James, this is a powerful piece, revealing and framing the mechanism that has undone Western culture. Hegel would be gratified to read your take on the question of matriarchy vs. patriarchy. University trained anthropologists or sociologists will get stuck on questions of paternal certainty, private property and accumulation of technology. Libertarians, and their hatred of government, will be confused about why they agree with you (they also often hate defined gender roles). There are many flavors of patriarchy, and of matriarchy, but the ones we have now are a complete failure.

-Lynn

Lynn, in the interest of full disclosure, I have only seen Hegel’s name in the tables of contents of books on philosophy that I could never complete, as social thinking past Hobbes simply bored me. So I suspect vaguely that he was some smart Kraut. I’m not going to google him and pretend I read him.

In the interest of piling on, here are some African Patriarchy items:

-Mobi, the Nigerian Lyft driver who is a good friend of Lili and I, said of the way African American women dress when they get into his car, “If a young woman dressed like that in Nigeria the men of the area would surround her and shame her, punish her for being so forward and humiliating her family.”

-There was an African tribe in which the men elongated their wives’ necks by placing stacked rings around them. If she was unfaithful, the rings were removed and her atrophied neck would snap.

-Female “circumcision” is not Islamic [Arabic] in origin, but had its roots in Northeast Africa among blacks.

-When adventuring in Northeast Africa, Richard Burton noted that one tribe’s men pierced and laced their wives’ labia closed before leaving her at home.

-My friend Oliver returns to visit his grandmother in Jamaica to make sure that no men have been taking advantage of her in business dealings. He also cares for his mother and sisters, providing them with cars while he drives junkers, giving his sister a place to live, etc. Disappointed in his father’s level of familial commitment he has made of himself the patriarch of a family, hardly suggesting that African folk are genetically doomed to matriarchal-dominated society.

-Recently, Lili told me that a Nigerian man brought his sister into the tag and title service and gave his sister a car, which, she claims is the opposite among our indigenous blacks, who typically practice female-to-male transfers. This, and the fact that Mobi has recently decided to pay half of his sister’s mortgage, might be regarded as suggestive of culturally transmitted African traditions that have broken down in America.

-As a grocery store manager, I worked closely, for three years, with a Ghana man who could never get a handle on American female behavior. He could look upon them as “Madam” the female owners, or as my property [Seriously, if he saw me talking to a female customer, he mentally tagged her as mine and considered her off limits.], or as his. He called me Boss constantly, never using my name, even when speaking to others. I was “the Boss,” “boss” or “bossman,” indicating that ideas of male hierarchy had a strict and powerful hold on his mind, extending, even into his past. Young Ghana men would seek him out at the store for advice and he would introduce them to me as good prospects but currently undeserving of direct words with me. His former employer he introduced to me in admiring tone, informing me, “Boss, you are my boss, but Mister John will always be my boss.” John was the man that gave him his first American job and who, upon hearing that I was considering his former man for employment, took timeout to come and meet me, assuring me that I was hiring a good man.

-The above reminds me of the German observations that African men, if led properly and with respect, made excellent war fighters, with a tiny cadre of German officers and their African troops consistently defeating superior English-Officered African and Anglo-Indian troops in “Operation Side Show,” during World War 1, indicating that African men might have benefited more from strong patriarchal leadership of the Teutonic type than the womanly troop management style of the British aristocracy.

Well, Lynn, that’s all I can scrape off the top at the moment.

Thanks for assembling this case for my commentary.

Guerilla Patriarchy may be read via the link below:

Literary Impressions of the Prose and Verse of Robert E. Howard