This is a clip from My Heritage, My Inheritance, a highly anticipated fashion film by South African knitwear designer Laduma Ngxokolo. Through his knitwear line, Ngxokolo seeks to preserve culture through contemporary fashion, and now film. This film was created to capture the deeper meaning behind the brand.
Centered around the theme of the Xhosa Ulwaluko (male circumcision and initiation) ceremony, the film chronicles the events that take place during this time – one of the most important events in the life of a young man as he graduates into manhood. Ngxokolo gives us a powerful and rare glimpse into a world reserved only for those entitled to undergo this process and educates us about the philosophies behind his brand.
Do you have a concubine, a ‘side dish’ or a ‘small house’? In Kenya, now is apparently the time to bring them out so they can be registered officially. Do not be shy, do not hide them. It is time to make the illicit clean and chaste.
It’s been official as of March 20 2014, when a Bill allowing polygamy was passed by our Parliament. If you’re married to a Kenyan man, he can bring home the other woman without your consent – and with the government’s blessings.
One MP, Junet Mohammed, even told her colleagues, “When you marry an African woman she must know the second one is on the way and a third wife..”
But the question is, why?
What do African men need with all these women? What good does it do to the women in the relationship or even the men themselves?
To answer that, I think one must tackle a more important question: What is the point of polygamy? What is the basis for it other than men wanting to have more than one ‘honey’ and a host of different places to sleep at night?
There have been a number of arguments for the role of polygamy within tradition, but none remains as strong as the core one: “It’s our culture”.
As much as we must pay homage to culture, we need to remember it is based on the needs of society and is not static. We must analyse if the reasons for having a particular tradition still hold true.
In the case of polygamy, one can see why the reasons for this practice no longer apply.
Firstly, the economy in Kenya is not what it used to be. The boom that we saw at the beginning of the Kibaki regime has stalled, halted (and some say even reversed) in the past years. The price of food has risen and there is barely enough money going around for people to run one household, let alone two, three or four. Having one household is not a cultural or moral issue; it is just good business sense.
What tends to happen to the average woman in a polygamous relationship is that one household suffers at the expense of another. When one household starts living the good life (cars, expensive schools, holidays etc), funds are diverted from another household. The man benefits regardless of which wife has these ‘perks’, but it’s not an equal arrangement for the women (and children) involved.
On argument that stems from ‘pre-colonial times’ is that polygamy was a way of empire-building. A full house was a powerful house. Children were seen as a source of wealth. However, in this day and age, one need only look at the price of higher education and the children-turned-adults who live with their parents for extended periods of time, sometimes till the ripe old age of 30. Children are not the investment they used to be.
Furthermore, with the rise of absentee fathers in our society, one must question whether men can really be entrusted with the responsibility of parenting children in multiple households when some can barely manage being a father in one. The strange thing is that these very men who are already negligent of their parental responsibilities are the most vocal about wanting multiple households.
Other reasons for polygamy hold equally as little weight:
It is a form of birth control for women: No, we have the pill now.
For political alliances: Now you can merely join your local political party. They will handle the alliances on your behalf. Or you can run for office yourself.
Agricultural manpower: Children helped farm the earth for food. Well, try going to your local supermarket today with more than two family members and then explain this to me as a justification for polygamy.
For male sexual gratification: Now this one is a good one. The world has gone through waves of sexual revolutions and women are no longer passive participants in sex. The statistics are that a large majority of heterosexual women have never had an orgasm. Handle one woman first, then we can talk.
And if we are going to have polygamy then why can we not have polyandry? If men can be seen to run more than one household then, in the spirit of gender equality, should the same courtesy not be extended to women? Give the average woman an Excel spreadsheet, a car with fuel and some stretching exercises to keep limber and in top shape and watch her show you what running more than one household is about.
A great number of households already suffer from a chronic case of absentee fathers and ‘men-missing-till-midnight’ syndrome. Should we really then institutionalise a practice that is already being somewhat abused? Or could this law possibly strengthen the entire sordid situation by giving women and children who remain in vulnerable situations legal rights?
Could this law possibly be a case of ‘if you can’t beat them, register them’?
I believe there are many men who do not understand the emotional, financial and social responsibilities that come with polygamy. We need to figure out why exactly polygamy is so important outside of being ‘part of tradition’. And if we cannot answer this question then we should not be engaging in polygamy.
Kagure Mugo is a freelance writer and co-founder and curator of holaafrica.org, a Pan-Africanist queer women’s collective which engages in activism and awareness-building around issues of African women’s identity, experiences and sexuality. Connect with her on Twitter: @tiffmugo
“We, the teachers, we try to make the violence and the war that we have experienced disappear,” says Nguinissara Rita, a primary school teacher at the St. Charles Louanga Missionary displacement site in Bangui, capital of Central African Republic.
It is almost an impossible task in a country in the grip of a humanitarian crisis that affects some 2.3-million children.
Nevertheless, Ms. Rita takes the challenge head-on. In the overcrowded mass of tents, people, bags and mattresses in this makeshift camp, the classroom serves many purposes: For her pupils, it is a form of protection against potential recruitment and abuse; for her, it is a place to help lay a foundation for reconciliation in a conflict with no end in sight.
