A Human Rights Watch report has called on South Sudan to increase efforts to protect girls from widespread child marriage in the country. The practice “exacerbates pronounced gender gaps in school enrollment, contributes to soaring maternal mortality rates, and violates the right of girls to be free from violence, and to marry only when they are able and willing to give their free consent.” According to government statistics, close to 48% of South Sudanese girls between 15 and 19 are married, some as young as age 12.
The internet’s latest viral video craze, the Harlem Shake, is just 30 seconds of gyrating fun – but in Tunisia, it has sparked outrage. Conservative Muslims have condemned students who’ve made their own copycat videos, and the education ministry is investigating the principal of a high school where one of many “indecent” videos was filmed. Animosity between religious conservatives and secularists is growing – in the coastal city of Mahdia, one student received 12 stitches after being beaten for doing the Harlem Shake. Similar violent clashes have been reported in the city of Sfax and the town of Sousse.
In 2007, I landed my first ever job as an accounts clerk at a printing company. I hated it. It paid the minimum wage and cost me more than I earned just to travel to and from work, but I was proud of the fact that I was employed.
After I got my first payslip, my ever-cautious dad began to badger me: “Ntoks, you should bring your salary slip and bank statement so we can go through it on a Saturday afternoon. I’ll help you manage your finances.”
Hell no! I kept my books away from him because they were badly kept ones which would reveal some questionable wastage – a McDonald’s treat for my friends, an extravagant dinner date, the occasional pair of shoes, and, uhm, splurges on a certain illegal green substance. (You’d be amazed at how active dealers’ bank accounts are.)
A few months later, African Bank offered me R5 000 of credit to be paid back over three years. At R150 a month, the installments were invitingly low. At the time I earned a salary of R3 000 so I was ecstatic about being approved for credit. I felt like a real adult but ironically I ignored the common sense that supposedly comes with growing up.
There I was in downtown Jo’burg in Gandhi Square, licking a R2.50 ice cream, when an over-eager credit sales person from the bank approached me, like a dealer on Oxford Road, and told me he could change my life. I was sold. I took the loan even though I did not need it – I was merely R200 short to top up my bus tag, and all I had to do to sort this out was call my mom.
I paid off my first debt in less than the stipulated three years, before I turned 21. By this time, in 2008, South African banks were over-extending themselves and loaning to people who earned even less than I did. Newspapers ran reports of how bad debts were eroding the South African economy, and the impact of the global economic downturn on our country.
Our economy was sucker punched into a recession, but our banks managed to remain resilient. This made me optimistic. And like a junkie, I went back to credit after being clean for only a couple of months, confident that I could control myself.
But the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, considered one of the worst ones since the Great Depression by economists, had different plans for me. Prices suddenly skyrocketed and I couldn’t afford what I used to. To make matters worse, in 2008 I made the bad decision to move out of home a month before securing an assistant business producer job at CNBC Africa. By then I was broke and pregnant. African Bank came to my rescue, with more than they offered me the last time! I paid rent, bought food, saved for transport, bought work outfits and booked a couple of doctors’ appointments. I even sent some of this money to my grandmother.
This is where the blur and the binge began. First it was one loan, then two then three then four, all from one bank and all with different repayment amounts. I signed up with Capitec Bank who introduced itself as my savior, but I ended up owning them more than I did African Bank. FNB, too, “helped” with the overdraft facility on my cheque card but it took just a few months for them to cut me off.
I survived on the overdraft facility for months – an extra R5 000 here, another R3 000 there – kidding myself that this was the solution. (Flickr/Images Money)
It finally dawned on me that I was deep in debt. It took a while for the depression to kick in. I am a business writer by profession; I report on economic issues and tell the world about bad business decisions and deals. I should’ve been smarter, and taken my own advice. At times, paranoia got the better of me. I was worried my financial situation would impact on my professional career and business reporters would gang up on me to say: “Ntokozo, we don’t need you to comment on this, you have bad credit, girl. Goodbye.”
