. Aunty Akoh had been checking a fault in
the electrical power circuit system while her husband assisted the women in the
kitchen when she unknowingly held on to the naked end of a copper wire and was
nearly electrocuted.

"I got shocked and learnt, Mama. I learnt just like my Philo is learning in the
University. She is learning so she can become a woman who works; a woman who does
not rely on her husband to buy toothpaste or mow the lawn, a woman whose husband
regards her a human being and not a mere appendage or help. My Philo will not be a
glorified cook, sex toy and a baby-making machine."

Mama Bobo sniggered. It was common knowledge that Philo was as terrible a cook as
she was a student.

"Aunty Akoh, no one wants to marry a liability in these times. A wife who works
very hard and leaves her home neglected is as much a liability to her husband as
one who does not work at all", Mama Agba opined.

"There are duties assigned to each gender by the Almighty. Bobo cannot suckle his
father's scrotum. He would not be here if he had lay in his father's belly here for
nine months. Men are built to be stronger, more durable and hence, fit for more
physical activity. Women are more aesthetically pleasing to the eye and are
delicately designed for the tasks that involve intricacy and careful application:
cooking, washing, beautifying and birth. Any attempt to disturb this ordered system
is ultimately laughable and will end up in a spectacular failure"

"The world has changed, Mama! The sociocultural mishap that gender roles are have
long been discarded"

"Yet, the woman cooks and the husband provides", Mama Bobo intervened.

"Does Arewa's husband provide for her? When the woman does the duties of man and
wife, how in that setting can the man be considered head? What is the use of his
headship and durability when he cannot even satisfy her martial rights because
alcohol has shriveled up his manhood? What is the use of his strength when he only
demonstrates it by pummeling her whenever she challenges him to produce the
proceeds from her Nkwobi sales that he constantly steals?"

"You make a good point, Aunty Akoh", Mama Agba said. "But Arewa's husband is an
anomaly. An unfortunate expression of the evolution of men."

"Yet, men like him abound and will contine to unless we jettison this biased and
backward patriarchal cultural values and embrace the egalitarianism that the world
is tending to. A world where boys and men are taught to know that headship comes
from the assumption of responsibility and not the size and type of their genitals;
a world, Mama Agba, where Baba Agba can comfortably hold his own in the kitchen and
prepare you a steaming hot pot of Egusi soup."

"May I not live to witness the day when my husband takes over my kitchen!", Mama
Agba shot at Aunty Akoh, looking scandalized.

"So, that is what this is then: an Egusi soup pot revolution? An Effirin soup bowl
movement, sweeping our men from the farms and the workshops to our kitchens?"

"Yes! This is an Egusi soup pot revolution, and some. It will drive our men to the
kitchens. It will also drive our women to the offices and workshops and piers and
then, it will strike a balance. It will offer equal opportunities and privileges to
men and women and to boys and girls to be either chefs or engineers, to aspire to
be a beautician or the President. Philo calls it Feminism."

Mama Agba shrugged. The thought of Baba Agba cooking her meals was harrowing, the
old man could not even be trusted to heat up a kettle of water.

Mama Bobo, however, silently agreed. There was a new Onidiri in town and he was a
young man, fresh from the University and perhaps a proponent of this "Feminism".
Across her bosom, Bobo sniffled and stirred uncomfortably: a sign that he was
growing impatient in his anticipation for another meal. As she adjusted her wrapper
to prop the boy's head as he gropped at her bosom, she grimaced in anticipation of
a stinging sensation she had grown to be accustomed to. Some roles, she thought,
would never change.