Towards Najjera I the jam was building up which is a common thing but still it doesn’t usually last as long as it did that evening. On further inquiry when the procession was now eased, we got to learn that a female heavy load truck driver was negotiating the junction connecting Kisaasi, Ntinda and Najjera. It had caused an uprisal among the men and women who were standing by at the time with ululations on fearful faces that she would probably fail and crash the gathering around her. She had the perfect reaction: she popped her head through the window and noddingly smacked to the whole world below her! This is not the first or the last time a woman will be looked down on. Of recent a friend told me that she wonders if the manual for motorbikes comes with a prescription that only men should ride as people still gape and stare in awe when a female/women bike rider passes by them. It’s these small beliefs that have remained ingrained at the back of our minds gearing a whole generation of misogyny and bigotry towards women who are fearless and venturing into the male dominated fields. That is why statements like, she plays like a girl have become persistent, as if she is not meant to play like the girl she is!
A schoolmate was always reminding me that I should invite him over to play whenever I hit the court. A couple of times I invited him but he never came to play. The day he finally came to watch, he couldn’t stop boasting of how he is a better player than me. Dude most prolly plays basketball once or twice a year but his deceitful tongue couldn’t spare him from continuously telling me how I need to improve my game: just to say I am on court 5 out of 7 days a week!
Maybe I am always just wasting time playing. After all I will never make it to the standard of a player “they” want to see in a woman. At the end he even never got to gather his feet to play one on one with me, lol. He must have felt emasculated on seeing a young girl playing hard and better than him at a “men’s sport.”
I came across this tweet:
“ooh, I also used to play in school”, “So are you like Lebron, when do you play? Want to see you dunk”, “I watch the NBA”, apart from basketball …” “Come for one on one”, nio nio ……
I believe most girls in sports have had these lines especially from a man or boy that gets to know that they are into a sport. It is more odd when it’s a fellow woman having such thoughts about the capabilities of another woman. I wonder how the girls in rugby take in questions like, “Wait, you play rugby for real?”. (Duh, like I don’t play rugby for real.)
We can’t continue attaching gender to everything. It’s an activity for crying out loud. This whole gendering of activities has continued to affect women’s/girls confidence to partake of a given activity. Makes me sad when a girl asks if she won’t be laughed at if she decides to learn a sport at a later age. Sports has no age and those that will laugh lack Ubuntu!
Women Ball Too. Women Bike too. Women Drive Too. Women Build Too. Women Lead Too. Women Code Too.
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