In his article on the Simon’s Rock newspaper, the Afghan student Abdul Samad Sadri wrote: ‘It is a mistake to go back to Kabul’. For those who don’t know, Kabul is the capital city of Afghanistan with approximately a population of four million people. As a person with love and hope for the world and especially for the country (Ghana) that gave me life, I found it very hard to understand why an Afghan would say such a thing about his own country? My question was answered after watching and reading the story of Malalai Joya; the strong, vibrant and outspoken Afghan who took the risk of exposing the warlords and speaking up on behalf of other women in Afghanistan.
In my opinion, Afghanistan is being faced with three major challenges: Poverty, the growth of drug addiction/opium cultivation and lack of education. As a child who was raised by a great yet struggling woman who sometimes could barely feed herself and her boy, I can understand what poverty feels like. What blows my mind is the fact that some families in Afghanistan agree for their children to marry rich but old and cruel warlords in exchange for money or food that could barely sustain them for three weeks. For example, one of the warlords in Malalai Jola was older than the grandfather of the young teenager he seeks to marry.An average person in Afghanistan makes less than $2,000, but here we are dealing with families who would never see this amount of money perhaps in their life time. Poverty has crippled families, rendering them dependent on dictators and warlords who would stop at nothing to killing their own people in the name of Islam.
The second challenge is the overuse of drugs by most men in the country. Opium has become like a candy for many people in Afghanistan. But unfortunately, as the saying goes, “When two lions fight, it is the ground that suffers”. The women are mostly the victims of these men who constantly abuse these drugs. Some men beat their wives and children for no other reason other than the fact that they are completely out of their minds. Malalai Jola tried to save a marriage that was breaking down because the husband constantly beats his wife and children. As a matter of fact, the last time they got into a fight, he hit his wife with a metallic rod, bruising all over her body.
And the third challenge, like I mentioned, is the lack of good education. “Good education” because education can be obtained in a variety of ways. But what we have in Afghanistan is ideology, not necessarily a good education. It is the idea that nature or God demands that the people, especially women and the poor or less powerful, should submit completely to the dictates of men and the warlords. Children are misinformed, brainwashed and deceived to violently serve the greedy warlords in the name of religion.
These are some of the challenges Malalai Jola is confronted with in her country, and like any other person, man or woman, who believes in the promise of freedom, justice and equality, she rose up to the challenge and spoke for the women but also men who have been victimized by the activities of the warlords. She did what was supposed to be done by educating young women, mediating disputes between husbands and wives and even running for a political office in order to enable her do more in restoring freedom, justice and equality for all citizens of Afghanistan. As a woman whose own life was endangered because of what she stood for and also as a woman who have witnessed others, wives and children, severely brutalized by their husbands and the warlords, I can understand her pain, anger and aggression. She’s not fighting for the cause of freedom and equality just because she is able to fit herself in other people’s shoes, but because of her lived experienced as a daughter, woman and as a friend to many others who have been denied freedom, justice and equality. This could be the reason behind her aggressive campaign. But I also believe, like the man who took us to the mountain top that, “Violent movement brings no permanent peace, it solves no social problem but merely creates new and complicated ones.” Jola must admit the hard truth that a permanent change cannot be created overnight. It took a long time to create the unjust system she wants to change; likewise it will take a long time to eradicate it and replace it with a democracy. She is fighting a fight that can never be won by her alone. She cannot walk alone, she needs the cooperation of other men as well. This is not to say Jola should try to compromise with the men in parliament on all issues. What is suggested here is that she should “walk slowly but carry a big stick” and she would go far. We saw this in the Suffrage Movement of the early 1900s and with Martin Luther king’s Civil Right movement in the 1960s. These are movements that believed in the shared destiny of both men and women, black and white. But Jola took it a bit too far to the extent of insulting the entire members of parliament because they disagreed with the truth. If you have your finger in the mouth of someone, you don’t slap them, or they would bite you. Jola’s approach in my opinion has failed to yielded the needed result. Now, I know that there are some who would argue that what she did was effective enough since she created some awareness. Well first I respect and admire her effort, but a long and peaceful change would never come from elsewhere other than from the people of Afghanistan themselves, and Jola has missed an opportunity to bring parliamentarians together in order to fight for democracy in Afghanistan. Like any other reformer, she would meet some challenges on the road, but it is the end that would justify the means.
