Chinua Achebe was not only a visionary writer but one with an avalanche of tactical quotes whose applicability remain relevant today.
In the book Things Fall Apart, for example, Eneke the bird says since men have learnt to shoot without missing so have the birds learnt to fly without perching.
When something changes, people must learn to adapt to new ways of life, according to the quote. To put it succinctly, when colonialists settled among the Igbo of Nigeria, they had to adjust their ways.
However, Achebe's artistry captures a basic fact of life: diarrhoea occurs when foreign microorganisms invade the body. While it is not the most pleasant situation, it is a necessary bodily response.
Consider how women have been forced to contend with the threat of patriarchy and its perceived dominance. Nature has fought back against injustices served to women to lift them to a platform of sensible equality where they can also enjoy similar advantages as men.
This should be a healthy point of stability where men and women can coexist in harmony. Surprisingly, a new source of contention has emerged, with men reacting in a way that inspires a brand-new sense of instability in the social order.
Men who have accepted that women can now go to school, wear pants, and are in the process of demanding standing toilets are not taking the new circumstances lightly. They have accepted the fact that they now report to female bosses and have wives who earn significantly more than them.
The undeniable fact that women can now go on drinking binges and return home whenever they want is a painful reality that men must accept. And there are many more.
Women, for their part, expect men to willingly pay the price of dominance by meekly bending backwards and being ruled by the new terms as a form of retaliation.
Philandering
Women who have honed their philandering habits to beat men now treat illicit sex as a walk in the park and expect their husbands to accept them back with no strings attached after romping their weekends away in the name of girls out in the coast or Naivasha.
The women's newfound freedom can take them as far as Tioman Island to see how the Asian phallus fits their African orifices, which are argued to be larger. When they return, their timelines are embellished with phrases like 'team adventure is back,' 'Asia was lit,' or 'Jamaican ebony meat is next.'
In the face of a similar challenge, previous generations of wives were encouraged to pray for their marriages and stay put until the men came to their senses. Realistically, men today are expected to kneel down and pray for their wives to regain their senses and rekindle their loyalty to family values in order to compensate for past sins and achieve a fair balance.
That is not the case.
Today's man has unpredictably taken to listening to the ilk of Kevin Samuels and reading books like 'Unplugged' authored by Kenya's new kid in the block, Jacob Aliet that teaches men to walk out of any abusive formations and treat themselves like the jewel.
Our men are flying without perching just when we imagined their wings were safely clipped.
