STRIVING FOR SUBSTANTIVE EQUALITY “MU MAUZENGEZGANI”: AN ACTIVE INVOLVEMENT OF WOMEN IN THE LOCAL CHURCH
By Father Erick Nyondo
This year, the Church in Africa celebrates the Golden Jubilee of Small Christian Communities (Mauzengezani). The Small Christian Communities (SCCs) are substantively a hub and a focal point of an African Church. They are a symbol and a sign of the African Philosophy, “I am because we are”. They are a reflective testimony of the African way of being and living, that is, a “koinonia lifestyle”.
The African life is relatively and systemically built on the communitarian mentality. Each individual assumes his identity and mission, in every respective society, from his or her community. It is therefore, an individual’s community that defines his essential core, destiny, mission and responsibility.
The SCCs are a culmination and an expressive beacon of the “African communitarian way of living” imbued with Christian values and gospel tenets. The SCCs are an intimation to the public of the ecclesiastical virtue of brotherhood and sisterhood. They are a mode of expressing the “Samaritan Spirit” of a brother being present to a brother or a sister being present to a sister, in both joys and sorrows and in perils and fortunes, in hurdles and hustles of life. Fundamentally, just like in the primitive Pauline Communities, the SCCs are a fount of grace gushing forth from “Broken Lord” (the Eucharist), “the Table that gathers all”.
However, the life of the SCCs buds from an African culture that is largely patriarchal. It is an undeniable fact that most of the African cultures are obsessively and largely patriarchal. The cultural overtone of African cultures is essentially masculine in which a feminine voice is trampled upon and is never accorded recognition and audience.
If ever the feminine voice is recognised, it is very much usual that the same voice is slummed with indignation and resentment. Women are beneath notice. The “female role” in a community of males is less likely recognised and socially empowered with any merit. The merit of a woman’s role is confined to a domestic circumscription and tasks. Beyond the domestic diameter, a woman’s role is futile and intimidated.
The same status quo does thrive within the circumferences of the SCCs. There is a deluge and plethora of evidence that within SCCs the female voice is not recognised in administrative and decision making positions. There are rare occasions in which the decisional actions and voices of women are reckoned with recognition and appreciation. Yet the irony of the same is that most of the SCCs are composed of a relatively large number of women.
As the church celebrates this landmark and groundbreaking golden jubilee of the SCCs, it is precisely essential to reflect more deeply on the means of achieving substantive equality within the spaces of the SCCs. Substantive equality denotes a situation in which women just like men are granted an equal start, that is, equality of opportunity and are socially empowered with an enabling environment to achieve equality of results both at decision level and implementation level.
This sort of equality is not to be thought as some identical treatment of men and women but rather a situation in which the female voice is heeded as impactful just as the males. This requires the reshaping and reversing the “masculine complacency” that maybe the underlying cause of inequality and subordination of the female voice. The masculine prejudice assigned against the realization of females’ decisional contributions and the exclusion from decisional opportunities whittle the women’s remarkable contributions within the welfare of the SCCs.
The incorporation and admission of substantive equality which is concerned with output (for example, equality of results or equality of opportunity) and which is gauged by reference to a state of affairs, that is, the substantive equality of situation, would determine the lengths and breadths of women involvements. Such an equality would secure a subtle recognition of women’s contribution in decision making and implementation of goals.
Thus, women would not be relegated to only operations that are incidental to the affairs of the SCCs but substantially be involved in the decisive affairs for the running of the SCCs. It is now an ardent imperative that women at the SCC level should be empowered and yet more glow with both administrative and managerial powers to manage and decide on the affairs of the SCCs. They need to be assigned with roles and occupy offices (for example Chairpersonship) through which they can render their skills and competences without male-manipulation and dominance.
The ministrations of women in SCCs have not to be thwarted and foiled by men’s domination. Christ our master wills the empowerment of women and did consecrate the female voice as a first Voice of Witness and Profession of the Salvation in the person of Mary Magdalene as she witnessed the Resurrection. This same empowerment of the female voice need to be reflected in the SCCs as the prime community spirited by the redeeming and liberating Blood of the Lamb.
As the church celebrates the golden jubilee of SCCs, it must also set as a cardinal and golden mission to eliminate all forms of approaches that disadvantage the female voice either on preference levels, cultural levels and socialization levels in SCCs. The SCCs must begin to reward merit to each voice as a “redeemed voice” as Paul in his letter’s states, “there are no more Jews or Greeks ….” for the standard and dignity of us all is one, “heirs of the Kingdom”.