Category: Perspective

Rape: A weapon on the battlefields and in the suburbs

Women take part in a campaign at the hospital ‘Heal Africa’ which advocates an end to sexual violence and rape against women, and complications which arrive from this, in Goma, DRC. (Pic: AFP)

American actress Angelina Jolie and British Foreign Secretary William Hague hosted a War Zone Rape Summit in London last month. Officially named ‘the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict’, it sought to highlight and combat the use of sexual violence against women and children within war zones.

The event was the biggest of its kind and brought together thought leaders, policy makers and change makers from around the world. The issues raised were especially relevant, given the current Boko Haram situation. Around two hundred Nigerian school girls who were abducted by the Islamist group on April 22 are yet to be found.

One of the key points of the summit was that during conflict it is not just guns causing destruction, but the penis. In times of war women are raped at an alarming rate as ‘all laws are suspended’ and anything goes.

Africa delegates featured prominently and many of the cases highlighted were from the region. African Union Commission chairperson Nkosozana Dlamini Zuma, speaking on one of the panels, stated that there must be zero tolerance of sexual assault within battle zones.

As part of its #ENDViolence campaign, Unicef has shared some statistics on sexual violence against women and children: in the Democratic Republic of Congo an average of 36 women and children are raped every day. In Somalia, 34% of rape survivors are children under the age of 12. And in war zones these statistics are sketchy at best as hordes go unreported because the channels to report are often destroyed in conflict.

It is well documented that women in Sierra Leone and Uganda have been subjected to rape, sexual slavery, and other forms of sexual abuse as well. There is a clear mandate to speak out on this. It has reached a point where sexual assault in countries such as Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire are posing a threat to justice, with this form of violence being a ‘characterising feature of war’.

But why is the brutality of rape only highlighted during war when the act is no less brutal on a Saturday night in a peaceful suburb? Why are you an animal in the combat zone and a man asserting himself in the city?

Rape: present during war and peace
At the summit, Nobel laureate Leymah Gbowee said that ‘Sexual violence in war is directly related to sexual violence in peace’ .

The problem is as prevalent across the continent, although it doesn’t receive an equal amount of attention in all countries. Take Kenya, which has had to deal with a legacy of British troops raping women over a period of 30 years. This institutionally imposed silence was broken by Amnesty International in 2003 when it emerged that over 650 women had been raped by British soldiers as long ago as 1965 and as recently as 2001.

The majority of these cases were gang rapes perpetrated by men during training sessions, not during times of war.

Sexual violence as a societal weapon
Sexual violence as a weapon is not only something confined to the battlefield and understanding this could go a long way towards reconceptualising the prevalent idea of ‘victim blame’. If someone pulls a knife on you people will not automatically look at what you did to ‘deserve’ it; the same should hold true of sexual violence, and not only during war.

Most people are aware that rape is never about the sexual act (the need for sex per se), but about asserting dominance. Men have supposedly romanticised the idea of rape, equating it to notions of ‘machismo’. This is in no way to excuse rape, humans after all separate ourselves from being beasts by resisting and restraining destructive primal urges.

Within the private realm sex is seen as a weapon, a tool that speaks to a balance of power and is seen more as a power struggle between two people and not as serious attack. Often cases involving sexual assault either fall to the wayside or the perpetrators receive ridiculously inadequate punishments, such as cutting grass.

In the home there are certain power dynamics that take place in terms of sexual relations between spouses. For one, to be married to another is to essentially lose the ability to state when and where sexual relations take place. This power struggle in the home can be embodied in the phrase: ‘There is no such thing as marital rape’. This is a view infamously held by the Chief Justice of South Africa Mogoeng Mogoeng, who came under fire for downplaying domestic violence in his judgments.

The idea of sexual assault as a weapon extends to sexuality as well.

Corrective rape in South Africa is rife. This act is based on the premise that a man can change the sexuality of a lesbian woman through the act of forcibly sleeping with her thus making her ‘see the light’. The idea that one can be changed or altered through a forced sexual act is again using sex as a weapon.

