My Father Is A Woman
By: Tony Okafor

A place where I taught as a young TC2 teacher in the 1980s( name withheld), one of my schoolpupils, a boy, once wrote: "My father is a woman". Hmmmm! I looked at the sentence a second time. On a second thought, I marked the sentence GOOD/CORRECT because the instruction was "MAKE SENTENCES with the following words...which included WOMAN, without more. Senior teachers in the school, mostly female teachers, attacked me for marking the sentence GOOD. They even went further to complain to the headmaster( Igbonised "headmaista", while other male teachers were called MAISTA. All female teachers, particularly spinsters, were called MISS), So, the teachers jointly and severally condemned my action. I was a little stubborn then, I didn't bother myself about their vilification. My objective then was to save a little cash and go to Alvan, a senior college for teacher training in Owerri. In those days, it was like a routine that after TTC( higher elementary), the next port of call must be Alvan. That can be a story for another day.

So, for me, what I marked was the philosophy of the sentence. Besides, the sentence was grammatically correct. Above all, from my personal observation, women paid virtually every family bill in the area. In fact, if you asked a child in that community, ONYE MU GI?, s/he would call the name of the mother not the father. In the evening, as from 4pm, COME AND SEE WHERE THEIR MEN DEY DRINK TOMBO(raffia wine) in cohort groups,in thatch shops around their Central market, called ORIE. They would discuss all manner of topics, including concubine affairs. They called the drink MGBAGBU IJIJI( something like the suffocator of houseflies).At about 7pm to 8pm, ,they would stagger home to meet their dinner respectfully placed at the best corner of the sitting room by their wives, often covered with net-like wool table cloths.