I lay awake at night, eating chocolate chip cookies in bed and watching bad American reality TV shows like Money Chase, where people in huge financial trouble do crazy things to win money to pay off their debts.
This was the worst experience of my life, but it did teach me one valuable lesson: cash is indeed king. The banks usually neglect you once you become a liability to them; the friendly salesperson who helped sign you up for a loan quickly becomes your worst nightmare.
I am now slowly trying to control and erase my debt. I owe a lot of money to one bank, but rather one than three. I’m even being offered discounts on payments now (but I’ve learned this could be just another gimmick.)
My advice to other South Africans being tempted to spend money they don’t have is, simply: don’t. Save your money instead. I would never have said this five years ago, but putting away R100 instead of buying a pizza has made a big difference in my life.
Ntokozo Khumalo is a business writer, reporter, and producer. She is also the director of Hot Content Media. Connect with her on Twitter.
A crowd of young women in burkas and some men gather outside a café in Zanzibar, bewildered by the sight: an African woman, in a West African mumu (kaftan) and covered head, playing Ghazal poetry as an Islamic call to prayer.
Sitting on the café terrace and accompanied by an acoustic guitar, Nawal’s clear voice captivates the audience – until it is broken by the cry of a visibly upset street vendor. “How dare you use the name of Allah in a song?” he shouts.
“You use keyboards in your praise of Allah,” Nawal retorts calmly.
Striking a chord with the community: from sandy Zanzibar to sunny Sudan
In 21st century Zanzibar, as in much of Africa and the Muslim world, music has the power to inflame as it did in ancient Persia when music, mosaics and poetry were created to be ‘nearer to Allah’. And the old divisions – between the more tolerant Sufi branches of Islam, which believe that art and music can be expressions of meditation, and the more conservative branches, which believe devotion should be silent, personal, and contemplative – continue to raise existential questions about the nature of faith and spirituality.
Although there is much disagreement over the role of music or prohibition of it in Islam, Nawal, a practising Muslim from the Comoros islands, is adamant that there is nothing in the Qur’an that forbids singing.
“I sing for my hopes, my values,” she says. “It’s like a communion. I want the public to forget I am an artist. I don’t say ‘Let’s go pray’, I just say ‘God is big, there is nothing that is not God’. So if someone kills me for saying that, they kill me for praising God. I am not here to change people – I am here to shine.”
She continues, “The Western media must show me as I am [and] show Islam as vital, spiritual, productive, subtle and positive – not just extremist.” She recounts a story at an international festival in Belgium when the predominantly Muslim crowd complained and nearly revolted. However, after the gig, she recalls, Turkish, Palestinian, Tuareg and Syrian Muslims – both men and women – came up to her with tears in their eyes, saying they had found her songs moving and profound.
These divergences also reverberate in Sudan, where the vibrant and dynamic musical group Camiraata uses music to address social issues. Far from seeing music as unreligious, the group uses music to bring together families, tribes and clans in Sudan, north to south, to sing their way through serious political and domestic challenges.
Indeed, for many Muslim Sudanese, music is integral to community dispute-resolution, initiation rituals, the unusual and the everyday. Da’Affallah, director of Sudan’s Music and Culture Academy in Khartoum and band member explains, “Music and culture is about understanding. If you know my music, my religion and my culture, you respect me.”
“We never ever stop singing!”, Da’Affallah continues, before breaking into song. “Music in Sudan is absolutely everywhere, and has been for many, many centuries. Music is life in Sudan, from birth to death. When a woman makes tea or coffee in the morning she has a special song [he starts singing]. She has a song and she grinds out the pestle in time as she grinds coffee. Then we have special ‘albaramka’ for tea – this is a group song.”
He demonstrates – and it sounds like Mongolian throat-singing – before continuing, “We sing love songs to our camels because we depend on them. We sing to the desert so it won’t kill us. If we have problems in the community, we bring together everyone to solve the problem, we consult the elders, we talk, we sing, we talk more!”
