‘Kings and queens are from nature’s special place’, our proud Ewes inscribed this truism in the sands of time.
I have met a few special Ewes in my life, and very brilliant ones, too.
I don’t know whether Amelia Amemate is royalty, but I am certain she is a phenomenal lady from a special place.
She writes beautifully and does a masterful job with the Oxford comma.
And if you were wondering what the Oxford comma looks like, visit any of Amelia’s facebook posts, her journal articles, and newspaper publications.
The second comma after ‘journal articles’ is an Oxford comma.
Amelia is yet to do her Viva, so she might not take kindly to my sweet mischief in addressing her as Dr. Well, that might well be my first chat-up line.
Surrender or shrink
Am I attracted to Amelia? I have convinced myself that we have a lot in common after bumping into her on what she calls the Blue app (facebook).
She is a sapiosexual who loves books.
That makes her a bibliophile. She loves television and the theatre, and has a BAFTA to show for her creativity.
We also share a similar travelling profile; we have sojourned in North America, the UK, and I believe, other places in Europe.
We are both Ewes. Well, that is another chat-up line. I am actually Fante, but on a good day, I am as Ewe as the Mawulis come.
Our only difference is Amelia’s obsession with the ‘perfect dentition’; I am fine with any clean set of teeth.
At 43, Amelia doesn’t seem ready for a man, and considers marriage a desperate adventure by 25-year old girls who have not built much for themselves.
Her reasons betray a confounding cocktail of overweening confidence, feminism, and grit.
As a high-flying academic who has built a heavy profile of female role models, including Joyce Bawa Mogtari, Amelia sees marriage as a social drama staged to compel women to submit to men, and in the process, lose themselves. She cannot surrender her voice and shrink into obedience.
Marriage, she posits, should be “an equal partnership built on love, understanding and mutual respect”.
What are Amelia’s real fears? To be fair, I have not read anywhere that Amelia is a feminist, even though she speaks very much like one–with a pepperdem orientation.
She writes: “By the time a woman reaches 40, she is a treasure trove of wisdom, experience, and resilience.
She has lived, learned, and built a life she can be proud of.
If a man fits into that life, wonderful. If not, she remains whole.”
Feminism and sexy men
Amelia my darling, I don’t know much about women, but I know how a man’s brain works: At 40, a man doesn’t quite feel whole without a woman.
When you read scandals about powerful men risking their office and reputation for sex with 22 year-old university girls, it is a natural admission of how incomplete men are without a woman.
Men carry the curse of working unthinkable hours to achieve everything their mother would admire, then they work themselves backwards by giving it all away to another woman.
Women achievers at 40 also feel the need for a man. They need a man to make a baby. What kind of man? This is where Amelia seems to have problems.
The species of men in this century do not fit into Amelia’s schedule, and she doesn’t seem ready to make any compromises.
Amelia is not alone. Actress Angelina Jolie shares her fears.
Recently, the celebrated Hollywood filmmaker warned: “Who you marry is more important than when you marry”.
At 49, and having married three times, she doesn’t need to worry about time, especially when she has six children.
At every stage of Jolie’s life, a man fitted in.
She may not be as forthright as Candace Owens, another influential American whose harsh feminist views in the past endeared her to many independent single women. Today, she renounces feminism as a sham.
She sees it as a privilege for a man to open the door for a lady, and finds wisdom in women showing up for men.
Wombmen and cavemen
Like Amelia, Prof. Dr. Asubonteng, my friend’s wife, wants equal partnership with her man.
But she also understands that the partnership is layered and powered by a natural antigen that places Eric, her husband, as a steward.
Indeed, another dictionary meaning of the word ‘husband’ is steward.
In British English, a husband is a manager of another’s property.
On my first visit to their Colorado home, I thought my geography of America had vanished to Techiman when I heard Prof. Mrs Asubonteng address her husband “Me wura”.
There are no masters or servants in this partnership, but there is a husband, who heads the partnership.
‘Mrs’ is not a foolish acronym for Master’s Registered Servant, as some cavemen have hoped.
Amelia worries about the African tradition’s blackmail that a woman at 40 needs to necessarily consider marriage, and also hurry to make a baby or two before the womb shuts down.
The same is true for men. At 40, a man knows his testosterone properties may power him to sire a child or two, but he is also aware that if he keeps it too late, his pension will suffer.
If a man is on a sugar fighting medication, Stanford Medicine warns that he risks producing children with genital birth defects.
Women, after all, are men with wombs (wombmen). Time ticks for both.
Surprisingly, Amelia falls to the conventional ‘men-must-provide’ aspirations of the average African woman. Amelia wants a man who has “good money, can perform like the god of kama sutra, has trained their superbrain mind enough not to be worried about how far a lady rises, and does house chores with me”.
Dr Amelia doesn’t say a word about what she brings to the table.
Instead, she demands to see a man’s academic transcript and insists she must wear her favourite perfume, sauvage.
Well, I have taken note of Amelia’s love list. I also know she likes oysters.
Benjamin Kwesi Tawiah
Tissues Of The Issues
bigfrontiers@gmail.com.
