More BBC News, Recounted as Accurately as Possible…
1. Botswana has just eliminated free secondary education, joining the ranks of most African countries that only provide free schooling through eighth grade. One high school student interviewed for the story said that the new policy would encourage him to work even harder because he knew that it was now a great privilege that his parents can afford to send him to school. When I see the kinds of problems the lack of free secondary education has created in Kenya, I can’t understand what possible social or macroeconomic benefits there are to this policy change in Botswana. The missionaries may have brought an annoying brand of Christianity to Kenya, but at least they also set up schools. If only the governments of Africa would now invest in their schools to the fullest potential.
2. South Africa encourages (or requires?) virginity testing for girls as a way to curb the spread of AIDS. It is part of a larger ritual celebration of virginity, a rite of passage, for unmarried girls. A traditional health practitioner, usually an older mama, manually inspects the girl’s hymen, as well as checking for a series of other medically-unproven signs of purity, including the look of innocence in a girl’s eyes and the looseness of the muscles behind her knees. Once a girl is pronounced a virgin, a huge celebration ensues.
If South Africa is anything like Kenya, most women (and girls) have no say about when they have sex, especially in rural villages. A woman’s duty is to provide pleasure for a man. She doesn’t have the right to say no or to ask a man to use a condom. If she does, she is often beaten. A woman came to the VCT one day wanting an HIV test. She was probably in her early twenties and pregnant. The father of the baby had kidnapped this woman when she was 14, took her to his hut, and raped her. This “relationship” continued, and she eventually gave birth to his first child, but they never got married. Now she is pregnant with his second child, and wanted an HIV test because she knows he sleeps around with other women.
On more than one occasion a Peace Corps volunteer has encouraged a Kenyan woman to say no to a man she doesn’t want to have sex with, with disastrous results. The woman was beaten to a pulp, and the Peace Corps volunteer was threatened, or even chased out of the village, for daring to challenge the will of a man.
Peace Corps policy now strongly discourages (prohibits?) volunteers from getting involved with issues of gender violence in their community because it has put more than one volunteer at risk of getting hurt.
Coming from a culture that values gender equality, I feel this arrogant, George W Bush-esque moral duty to intervene and convince Kenyans that my point of view is more humane. The problem is that there’s no easy way to go about being a moral imperialist, probably because moral imperialism is morally questionable from an objective standpoint. Even when I have casual conversations with Kenyans about equalizing gender roles, or when I attempt to lead by example, everyone just laughs and writes me off as a foreigner with funny ways who will never understand their culture.
Maybe the key is accepting that it’s not my role to sweep through the country preaching gender equality. I may plant a few seeds in some fertile minds, but maybe as more people, especially girls, attain higher levels of education, traditional attitudes and gender roles will begin to loosen on their own, at the grassroots and at the policy-making level.
3. Uganda offers university scholarships for virgin girls. Truly dizzying logic: encouraging girls to conform to one oppressive double-standard in order to empower them to rise above all the other cultural and institutional oppression that has kept them down for generations.
4. The BBC reads letters from listeners who write in about “Why I Love Africa” (accompanied by a catchy jingle). They say things like, “I love Africa for its rich cultural heritage and music that go back for centuries.” Many of these listeners are African ex-pats living in Europe or the U.S. One of my friends once commented that the subtext to most of the letters is, “I love Africa because I no longer have to live there.”
2. South Africa encourages (or requires?) virginity testing for girls as a way to curb the spread of AIDS. It is part of a larger ritual celebration of virginity, a rite of passage, for unmarried girls. A traditional health practitioner, usually an older mama, manually inspects the girl’s hymen, as well as checking for a series of other medically-unproven signs of purity, including the look of innocence in a girl’s eyes and the looseness of the muscles behind her knees. Once a girl is pronounced a virgin, a huge celebration ensues.
If South Africa is anything like Kenya, most women (and girls) have no say about when they have sex, especially in rural villages. A woman’s duty is to provide pleasure for a man. She doesn’t have the right to say no or to ask a man to use a condom. If she does, she is often beaten. A woman came to the VCT one day wanting an HIV test. She was probably in her early twenties and pregnant. The father of the baby had kidnapped this woman when she was 14, took her to his hut, and raped her. This “relationship” continued, and she eventually gave birth to his first child, but they never got married. Now she is pregnant with his second child, and wanted an HIV test because she knows he sleeps around with other women.
On more than one occasion a Peace Corps volunteer has encouraged a Kenyan woman to say no to a man she doesn’t want to have sex with, with disastrous results. The woman was beaten to a pulp, and the Peace Corps volunteer was threatened, or even chased out of the village, for daring to challenge the will of a man.
Peace Corps policy now strongly discourages (prohibits?) volunteers from getting involved with issues of gender violence in their community because it has put more than one volunteer at risk of getting hurt.
Coming from a culture that values gender equality, I feel this arrogant, George W Bush-esque moral duty to intervene and convince Kenyans that my point of view is more humane. The problem is that there’s no easy way to go about being a moral imperialist, probably because moral imperialism is morally questionable from an objective standpoint. Even when I have casual conversations with Kenyans about equalizing gender roles, or when I attempt to lead by example, everyone just laughs and writes me off as a foreigner with funny ways who will never understand their culture.
Maybe the key is accepting that it’s not my role to sweep through the country preaching gender equality. I may plant a few seeds in some fertile minds, but maybe as more people, especially girls, attain higher levels of education, traditional attitudes and gender roles will begin to loosen on their own, at the grassroots and at the policy-making level.
3. Uganda offers university scholarships for virgin girls. Truly dizzying logic: encouraging girls to conform to one oppressive double-standard in order to empower them to rise above all the other cultural and institutional oppression that has kept them down for generations.
4. The BBC reads letters from listeners who write in about “Why I Love Africa” (accompanied by a catchy jingle). They say things like, “I love Africa for its rich cultural heritage and music that go back for centuries.” Many of these listeners are African ex-pats living in Europe or the U.S. One of my friends once commented that the subtext to most of the letters is, “I love Africa because I no longer have to live there.”
posted by Justina at 11:01 AM
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