“We teach forgiveness to our children because we need to forgive the others,” she explains.
Temporary learning spaces The school year in the Central African Republic has been disrupted for the better part of two years, and since 2012 most schools have been closed. To help provide educational opportunities to children, Unicef has supported international and national partners in setting up about 118 temporary learning spaces, covering more than 20 displacement sites in Bangui and other areas affected by conflict. As a result, over 25 000 children are back in a learning environment.
These temporary spaces are meant to operate only until schools reopen. “In the meantime, at least these children, who are living in difficult circumstances in the displacement camps, will regain some sense of normalcy and routine in a safe environment,” says Celeste Staley, chief of education at Unicef Central African Republic.
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There have been efforts to reopen schools, but the process is slow and full of challenges. Many schools have been looted and damaged in the conflict. And given the continued insecurity, getting teachers back into classrooms is extremely difficult. Additionally, staff salaries are in arrears, which discourages teachers from returning.
Rebuilding and strengthening Unicef supports the education cluster, a group made up of the national Ministry of Education along with NGOs and UN agencies engaged in the education sector. The cluster supports coordination among partners, joint assessments, identification of funding opportunities and sharing of information.
To support the reopening of schools, Unicef is providing basic school materials, light school rehabilitation, teacher training, and catch-up classes for children who have missed several months of classes.
The cluster is working with the transitional government to rebuild and strengthen the education system, which even prior to the crisis was among the least developed in the world.
“We know that it will be difficult to rebuild what was already a broken education system,” says Judith Leveillee, Unicef deputy representative in the Central African Republic. “But we must do what we can to get children back to school. This is where they should be. They have already lost so much.”
Back at the Louanga displacement camp, an energetic and passionate Nguirissara is teaching her young pupils a song. “Maybe it is my destiny; I don’t know,” she says. “But teaching children is something I like doing – and this way I can help them and my country.”
Suzanne Beukes is communications officer at Unicef’s Africa Services Unit.
African nations are experiencing substantial urbanisation at a rate like never before. A continent that was once characterised by its largely rural nature is now seeing diverse groups of people – ethnically, religiously, and socioeconomically – flood its urban centres, 50 of which have a population of one million or more.
People come to the city for a number of reasons – to escape civil conflicts in rural areas, to search for employment in an effort to better their lives and those of their extended families, or in response to environmental issues such as drought or famine. In Africa especially, circular migratory patterns exist as people oscillate between large urban centres (to have access to wealth and other resources such as food and aid) and their villages (to maintain familial bonds).
However, even with the circular nature of migratory patterns as it exists, urban centres continue to grow in Africa. Considering the high fertility rates across the board, the bulk of this growth is in fact not coming from migrants but from the offspring of current city dwellers. When you combine this growth together with the aforementioned migratory population, it is estimated that this continent, where approximately 40% of the population lives in cities, will be more than 60% urban by 2050.
Traffic on Agege Motor Road in Lagos. (Pic: AFP)
In the 2014 publication Africa’s Urban Revolutionby professors Susan Parnell and Edgar Pieterse, civic conflict – a phenomenon that occurs hand in hand with this kind of rapid urbanisation – is defined. It is the violent expression of grievances vis-à-vis the state or other actors. Essentially, civic conflict is the manifestation of marginalised civilians’ frustration on the state’s inability to do things such as provide adequate housing or transportation, reduce distresses such as traffic and pollution or provide other services including healthcare, education to the masses. Though this type of conflict is distinct from warfare, which commonly exists in rural areas, these conflicts exist and effect great numbers of city dwellers. With the urbanisation in Africa taking place at its current rate, these conflicts should not be ignored.
The misconception that urban growth is temporary, that it will dwindle as conflict in rural areas is solved, robs civilians of a chance to live comfortably within the cities that they occupy. When I travelled to Abuja in February, I was struck by the immense traffic around the national mosque on Friday evenings. In recent years, increasing Boko Haram attacks in the northern states of Nigeria, many people have come to the nation’s capital to be out of this harm’s way. The traffic associated with the expanding population of the city does not only occur during this holy time for those of Muslim faith, but during rush hour as people struggle to find or get to work. Of course, the Nigerian state should take the steps it must in order to oust the terrorist group driving people away from their homes and into the capital. However, it should not be assumed that if and when it does, the population of Abuja will decrease to a more manageable one. Abuja and other cities in Africa that are experiencing growth from similar factors must increase attention towards alleviating woes within the urban centre or frustration amongst those caught in traffic jams of increasing length or those who live in inadequate housing due to the jurisdiction’s reluctance to provide the growing population with such will increase and strain the relationship between those who live in cities and those people who generate the policies around them.
Africa’s urbanisation provides both a challenge and an opportunity. It is an opportunity for young people to introduce innovative ideas that will allow for diverse groups in urban centres to be able to equally access resources and infrastructure in a way that will not put pressure on the state. However, in order to do so, the state must recognise that city growth is long-term and facilitate this kind of innovation. A symbiotic relationship between the state, the city centres and the population must be developed that allows for the growth of cities to occur in an efficient way that is considerate of the many different types of people who occupy these spaces. As cities continue to grow in Africa, which they will, it is important that city management and these kinds of symbiotic relationships are not neglected. If they are, these civic conflicts and the ugly violence that becomes of them are sure to grow as well.
