Dear Editor,
It was interesting to learn from Henry Jeffrey that the initiative against domestic violence originated in his office when he was a minister of government in 1996. It is disappointing that this progressive measure bore so few flowers and so little fruit in more than a decade.
Dr Jeffrey then treats us to a summary of a nineteeth century evolutionary theory as it related to human society, and as conceptualised by Engels and Lenin. This evolutionary approach has, in the capitalist West, been associated with Lewis Henry Morgan, an American who studied the Seneca Amerindians and met and was influenced by Charles Darwin.
Morgan’s theorising, like Engels, has long been criticised and dismissed for its eurocentricity and lack of real ethnographic support. It is impossible, given current knowledge of human societies, to subscribe to the idea that human groups emerged from a “promiscuous horde” of savages who are evolving ineluctably to the Western monogamous ideal of a European bourgeoisie steeped in Judeo-Christian ideals.
The records of even the most ancient Hindu or Chinese or Middle Eastern and Egyptian societies contradicts this conceptualisation of things and, though I never read the book from which Dr Jeffrey quotes, I am surprised that it is seriously considered in the academic community apart from its interest as an antiquarian historiography.
The degree to which speculative history has fixed itself in our view of the past is evident when one read an otherwise good editorial or commentary some years or so ago and was informed that the origin of mate selection lay in the savage habit of club-wielding men jumping out of their caves clubbing the women they came upon and dragging them back to the lair to have their way with them.
The mind drifts off into the ramifications of this hypothesis. Did not the women take evasive action? Arm themselves, walk only in gangs? Did some parade themselves, mincing seductively, before the cave door of someone they liked? Did the behavioural ancestors of the SASODites club and drag too (before their battered and broken bodies were discovered owing to the bad odour floating from their caverns)? Were the women all free agents, working for themselves. No husband or kids to escort them around? Did they have to live in the same neighbourhood as their violators? Or were we all simian in aspect and mental level at that time? Why did we have to club them when every ape and hound is having a normal life and sexual release without the risks of a recourse to violence? Is the human female basically averse? Where did this idea come from anyway?
The growth in human knowledge has truly been phenomenal over the past fifty or so years. As public education released more minds into the reflective and critical spheres, ideas about humanity and the phenomena with which it is associated increasingly free us from the narrow and colonial/imperialistic ideas that dominated during the rise of Europe and which were transmitted to us and the generation of Westerners who ruled the world.
Care has got to be taken with “unilineal” ideas of human progress. If anything at all, the world has revealed a co-existence of forms of human organisation and human belief that is quite varied in time and space.
Concerning the role of women in all that, it has to be noted that if any conclusion may be offered, it is that human cultures have given a wide variety of social and hierarchical roles to women while generally retaining the ritual, ceremonial or formal final authority of the male.
As to why this is and has been so, questions of socio-biology surround this issue and a full exposition needs to be undertaken when the question of women is approached.
Yours faithfully,
Abu Bakr
