Is This Really 21st Century?

It’s that time of the year where I travel around a lot, and I’m already tired from my third journey. Normally, I’m always excited and in tune with nature when I travel, but this time, I’ve just been lost in thoughts. It all started on Wednesday morning.

I had to be on a four-hour journey to somewhere in the central region of Ghana. And since there weren’t any cars that could send me straight to my destination, I had to transit midway through the region.

It wasn’t my first time there, but it was my first time doing this alone so I was very alert not to get on the wrong bus. I asked around, and luckily for me, I got someone to stop a car that had moved about 10 seconds before my arrival.

I got on the bus, and after 2 minutes, it stopped because of a faulty car that had caused traffic. So it happened that the car got a flat tire in the middle of the road while dodging a big pothole. Everyone was patiently waiting for the car to be towed out of the way for us to go until we got to know the gender of that driver. And here’s where it gets disappointingly interesting.

We found out the driver who had a flat tire was a woman, and surprisingly, the women on my bus started saying the most ridiculous stuff. “This is why women aren’t supposed to be driving.” “What’s a woman even doing behind a steering wheel?” “There should be a law where women are not allowed to drive.”

I was totally shocked and disgusted by their mindset. And the fact that they were coming from women? I just couldn’t hide my disappointment. Normally, I would mind my business, but this time, I asked one of the women just one question that silenced her. “So you don’t think your daughter deserves to drive a nice car?”

I really wanted to ask her why she wasn’t bothered when she thought the driver was a man but started talking after finding out the person was a woman. These are the people who make us take ten steps backwards in civilization.

In this modern world, do we now have to explain to people that a woman getting a flat tire on the road doesn’t make her less human than a man? Or makes her deserve less. If you ask me, the only wrong she probably did was to be born in a country where dodging potholes should be a topic in driving school. Because most accidents in this country are statistically associated with the roads and definitely not gender.