Facing the music in northern Mali
A couple of thousand miles west of Sudan in Mali, the tensions between contrasting interpretations of the role of music for Muslims was been brought into particularly sharp, and often tragic, focus following the takeover of the north by Islamist militants last year.
Khaïra Arby, looking regal in her striking head wrap and plush blue dress, her face lined and tired, just got off a plane from Mali. “Yes, it’s true, I’ve seen it myself; they will cut off your tongue if you sing,” she says. “I’ve seen friends who’ve had their hands cut off for the ringtones on their mobile phones.”
Arby, adored across Mali, is affectionately called the nightingale of the North. Born in the village of Abaradjou, north of Timbuktu, her parents came from different ethnic backgrounds – her mother Songhai, her father Berber. Arby’s music, which is more popular at home than the music of her internationally famous cousin Salif Keita, captures northern Mali’s diversity of ethnic groups, styles and poetry.
After persistent threats and attacks from Islamists militants – including smashing up stereo systems in markets and people’s homes, confiscating radios and even SIM cards with music on them – Arby escaped to Bamako to stay with Salif Keita on his island on the river Niger just outside Mali’s capital of Bamako. Many Malian musicians are among the thousands who fled south since the crisis began.
Keita is also resigned. Before the international intervention against the Islamist rebels, he commented, “If there’s no music, no Timbuktu, it means that there is no more culture in Mali.” Indeed, Timbuktu is regarded as part of a chain of African kingdoms that had a long history of education, literature and intellectual life. It was the site of one of the largest Islamic libraries in Africa and a meeting point for scholars who debated and interpreted the Qur’an.
However, last year the Islamist rebels who took over the towns declared the shrines to be idolatrous and restricted forms of expression, such as music, that had been part of the fundamental fabric of everyday life. Like many Malians, Arby was bewildered. “There’s not a single part of the Qur’an that forbids music,” she says. “I’ve read it all, I can tell you honestly, there’s nothing in there that says don’t sing. I’ve never seen, never, that music is forbidden.”
In fact, Arby is highly sceptical as to the importance of religion at all in the motives of militants. “This war is about drug-running and arms trafficking. It’s about controlling important routes through a very long term trade area. It’s about money, politics and control. It’s not about religion,” she insists.
Cheikh Lo, a Senegalese veteran and arguably the Miles Davis of African music, is also angry about the rebels’ attempts to ban music in northern Mali. Lo is a devout Muslim of the Baye Fall Sufi tradition. “These people misuse the name of Islam,” he says. “They are nothing to do with Islam, they are terrorists and we must have the dirigence [direction or composure] to drive them out.”
Clearly, Africa’s Muslim musicians – from Senegal’s Cheikh Lo to Mali’s Khaïra Arby to Sudan’s Camiraata to Zanzibar’s Nawal – are not about to give in and succumb to pressures against their singing. In fact, to the contrary, they see music as the very means of social change.
“The real musician does not go out to nightclubs, but he stays in the community, and leads to the right way,” says Da’Affallah. “This means peace, unity, understanding, communication.”
Meanwhile Arby states defiantly, “We have an obligation to sing, to dance, to respect, and to show appreciation for the suffering and the endurance and bravery of the people who are fighting for us, for those who cannot sing. We must compose beautiful songs before the war, during the war, and after the war, to celebrate what we have.”
There’s a trending joke in Ghana’s business schools today that goes like this: a Canadian investor who owns a call centre in Accra dialled his business all the way from Vancouver, only to be greeted with: “Holla client, I gotta take your call big big up ayew …”
Baffled by the lack of ‘standard’ English, the owner revealed his identity to his employee and threatened: “I gotta take your call big big up? Do you think I’m still going to invest in your country and guarantee your job?”
