Title: Woman, You are Important
Author: Blessing Abraham
Publishers: Kabod Broadcasting, Lagos
Number of Pages: 224
Reviewer: Banji Ojewale
Former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ghana’s Kofi Annan (1938-2018), once said, ‘’There is no tool for development more effective than the empowerment of women.’’ Nations across the globe have adopted this counsel and roared themselves into greatness and accomplishment. One of the big factors that winged their traction for meteoric move is the preponderance or balanced presence of their women in government at the top, not on the periphery of activities.
They invest enormously in the fair sex to enlist them for productive work in the home, for the state and its citizens. Thus empowered, the women can conquer the peak to become the head of government, commander-in-chief of the armed forces, leading lights in industry, civil service, the professions etc. They are also transformed into the moral compass of humanity, fashioning a family to sustain a sane society, yet unleashing their God-given potential to correspondingly nurture mankind.
But in her book, Woman, You Are Important (She shall be called Woman, Because she was taken out of Man), Blessing Abraham declares that God was light years ahead of man in discovering the indispensability of women in the patriarchal order of the world. Only lately have civil authorities recognized what the Creator saw long ago to move Him to bring a woman into the life of Adam as a ‘’help meet’’. There are profuse Biblical references to support Blessing Abraham’s position that man would endlessly grope in the dark without the female component, as the Lord desires it in His unquestionable Wisdom.
“And the LORD God said, it is not good that man should be alone; I will make him an help meet.’’
From that foundational proclamation, the author draws the following extrapolation upon which rests her argument: ‘’God, through the creation of woman fine-tuned His work, He created woman, from man, to complete man. Therefore, man is incomplete without a woman! Someone once joked, told a male friend to ‘Count your ribs, you will find one missing.’ God made woman, to add to man, not to subtract, to beautify, not to destroy. God does not make mistakes! Woman, God called you to help… Thus the woman’s important role is to help man, called by God to assist man, in order to become all he was created by God.’’
In lucid language and argument not at all confrontationally feminist, Blessing Abraham (formerly Olatilewa Morayo Kuforiji) challenges women (and humanity at large) to key into this Divine concept, which is infinitely superior to whatever philosophy or ideology our civilization may throw at us. She insists it is in our interest to buy into it.
It is difficult to attempt to contradict her, as she links this centrality of women in the affairs of society to a dominant inherent force. Indeed, the author says our women are the solution to the greatness sought by man.
But some critics would ask: if Blessing Abraham is clothing women in such powers after their progenitor, Eve, misled her husband into a big fall that brought sin and deadly punishment to all mankind, can we still count on them today? Oh, yes, the author says, and lists heroines who didn’t fail God. According to her, the disobedience of our ancestors wasn’t enough to annul the Lord’s decree that the woman is man’s helper, describing her a ’’the generational producer.
There’s a caveat: the woman who would fulfil her role according to Heaven’s will must be born again, Christ-redeemed and Spirit-filled. She can’t be sensitive to inner stirrings to be a home builder if she’s carnal or worldly. Heroines like Sarah, Hannah, Deborah, Esther, Ruth, Mary, Elizabeth, Priscilla, Dorcas, Lydia etc. had an unbreakable bond with God to enable them tap into His bottomless resources for exploits.
Woman, You Are Important warns that our age needs more of these women of note. The home must churn out boys and girls who would populate the communities with godly principles. Now, this won’t happen if our women are bogged down with distractions of an avoidably busy and hectic schedule of our age. Blessing Abraham warns against women getting overwhelmed to the neglect of the home.
There’s a character in the Bible who was penalized for losing a person put under his watch. His excuse of being busy ‘’here and there’’ didn’t save him.
Shall we also cautiously say that following our study of Sister Abraham’s argument so far, we have our women to blame for the fallen values in society? Is society not, after all, the melting pot of what issues from families? Society is the meeting point of family units; what you get in the social pool is what is brewed in the home, not the reverse.
The author has an inspired answer to that troubling scenario. She says God Who created man for procreation and expansion also meant His creatures to live a good life characterized by lofty moral tokens. Actually, He desires abundance for us. Sister Abraham describes it as ‘’vibrant eternal life,’’ with the woman playing a pivotal role.
Woman, You Are Important concludes with treatises on peace, evangelism and what the writer calls ‘’Eternal Home’’ (Heaven). It’s God’s Abode; but it’s also accessible to those who receive His Son Jesus Christ in their heart and home, where the woman is given her rightful place for progress and development.
In Canada in 2015, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had 15 women in a cabinet of 30. A research on this by two scholars had this outcome: ‘’…women in government … have reduced mortality rates triggering…specific types of health-producing expenditures… (women) employ more democratic leadership style compared to men’s autocratic style.’’ Here in Africa, Ethiopia and Rwanda, two of the continent’s fastest growing countries, have had women taking up half of the cabinet.
A major drawback of Blessing Abraham’s work is that it fails to capture these contemporary secular experiences to prove the Biblical point that women can no longer be marginalized by society. We can’t overlook this contemporary perspective. I propose that future revisions of the book should bear this in mind.
But this doesn’t diminish the stature of the book. It is classically written, with a prose not unencumbered by labyrinthine kilometer-long sentences or polysyllabic words that slow down the reader. And you’re not interrupted by the printer’s devil hopping from page to page to interfere with your grammatical and lexical sanity.
The book is partly autobiographical, leading us into snippets of the writer’s family. Her husband, Kolawole Zion Abraham, formerly Kolawole Solanke Kuforiji, was once news editor at Rhythm Radio station in Lagos. He enjoys the sight of his wife in the kitchen preparing him his delicacies. He regards himself as his wife’s first son.
Author Blessing Abraham, a Linguistics graduate, is described as a ‘’recklessly dependent Christian’’. She is the Chief Strategy Officer at Kabod Broadcasting in Lagos, Nigeria.
*Ojewale is a writer at Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria.
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