A move away from victim blame
The call for empowerment of women is tied extremely tightly to the notion that rape is not the fault of the person who is assaulted, that they need not carry that burden. Sexual assault needs to be seen in light of any form of physical assault. No one questions someone who has been shot, and one shouldn’t be questioned as to the ‘role you played’ in your rape.

Summits such as this one highlight the aggressive nature of sexual assault and show it in a new light and context: as something outside the sexual realm and akin to a stabbing or even a shooting. It highlights the violence behind the act.

The call for a global shift from that of impunity (especially in the case of those involved in sexual assault within conflict zones) speaks to the severity of the situation. Sexual assault is not just about sex, one person wanting it and one person not. It has a far more vicious element to it which is often left out of the global rhetoric on the subject.

Sexual violence is violence, not just on the battlefield. It is not asking for it in one place and a weapon of mass destruction in another. Seeing it in the context of conflict shows the severity and brutality of the situation, a lens that should be applied across all cases, not just ones in which the man doing the raping is carrying an AK-47.

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’sidentity, experiences and sexuality. Connect with her on Twitter: @tiffmugo

11 years ago

Open letter to the anti-TV brigade and my Nollywood people

A black 4 x4 rolls down a driveway to the sound of D’banj’s Oliver Twist and stops outside the palatial triple storey residence. The cast’s names unfold: Desmond Eliott. Rita Dominic. Mike Ezuruonye. The driver turns off the engine. As he opens the car door, D’banj declares:

I have a confession
See, I like Beyonce!
I like Rihanna, she dey mek me go gaga
I like Omotola, cos people like her….
…Oliver, Oliver Twist!

The young man — played by Mike Ezuruonye — steps out of the car. With calculated chill, he adjusts his trendy aviator sunglasses. The camera zooms in on the Gucci logo, then lingers on the trendy haircut that would get a nod of approval from the Kinshasa’s sapeurs; those gentlemen whose renowned stylishness is encoded in their very name: Societe des Ambianceurs et des Personnes Elegantes (Society of Ambience-Makers and Elegant People). A beautiful young woman in impossibly high heels emerges from the passenger side, as D’banj declares his liking for Genevieve. Her makeup alone is worthy of a Vogue magazine cover. The man puts his hand around her waist, and looks into her eyes with a loving enchantment that would be perfect for a John Legend video. The couple walks into the opulent lounge, boasting the requisite plush lounge suite, thick carpets, huge flat-screen TV, and artworks on the walls. Seated alone is a well-dressed older woman, her turquoise head-wrap intricately folded like an origami. “Good-morning mama,” the young man greets cheerfully, arm still around his lover. The camera zooms in on the origami head, as she gives him ‘The Look.’ We sit back and wait, knowing what is coming seconds before it is delivered: the multi-syllabic Nolly-sneer….

* * *

Hi. My name is Grace and I own a TV.

As a lapsed Catholic, I know a thing or two about confessions. You know what they say: Catholic guilt, like Catholic marriage, is truly a for-better-or-worse situation. You can take the Catholic out of mass but you cannot take the guilt out of the Catholic. So, like D’Banj, I have a confession to make: I watch the news and sports, but my main TV viewing diet is soapies and Nollyflicks. Yes, including 7 de Laan, Rhythm City and Nollyflicks with titles like Adam’s Apples and Daughters of Eve. I realise this is a dangerous confession for a wannabe Kleva Black, because we are supposed to have our noses perpetually buried in Slavoj Žižek’s or Cornel West’s latest thoughts, as fantastic jazz plays in the background. Naturally, we are not supposed to know who Sarkodie is; never mind the latest ghetto kids’ choreography of Ugandan hitmaker Eddy Kenzo’s Jambolee. And we definitely aren’t supposed to be pondering how to transcribe that trademark Nollywood sneer-and-click combo, which has inspired an entire range of memes.

