16 Days - Day 14: Showtime at KoupelaTenkodoko – or, Husbands
Posted by Ann Jones on December 8th, 2007
 At the village photo exhibition, women photographers (right) confront the notable men of KoupelaTenkodoko (center) outside the chief’s reception hall. Other village women (left) look on. Standing under the tree, Veronique translates as Tanou leads the discussion. Photo: Ann Jones |
| The International Rescue Committee is working with writer, photographer and long-time women’s advocate Ann Jones to give women in war zones an opportunity to document their own lives with digital cameras and make their voices heard.
Ann is blogging from West Africa, posting new photos and stories each day from November 25 to December 10: the “16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence.” You can catch her earlier posts here and sign up to get e-mail alerts about new posts at theIRC.org/join16days. Yamoussoukro, Cote d’Ivoire Two days after the triumph at Zatta, we pack a small delegation of Zatta women into our vehicle to attend the exhibition at KoupelaTenkodoko so the women can meet and talk. Tanou and I have some trepidation. All along we’ve been aware of big cultural differences among the three villages where we work. A sociologist might trace them to disparities in such things as ethnicity, tribal traditions, levels of education and economic advancement, proximity to urban centers, access to mass media, and so on. The differences are bound to show up big time at the next two shows. We gather in KoupelaTenkodoko in front of the chief’s house. The notable men already await us, seated in chairs on the chief’s porch and on the stone steps. Malik the tyrannical translator is in the front row. The women are offered chairs in the yard, facing the men. The other women of the village gather behind them, though they have no chairs. Some sidle on to the porch. The Chief of Tenkodoko himself is not present. He seems to have gone to town, pointedly reclaiming his reception hall for his children—who are inside watching a loud shoot-em-up movie on TV—and leaving this “women’s matter” to be dealt with in the yard by Malik and his pals. The chief of Koupela is absent as well, though he sends word that I may come and take his picture. The balance of power in KoupelaTenkodoko, once tilted briefly in the women’s favor, has tilted back. The men have come to lock it down. When two women present photos of abandoned women, the men laugh. “They must still live,” the photographers say. “The village cannot abandon them too.” Malik says, “If a man abandons a woman, she must have done something wrong.” Case closed. Tanou says, “You are not here to argue. You have been invited to listen and to learn.”
One by one, the women present photos of women doing heavy labor and suggest, again and again, that men could help. The men laugh. Tanou asks how many of them ever help their wives at home. Four men raise their hands. One of them is Malik. It is the women’s turn to laugh. Tanou puts the question to the village women. “Is there any man in this village who is known to help his wife?” A young woman points out a man seated in the top row. “He is a good man,” she says. “Everyone knows it.” Tanou turns to the man. She asks him to tell us, if he will, why he helps his wife and what satisfaction it brings him. The man replies quietly: “I loved my wife when I married her and I love her still. If I love her, I must care for her and help her. It is very simple. It gives me pleasure.” Veronique stumbles over the translation. The man is her husband. He also says, “A woman is not a slave.” It’s something I’ve heard women say again and again. Why this word? It occurs to me that Veronique’s husband means it literally. He says that a woman is not a slave because in fact she is: a slave to work, a slave to sex, a slave to violence. Only the luck of marrying “a good man” relieves a woman from bondage. And there seems to be only one “good man”—Veronique’s husband—in the whole place.
Then it’s the turn of Samandougoulou Assetou. She presents two photos: one of a woman stirring her cooking cauldron over a fire while hungry children press her, holding out their bowls. The other of a woman pounding maize with one hand while holding a child to her breast with the other. They are photos of herself and her children. She set them up, she explains, and had a friend press the button. She took them to make this point: “When a man assigns jobs to his wife, he should assign them one at a time. And he should do some work himself.”
Men laugh, but she shouts them down. She is young and beautiful and utterly determined. Later she tells us that her father forced her, as a teenager, to marry an older man, a man so mean that even her father now urges her to leave him. But she cannot. She has five children. One of them is strapped to her back as she speaks, slicing the air with her arms, silencing the men. The photos she has made and shown are photos of a slave at work. One man in the front row looks away. He is Malik’s friend, Assetou’s husband.
The high drama of confrontation leaves the women exuberant. Who knew they could fight so hard? When the men have gone, the women vow to keep watch over Assetou and protect her from her husband. But Assetou is euphoric with the giddiness of a woman who has nothing left to lose but her life. When the women circle and begin to dance, it is Assetou who whirls and stomps at the center.
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December 8th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Please continue your fine efforts……
If my edress appears with my name for everyone to see….not just me… PLEASE delete them from public view!
