‘And is it a boy or a girl?” I asked this guy who would be my friend, as we got to know each other. Crestfallen, he replied: ”It’s a girl.”
And then he explained the frown on his face. ”This is no world to bring up a girl. The boys are going to f%*k her before she knows anything about love or sex. When she is older they are going to look at her and imagine doing things with her. And there is hardly a chance that she will be well off unless she marries someone rich.”
My new friend’s lack of confidence was not misplaced. ”I know. I have done it to many girls myself,” he said before going into the details about how he had ”fooled ’em, f%*ked ’em and left ’em”.
That was back in 1993. The little girl was a mere two years old then.
I recently met my friend again and we got chatting about families. I am happy to report that he is no longer as worried about his daughter’s prospects as he was back then.
Somehow, as a father to a little girl myself, I understood his reasons for being confident about the future that awaits this generation of girls — or girl-children as our daughters are now known.
It has never been a better time to be a girl in South Africa.
Sure, reports of rape and other forms of sexual assaults are still far too many. Women are still being objectified in the mass media. The face of poverty is still a face of a (black) woman and this gender is still on the receiving end of HIV/Aids.
But be that as it may, I share my friend’s optimism that, all things being equal, our daughters have a better chance of success than our sisters or mothers had.
For starters, they can learn from an early age that girls too can be superheroes. The girls in the cartoon The Powerpuff Girls attest. The series is about how three little girls have dedicated their lives to saving the world and ridding it of crime. All of which they intend doing before bedtime every day.
As soon as they go to school and can string an essay together, they stand a chance of spending a day with the president of the country, learning how a country is run.
Girls are beneficiaries — through programmes such as Take a Girl Child to Work — of concerted efforts to expose them to the workplace and to teach them early on in their lives that they can be all they want to be, that their gender is no inhibition.
If a girl became interested in politics, she would realise that South Africa is still waiting for its first male Speaker of Parliament and that 12 of the current 27 Cabinet ministers are women.
Unless they revisit newspaper clips of April this year, they are likely to think that a woman premier is a normal feature in society, which is why four of the nine are women.
If my own daughter could, she would read this newspaper and find out that daddy’s boss is a woman and the heavens have not fallen. She would realise that mommy, too, has a boss who is a girl.
Still in the workplace, they will learn that those who treat women as sex objects are punished in terms of the many sexual harassment laws. Okay, maybe they are not always punished, but there is enough body of law making such practice intolerable.
And unlike some of us who grew up identifying women as ”the one who drives a car” because there were so few women in our community driving cars, our daughters will grow up not knowing that such a simple thing was once a preserve of masculinity.
If they learn bad habits such as smoking, we will condemn them on the basis of what they do to their health rather than because they are curious social creations.
I am reminded here of a tiff between Professor Itumeleng Mosala and Dr Mamphela Ramphele where Mosala said Ramphele’s claim to fame was that she smoked cigarettes when it was unheard of for black women to do so, and that she had a relationship with Black Consciousness leader Steve Biko.
If I have a gripe with all this focus on girls, it is that I wish black boy-children — especially those who grew up in an era where white males were seen as the natural heirs to the throne of the world — were being empowered in a similar way. Perhaps that would diminish the number of young men who call anyone likely to pay them for a service, such as washing your car or helping you park it, ngamla (white man).