Look, in my defence, in between trying out these Jambolee moves and Nollywood sneer-clicks, I read books and listen to jazz, in the interests of keeping peace with the jazz snobs and literati in my life. I am currently bonding with Ahmad Jamal and reading Kenyan Caine Prize winner Yvonne Owuor’s Dust. But I remain guilty of owning and watching a TV. This is a serious indiscretion, which might explain why a few second dates never materialised in my dating past. Perhaps I should not have betrayed such enthusiastic knowledge of Jason Malinga’s marital problems on Generations, or such passionate irritation at Gita McGregor’s perpetual scheming on 7 de Laan. Or maybe it was my sincere puzzlement at the murder mystery in Thathe, implicating the Great Warthog of Luonde, He-Who-Says-Die-and-I-Perish.

While we are at it, what’s the deal with the duplication of stories across South African soapies? I see now the missing Malaysian plane that first resurfaced on Rhythm City with Siyabonga Twala’s stylish character, DH Radebe’s private jet disappearing, has now reappeared and disappeared again on Isidingo. Yes, it is another stylish black businessman’s private jet: Vusi Kunene as Jefferson Sibeko, disappeared somewhere off the Angolan coastline. I am guessing the scriptwriters don’t know this, but some of us are equal-opportunity viewers (to borrow a phrase from my friend who once defended his polyamorous tendencies by explaining that he always made it clear to the women in his life that he was an equal-opportunity lover). Unlike my bank which recently demanded financial monogamy from me, by declaring they wouldn’t handle some of my transactions unless I stopped ‘seeing’ my other bank; some of us have dispensed with LSM monogamy, and we are now equal-opportunity viewers who gallivant across SABC and DStv’s audience Bantustans. And I can tell you this much: when you start on an amnesia and stolen identity story-line in Diepkloof at 18h30, by the time you get to the Thathe flavour of this amnesia on Muvhango at 21h20, you have just about had it with the amnesia angle, in all its manifestations. While we are at it, I am this close to organising a Red October campaign in protest against Paula van der Lecq’s (Diaan Lawrenson) use of the word ‘phantasmagoris’ on 7 de Laan, and KK Mulaudzi’s trying-too-hard-to-be-hardcore robotic laughter on Muvhango.

But I must distance myself from The Bold and the Beautiful. There is a way in which if you started watching The Bold from episode one, when you were six sizes smaller, the sight of Brooke Logan Jones Forrester (x7) walking down the aisle with her daughter’s husband’s father for the umpteenth time is harmful to your health. It is not so much the many tribes of primary, secondary and tertiary incest involved, but the deep shame that you ever nursed a committed teenage crush on Ridge Forester. As did half your school. The other half was busy ogling the NBA’s Dennis Rodman and his peroxide-blond head. I wasn’t a Rodman fan, but I supported the San Antonio Spurs with the same passion I now dedicate to the Super Eagles of Nigeria, the Ghana Black Stars, the Indomitable Lions of Cameroon, the Desert Foxes of Algeria and the Elephants of Côte d’Ivoire. What? Too many teams? No, friend. When it comes to soccer, I am an equal-opportunity Pan-African. Sure, I got that memo about all my Foxes, Eagles, Elephants, Lions and Stars being whipped out of Brazil before they even finished unpacking. This, despite the fact that many of Europe’s soccer leagues would have a crisis of SA platinum-belt proportions if all their players of African descent decided to go on a prolonged strike. Like all matters Pan-African, supporting African soccer is not for part-time Africans. It takes the loyalty of an Arsenal or Bafana fan, and the patience of biblical Job.

So, you can see why I have no energy for an anti-TV brigade which has somehow convinced itself that not having a TV makes it a special breed of really clever, studious, intellectual people. I am generally able to ignore this lot with the same indifference I reserve for those who think my Christianity is questionable because their limited imagination cannot process the idea of a dedicated Christian who does not go to church and is partial to Windhoek lager. What I can’t ignore though, are people who build careers studying popular culture or producing content for these platforms while simultaneously holding TV, radio, and magazines in such contempt. What brand of dishonest schizophrenia is this?

But I digress. The moral of this open letter is really an appeal to my people in Nollywood. Listen: That situation of sunglasses indoors? E no fine oo. E shady. Abeg, mek we stop this nah.

Sincerely,

A TV-owning equal-opportunity Nolly-fan

Grace A. Musila is a Kenyan who studied in South Africa.