ELIZABETH
December 8th, 2007 at 11:29 am
On a previous posting I had said these women had to be careful, their lives were in the balance! Again, I’m wrong…they should band together and go on strike! NO meals prepared for the men, NO men’s clothes washed, and No sex. Yes, I know the outcome will be more beatings, rape, and perhaps death. What other choice do they have?! What a crime that the rest of the world has looked the other way on the horrible abuses of human rights inflicted on these women and their children. Believe me, it is not lost on me that these poor kids will suffer no matter what is done…
December 8th, 2007 at 11:55 am
It is unfortunate that Ms. Jones’s strident feminist politics are so blatant that they color and shape every photograph she and the women under her tutelage present. One example: a woman is working as a man walks by in his nicely pressed clothes; the images are necessarily selective. These societies may indeed have been sickened with an attitude that keeps women as slaves unless love intervenes. But the men are human beings too, and the photographs will never bring enlightenment until they are willing to look for the whole story. Indeed, Ms. Jones may be guilty of engineering some dangerous confrontations and upheavals that will hurt the people she cares about. Real change in culture is a slow process. Helping the women see for themselves (instead of guiding them from “literal” interpretations of their own photos toward the impressions she has drawn herself) and draw their own conclusions and plans of actions might have ultimately been more respectful of them.
December 8th, 2007 at 12:01 pm
Brave Women All. May their messages cause the men to reflect and understand that in the end; the changes the women want and need will cause the community to prosper and grow in many positive ways.
December 8th, 2007 at 12:14 pm
I am overcome with emotion at the tremendous breakthrough in self-empowerment these women have just achieved. These are momentous occasions for them but I know the road after these days will still be long and hard. I implore IRC to not abandon these women in their journey. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Please continue this project and continue to share these women’s stories long after these “sixteen days”.
December 8th, 2007 at 12:16 pm
Wow! What a story! I applaud these women who are standing up and putting the truth out there to be dealt with. I pray it produces much good fruit of needed change.
December 8th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
[...] http://blog.theirc.org/2007/12/08/16-days-day-14-showtime-at-koupelatenkodoko-%e2%80%93-or-husbands/ [...]
December 8th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
I am saddened that a lack of respect and criticism for new beginnings must be amidst us but these women are strong. Survivors are always stronger than they appear.
These women will be able to find resolutions to their problems by working and learning together. Bon chance! 
December 8th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
It is hard for these men to change the way they were raised - basically as slave owners, owning their wives. The women themselves took the photos about their lives as they are. To “pretty” them up so that the men don’t feel so bad would be a disservice to the women suffering under these circumstances and would effect no change. This project is not feminist, it is humanist. That is, it expects each person of either gender to have the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else. One wonders how the men can be happy when their wives are slaves to them.
December 8th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
It gives my heart great joy to see these women unite and stand strong together. United we stand divided we fall!
Yea WOMEN!!!!!!!!!!!! You are Goddesses!
December 8th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
The pictures are heart breaking, once more. Back in 1995, at the Women’s Right Conference in Beijing, China, endless groups of women from almost everywhere in the world told the very same sad story… And I can vividly remember a group of men from northern europe, Norway I believe, explaining how hard it had been for them to understand their own violence and how difficult it had been for them to put an end to it… It could very well be one possible solution today: having men talk to men. Men like Veronica’s husband have to exist somewhere, even in Cote d’Ivoire… Could it be that the time is now ripe for such changes? Men against violence against women… Let’s dream!…
December 8th, 2007 at 9:52 pm
I applaud Ann Jones, the IRC, and all these courageous women who are willing to stand up in unity. Cruelty, slavery, discrimination,any form of abuse–physical, mental, emotional–against one human being is abuse against all mankind. Until we begin to understand this, we cannot begin to “Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself”. Change on this level is huge, but this group has taken an enormous step that the world should know about.
December 8th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
i look forward to reading each epiosde although they make me nervous for the people after the photograper an correspondent leave. from woin ith refugees, i know that the women an the one good husband could be ridiculed or even killed.
thanks for bringing us these stories. i hope that readers will see how much there is to do to alter customs . . . . not that everyone needs to be like us.
December 9th, 2007 at 12:06 am
I am amazed at what these women have accomplished. To take such a stand under their circumstances is beyond courageous. I pray to God their voices continue to be heard and real change can be achieved. Bless all who worked on this project.
December 9th, 2007 at 5:13 am
Since the mid 1800’s when women began fighting for the right to vote, the world has been changing. It is slow, but bit by bit women, and men who listen to the women, are making the world more humane. It is hard to see, sometimes, but it is happening in every culture in the world.
December 9th, 2007 at 10:27 am
This isn’t a “glass ceiling issue”! This is about fundamental human rights…! I see no difference with these women and the women under Taliban rule in Afganistan. The picture of the woman feeding her child AND pounding the maize at the SAME time, speaks volumes…