I was raised in a patriarchy. My father was the dominant figure and had the belief that men should stay men. And most Africans like him did not see the kitchen as a place for men. So when we hear the sound of his engine, my mum will quickly ask me and my brother to take our leave, ‘your papa is around’. We hop off like frightened squirrels.
I never had the joy and fun of cooking.
Being an ‘African man’ has the weight of self-saturation. You often don’t see and feel life outside the rigid frame of being served and made to feel like the king. Me first! The male ego is also as heavy as the king’s stool.
The weight of that alone leaves you sinking, leaves you feeling too important about yourself and you hardly get the fresh air and recreation in finding joy in little things and coming out of yourself to serve others. For 5 years now I have felt unburdened to discover a new life for myself in these 10 things:
1. Cooking and washing up makes you more loving and relaxes your nerves. It’s actually a very romantic language to your spouse and shows that you care.
2. Cooking and serving up nice meals to visitors gives you fresh breathe of fulfilment than when you bought the food from a vendor.
3. Doing chores at home makes you a supreme role-model to your children and the entire household. It’s a symbolic language of responsibility and shows a humble heart.
4. To choose a cause that is not directly beneficial to you, where you can serve others directly like in the church improves both your mental health and also your sense of purpose.
5. Great men serve and devoted to the cause of those who couldn’t help themselves.
6. Learning to make different meals is actually a recreational habit that saves you the pounding and hacking of the ‘masculine’ heavy-duty drudgery of politics, power, football and ego of social dominance.
7. When you make a nice meal and after you have tasted it, you sure would smile, that alone is a tonic to enduring youth.
8. You become less critical of other people’s cooking when you make a mess of your first trials and you appreciate women the more who despite their heavy undertakings choose to cook the meals.
9. Cooking is a creative thing, the more you cook the better and boldly creative you become.
10. Africa is great and our fathers were great. To be better is to find other meanings to the world around us, while keeping the best of things we learnt from our fathers. That to me is greatness.