11 years ago

Ethiopia’s child brides see marriage as key to jobs abroad – study

Ethiopian immigrants returning from Saudi Arabia arrive at Addis Ababa’s Bole International Airport on December 10 2013. Each year, thousands of Ethiopians facing harsh economic realities at home seek work in the Middle East, but many face abuse, low pay and discrimination. (Pic: AFP)

Up a bumpy, winding dirt track in the mountains of northern Ethiopia, past two bulls chewing pasture and a rondavel built from sticks and cow dung, is the modest home of Lubaba Abdella, its mudbrick walls reinforced by eucalyptus bark and topped by a corrugated roof.

Abdella has lived a lifetime, yet she is still in her teens. She dropped out of school, married, divorced three months later and emigrated illegally so she could cook and clean for a family in Saudi Arabia, earning money to support her parents and eight siblings. Now she is home and back to square one.

Three-quarters of girls in the Ethiopian region of Amhara become child brides like Abdella, according to the London-based Overseas Development Institute. Many also join the so-called “maid trade”: up to 1 500 girls and women leave the east African country each day to become domestic workers in the Middle East. A study has shown for the first time how these pernicious trends feed off each other.

In Ethiopia’s Muslim communities it is often deeply shameful or “sinful” for girls to remain unmarried after they begin menstruating, notes the ODI. But once girls are married and sexually initiated, parents consider their social and religious obligations complete.

The thinktank’s researchers in Amhara found it was therefore becoming common for parents to insist on marriage followed by a swift divorce so that their daughter was free to migrate and send her earnings home to her parents, not her husband. The fact a girl had already been “deflowered” meant she was seen as less likely to be disgraced by foreign men. “It’s a question of virtue and virginity,” one local researcher said. “Better to lose it in a dignified way.”

Girl Summit
The findings are being released ahead of the first Girl Summit, hosted by the British government and Unicef on Tuesday with the stated aim of ending female genital mutilation and child marriage within a generation. The ODI will warn that parents who see their daughters as commodities are pushing record numbers of girls into abusive early marriages. Some 39 000 child brides marry every day – 14 million a year – often against their will. Amhara has Ethiopia’s lowest average marriage age – 14.7 years – and one of its highest illiteracy rates.

Abdella, now 19, illustrates the constrained choices and warped pragmatism that many here face. She was 16 when she dropped out of school for an arranged marriage to a 22-year-old. It lasted only three months. “He used to hit her,” said Abdella’s mother, Zeyneba Seid. “They didn’t like each other so divorce was inevitable.”

It was hastened when Abdella’s husband wanted to seek work abroad. Speaking Amharic through an interpreter, she recalled: “If a man migrates alone to the Middle East, he will cheat on you. But it’s difficult to migrate with your husband and still support your family. That’s why I wanted a divorce.”

Nevertheless, Abdella believed even her short-lived marriage would be an advantage overseas. “I was told I’m young and it’s better if I know what marriage is before migrating. People in the Middle East might force us to sleep with them. If a girl has been married and goes to Saudi and is raped, it’s not as bad as for one who’s single. If she’s single and bears a child, it’s really difficult to come back here. But if she’s been married, it’s OK.”

The ODI found that some girls also choose to migrate, against their parents’ wishes, out of a sense of filial piety that tends to be weaker in boys. Abdella says it was her own decision because her family was in poverty, farming just one hectare of land. Notably she has an elder brother who is still at school. “He was asked to migrate but he wanted to continue his education, so I had to go and earn. I wanted my family to be better off.”

For the residents of Hara, a remote mountain village where the air fills with birdsong, cocks crowing and the Muslim call to prayer, and the streets with bajajs (motorised three-wheeled rickshaws), camels and boys herding goats, Saudi Arabia offers an alluring promise of riches just as America once did to Europe’s huddled masses. The results can be seen in a series of neat concrete houses with colourful paintwork, barred windows and a sprinkling of satellite dishes that have sprung up in the past five years, funded by wages from the east. Owning a corrugated roof is a status symbol here. For those still living in older houses made from mud and thatch there is the perpetual struggle of keeping up with the Joneses.