The call centre employee’s fun and flexible street English is a new form of the Queen’s English that can be heard in Accra’s bars, hotels, schools, taxis and airports. When describing your recent whereabouts you say: “Aye wiv been dere now now.” When friends are hungry you’ll hear whistles of “Chaley, you chop?” and replies like “No, I go weg small.”
This blended language known as Ghanaian English is “the final curtain on the voice of colonialism”, one student I spoke to boasted.
I once struck up a conversation with the receptionist at a local lodge I was staying at.
“Have you eaten yet?” I asked.
She merely sighed and replied: “No I eat after small small, sir.”
“Small small?”
She shrugged and explained: “I simply mean I’ll eat when I show you your room.”
This increasing desire by young Ghanaians to ‘modify’ the Queen’s English has sparked a debate between conservative old Ghanaians and the street-savvy, upwardly mobile youth.
On one end lie the young, hip and patriotic who are busy inventing a new slang vocabulary. If you hear tax vendors saying “go quench”, they mean “die”. When you eavesdrop on hippie girls in a bank queue saying “wack, garl”, what they mean is “eat, girl.” If you spot a high school chap bitterly complaining that “I was held in a go-slow, man” he means he was caught in a traffic jam.
On the other extreme are old-school die-hard Ghanaians, usually Oxbridge-educated, who equate speaking with a proper London or ‘BBC’ accent with status and education. This group heaps derision and insults on the youth who’ve adopted the ‘lafa’ (locally acquired foreign accent).
But Ghanaian youth are proud of the lafa. Some may be Akan (a language spoken in South Ghana) speakers but they also don’t want to sound too ‘Londonish’ when they speak English. A variety of English exists in the UK itself, they attest. “You don’t expect [to hear] the same English in Aberdeen, Wales and Ireland,” a hippie college major scrolling through her iPad in an Accra boutique tells me. “Just observe the thick Yorkshire accent in Ian Rankin novels.”
Speaking English with an Oxbridge accent carried prestige for almost half a century after Ghana’s independence in 1960. Now, young Ghanaians are beginning to embrace Ghanaian English. These adventurous linguists claim that Ghana has outstanding achievers in chemistry, diplomacy, tourism, law or education who’ve never stepped a foot outside the country’s borders. They say that former UN chief Kofi Annan speaks fluent Ghanaian English on the international stage but is easily understood from Syria to Venezuela to Scotland.
The traditionalists, however, argue that while Kofi Annan speaks with a Ghanaian accent, his use of English grammar is perfect and, as far as they recall, they’ve never heard him addressing the UN General Assembly in “pidgin Ghanaian English”.
This generation of young language inventors have been spurred further by an explosion in technology, music and movies. In the past, many Ghanaians pop singers mimicked Madonna, Tupac or Beyoncé. Now a new brigade of local artists wearing Ghanaian name tags and brands have come to the fore. “The idea is to mix western music styles with our Accra accents and rhythms for a home audience,” explains Pio Fawcett, a local DJ.
This infatuation with a localised version of English is not unique to Ghana. Long back, our West African neighbours from Nigeria and Sierra Leone eased into speaking English on the international stage with a heavy local accent. Nigerians call it Pidgin English while Creole English is synonymous with Sierra Leone.
To douse fierce criticism from the educated Ghanaian elite that they’re diluting the Queen’s language, the youth argue that Ghanaian English unites the country. “We’re not watering down the Queen’s language,” explains Ammond Kotto, a dental science graduate who’s returned from studying in London. “Look at Israel. It was a disparate country of refugees coming from all corners of the globe until Hebrew became the common denominator that made it a nation.”
Language purists in Ghana further argue that English is the mainstay of the internet and global commerce, and any country that waters it down will be sidelined. Ammond is quick with his rebuttal. “Do you mean China, a non-English speaking country, is left out of global commerce?” he asks.
Whatever the merits or demerits of this slang, speaking grammatically correct English with a Ghanaian accent is fine by me. However, “I eat after small small” is going too far down the Ebonics road.