Georges Ekwensi is a Nigerian American from New Jersey. He contributes to Rise Africa, a blog written by a group of individuals who seek to create an atmosphere that encourages conversation between Africans on the continent and in the diaspora. Connect with them on Twitter: @riseafrica
Activists in Uganda, where HIV prevalence is on the rise, have warned that new legislation criminalising deliberate transmission of the virus will further undermine efforts to stem the Aids epidemic and erode the rights of those living with HIV.
As well as setting out fines and jail terms of up to 10 years for those found guilty of “willful and intentional” transmission, the HIV/AIDS Prevention and Control Bill, passed by Parliament on May 8 and now awaiting presidential assent, also obliges pregnant women and their partners to take HIV tests, and in some circumstances empowers health workers to unilaterally disclose a patient’s positive status to an at-risk partner or household member. It also obliges parents to tell their children of their status.
“Despite years of engagement and labouring to explain the dangers on an HIV-specific criminal law, Parliament has refused to be advised. When experts on HIV research and management attempted to speak, [lawmakers] still failed to heed to the key concerns,” Dorah Kinconco Musinguzi, executive director of Uganda Network on Law, Ethics and HIV/AIDS (UgaNet), told IRIN.
“If we have not managed to test 67% of Ugandans for HIV without a law that punishes transmission, will this number improve when citizens know that more legal burdens are added to testing? The answer is no. Will their behaviour improve because of this fear? No. Will we have helped the HIV situation then? No. We shall have more people transmit HIV in ignorance of their status. Laws do little to change behaviour, instead it takes behaviour underground,” she said.
Over the past five years HIV prevalence in Uganda has risen from 6.4% to 7.3%.
“The evidence from the Ugandan Ministry of Health shows clearly – criminalisation of HIV doesn’t work. It drives people away from services and fuels discrimination and fear,” Asia Russell of the HIV advocacy organisation Health GAP, told IRIN.
(Pic: Mujahid Safodien / IRIN)
Alex Ario, the national co-ordinator of the ministry’s AIDS Control Programme (ACP), said “the Bill may not be that useful in my view. It does not add value to the current efforts. Actually, with dwindling support from donor communities to ACP as it is now, we would rather divert efforts to lobby government of Uganda to put more money for HIV activities rather than legislating against people with HIV.”
“We need to redirect legislative reform, and law enforcement, towards addressing sexual and other forms of violence against women, and discrimination and other human rights violations against people living with HIV and people most at risk of exposure to HIV,” he said.
Russell added that in conjunction with the Anti-Homosexuality Act, which passed into law in February 2014, this new law could lead “a sex worker apprehended for sex work, who is transgender and HIV positive, [to] be sent to prison for life.”
UgaNet’s Musinguzi said: “This [Bill] will hurt the women we have been encouraging to come up to take an HIV test such that they can have HIV-free children. But in this case, they will be forced to disclose their results and should they fear, and not do it in time, that means that they are potential candidates for [prosecution under] the Bill…
“There is high likelihood that justice will not prevail for the HIV-positive [people] found in this situation because of the high levels of stigma and condemnation that we have seen the HIV-positive go through,” she added.
More than 150 000 people are becoming HIV-positive every year; 1.5-million Ugandans are HIV-positive, according to Uganda Aids Commission statistics.
The Bill also flies in the face of the “rights-based” approach to HIV embodied in the regional HIV/AIDS Act passed in April 2012 by the East African Legislative Assembly.
Those in favour…
Meanwhile, some MPs have been defending the Bill.
“Every piece of legislation is to prevent mischief. The Bill is both [a] legal and moral thing. We want to reduce down HIV deliberate infections,” Medard Lubega Ssegona, opposition shadow minister for justice and constitutional affairs, told IRIN.
“The Bill will encourage more people to go and test for their good. It will compel two consenting adults to test before they engage to each other because of the sanctions of false disclosure,” he said, adding: “The deliberate infections have caused a lot of burden [on] our economy. The government spends a lot of money on treating and taking care of people who have [been] deliberately infected by people with bad hearts. This is going to stop.”
Olivia Kwagala Kabaale, a legislator from the ruling National Resistance Movement party, said: “The mandatory disclosure will help to protect those who take care of the HIV sick people. Some of these people don’t want to disclosure their status yet they pose a risk of transmission of the virus to others.”
Laws in Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania also criminalise deliberate HIV transmission, leaving Rwanda the only member of the East African Community not to do so.
The new Bill also establishes the legal framework for an HIV Trust Fund to finance local-level programmes using money generated by levies on bank transactions and savings interest, air tickets, beer, soft drinks and cigarettes, as well taxes on goods and services traded within Uganda.
“The Bill is creating [an] HIV trust fund which is going to help the government raise local funds to support the HIV programme. It’s a right time for us now as a country to mobilize our own resources to fight the epidemic. We have been depending on donor support for our HIV fight,” said Kabaale.
