Today as I prepared for my speech I felt just a bit more nervous than I did the day I boarded a flight for the first and only time. I could still remember vividly all the NatGeo “Air Crash investigation” episodes replaying in my mind as I contemplated an excuse to decline the most important opportunity of my life. The flight induced nausea, the images of perpetual flames engulfing metal and flesh as yet another airliner fell, and the confusing statistics citing air travel as the safest mode of transport, all played on my mind as I carefully listened to the metronomic instructions from the squeakyvoice of the flight attendant. I was just as eager to add my voice on a critical topic as I was to get an opportunity to thank a stranger I met during that flight.
As I struggled to trim my speech to the ten minutes Memory allocated to me, I couldn’t help but hope for ample time to talk about the day the feminist in me was born. I could nothelp but hope Memory wouldn’t tap her microphone before the end of my speech, to signal a breach of agreement on my part. The last time she was director of ceremony at a prize giving dinner for the lady Chevrons she had tapped her microphone and the guest of honour wisely truncated his concluding remarks. Yesterday I thought of the embarrassment of a trembling voice added to a public reminder for exceeding my time and decided I would rehearse the speech as many times as I could. With a timer and an imaginary audience, the only resources at my disposal, I would make sure I wouldn’t suffer a double portion of sheepishness. As I faced my imaginary audience for the tenth time, I could recall an elderly man in his seventies staring at me as if noticing just how uncomfortable I was travelling at 30000 feet above mean sea level. When he was not staring at me he was reading a book that he seemed to be enjoying.
I tried to peep at the title wondering what kind of book a seventy year old man would enjoy reading. By the time I first heard his croaky voice I had managed to read the summary at the back of the cover and the book’s title, “Dear Ijeawele, a feminist manifesto in fifteen suggestions”. When I asked the elderly man if he was enjoying the book, hoping to mask my fear and abide by the unwritten code for people sharing seats on a flight, the elderly man obliged by closing his book for a fleeting exchange. Wary of distracting him from his “wonderful” book, I feigned to be looking for one of the flight attendants. Just then, the squeaky voiced flight attendant came and offered us refreshments. I realised then that it had not been her voice that was squeaky but the public address system. The elderly man who later introduced himself as Muchandidii closed his book again, sipped his drink, before asking me a random question I had not anticipated. “Why are there so many flight attendants who are female and so few pilots who are female?” I could have easily said I wasn’t a frequent flyer and let him go back to his novel but somehow I told him what I had heard often about there being jobs for men and jobs for women. It was then that the man had found himself a job of his own.
With no hope of him opening his book again I decided to listen to him and distract myself from my discomfort with being inside an object moving at a speed at least five times that of a very fast car and at a very high altitude. What followed was a distraction I would always remember and quote each time I would give a speech. From the least expected source, an elderly African man, had I finallyunderstood the importance of treating women with respect, and of adding my own voice towards discouraging negative stereotypical thinking regarding them. As he took me through some of the books he had read on gender imbalance, I realised just how much I was supposed to be worried although I was seldom on the “wrong side” of the imbalance, being a man.All the stories from my sisters, nieces, and friends, sometimes told in tears, suddenly made much more sense than they ever had. Suddenly, instead of feeling helpless or indifferent about the innumerable cases of gender imbalance, I knew from that day I wouldn’t be quiet. For a moment I recalled complaining about my sister getting a place for a university programme I had always dreamt of yet she had less points. I recalled how she had reminded me of all the days I had left her behind while she cooked and I went to school, or when she would join a group discussion late after doing dishes. It was not until Muchandidii passed me tissue paper that I realised I was teary, something I didn’t remember ever doing, at least not in public. When he asked me if I had a daughter and I said I did he gave me the novel he had been reading, which I accepted only after he said he had read it seven times. From a stranger I had finally grasped how much I had been complicit regarding unfair treatment of girls and women.
As I rehearsed for the last time I knew the most important thing would not be how much I would tremble or be worried about Memory’s reminder about my time being up, but just how much I had been transformed by a discussion with one Muchandidii. I decided then that I would know what to say even without a script, just like a stranger on the way had changed my thinking without one.