I wasn't not joking when in my last post about Rural gardening, I observed that rural women in agriculture, contrary to popular believe are in recent years, actually at the center of gardening work every day, playing not just the lighter ‘helper’ roles, but the heavier chores.
As we yet know, or should I say, as we are yet made to believe, in the few occasions when women venture out of cooking food in the kitchen, keeping the homestead tidy and tending the kids, and into any sort of garden work, it is to dispense the lighter chores, and always at the end of the production chain, like season end harvesting, and finally, sitting in the market areas to sell what the men ‘produced’!
The heavier gardening chores are of course, if you have tried some gardening, at the start of it all, especially during land tillage. And the even heavier part is during what my secondary school agriculture teacher called primary tillage. There where you need to open virgin land. That is where the work is most intensive.
And notice, I am not talking about some developed economy here. No, I am talking about agriculture in a rural community of a third world economy where gardening is 90% - my own estimate, by the way, but I bet you its justified! - manual.
So there is no such thing as tractors, those are way too expensive, in deed unthinkable for households that live below $1 a day. So you want to open land? There are basically two ways, you either use a hand hoe or, and this is the most common, you use drought animal technology, oxen and an ox-plough.
Have you ever tried it? Man or woman, have you ever had to hold tight and steady from the rear, the handles of the Plough, as two or four strong bulls pull it from the front? And you have to keep the plough aligned in the correct direction, the plough plowing at the correct depth, without you toppling and being run over by the bulls or knocking your bare feet on a tree stump?
That is how intensive Ox-plough tillage can be, and for ages, in communities that have practiced it, it has always remained the preserve of men. The women would only come in later to gather and dispose the after tillage debris.
In my community, there are not so many household with bulls for such use, so as I observed in the last post, communal rotational gardening is done. Tillage is scheduled per family, in such a manner that on a given day, one family ‘borrows’ the bulls and uses them and the next day another family also does the same. Through it all, the man of the other family - joins and supports the borrowing family in the tillage. You know it needs at least two people to drive and direct the bulls, and vice versa.
It used to be that men did this ox-plough tillage. Their energy and drive made them more suited. However, that is no longer the case. And women have assumed the reigns, and are now to be found holding the plough handles and doing the tillage themselves! It’s a significant shift in the division of gardening responsibilities as we have previously known, and shows just how much women are today involved in the sustenance of rural family life.
Why is this, I cannot be sure, but my wild guess is that women, ever the anchors of family life, as in several aspects of global political and economic life, are assuming more responsibilities that put them at the helm of family life, just as an infamous German politician once observed - the feminization of men always leads to the masculinization of women. That may be true!
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