“Seeing the houses that were built makes you wish you’d migrated,” said Abdella, who sleeps with her family on the floor of two cramped rooms. “We have a lot of needs: clothes, shoes. Most of the time we cannot afford them, whereas people in Saudi had money.”

Working in Saudi Arabia
It is now illegal under Ethiopian law for anyone under 18 to migrate to work but Abdella, like thousands of others, got a passport by using a fake ID and lying to the authorities that she was 27. The entire process cost 15 000 birr (£445). She cooked, cleaned and washed clothes for a Saudi couple and their three children and was paid 800 riyals (£125) a month, paying off the debt and earning enough for her family to be connected to electricity and water and cover food bills.

The job came to an end after 20 months when Saudi Arabia carried out a mass deportation of illegal foreign workers. “I’m doing nothing at the moment,” sighed Abdella as two chickens scampered across the house’s dirt floor. “Seeing my family suffering here, I don’t want to remarry, I just want to support my family. I want to go back to the Middle East. There’s no other option because the wage is really low here.

“My younger sister, who’s 15, is planning to go. I advise her to because she can earn more and do whatever she wants. But she would have to marry first – it’s our custom.”

The pattern of marriage and divorce is becoming increasingly common. Aesha Mohammed (16) recently married a man six years her senior, only to divorce after two months because she refused to quit school. Her elder sister also married and divorced, then migrated to work in Saudi Arabia. Mohammed, who wants to become a doctor, said: “Sometimes when I joke with her, ‘I want to drop out of school and come to Saudi’, she says no, stay in school because it’s hard there. There is a lot of work and it’s a burden.”

The journey to get there can also be treacherous. For some it involves more than a week on foot to Djibouti, then a six-hour boat ride to Yemen after dark, followed by 15 to 20 days travelling by road to Saudi Arabia. Habtam Yiman (24) who married aged 12 and has married twice since, said she was detained in Yemen because officials did not believe she had a sponsor. “They check your blood type and take some of it for the hospital,” she said. “I saw a man whose blood was completely drained out of him and he was left to die.”

Yet still thousands are pouring in for the sake of their families. The ODI, which hosted a field visit by the Guardian last week, reports that some girls go because they “feel inferiority” and have been “seduced by the glamorous stories” told by illegal brokers. The fate that awaits them can include overwork, non-payment, social isolation and abuse.

When Zemzem Damene set off to work in Kuwait, she was a normal girl who wanted to earn money and be like her friends. Today she is confused, withdrawn and virtually mute, a stranger to her own family. Something happened to Damene in Kuwait and no one knows exactly what.

As the 20-year-old peered nervously from under her veil and picked at her hand, her mother, Engocha Sete, recalled: “She wanted to go and I couldn’t stop her. She said her friends went to the Middle East and brought home shiny objects. She wanted that and she had to have what she wished for.”

Her father, Damene Alemu, added: “I was sad she wanted to go. I asked her to marry here but she said, ‘You don’t have a lot of money to marry me off, it’s not logical.’ Marriage is an expensive thing for the father, with buying clothes, organising a party, paying two months of utilities. She said it’s best that she go off to the Middle East.”

But the plan backfired and Damene actually lost more money than she made, forcing the family to sell cattle. According to Alemu, his daughter’s first employer took all the money she had and even the clothes she brought from home, and that was the start of her decline. “She went to a hospital in Addis Ababa but they didn’t tell us what the problem was, only that it’s a mental illness.”

Damene’s mother added pensively: “She doesn’t do anything now. She doesn’t speak much. Most of the time she sleeps. Now she’s sick, there’s nobody wants to marry her. If she gets better, we’d like her to get married. But because she’s lost so much, the only thing she talks about is money.”

11 years ago

Defining ‘the African woman’: Save your labels for Tupperware

(Graphic: Flickr / James P. Wells)

If there is one thing that I love to do it’s organise things. There is something wonderfully joyous about clothes that are sorted according to their colours, shoes organised by heel height and e-mails that are slotted into descriptive categories and archived. It’s systematic. It’s blissful! It’s neat, and to me neat means manageable. I love neat like I love Tupperware, shelves and label makers. The problem with this ritualistic tidiness is that it doesn’t translate so well in the real world. People are by their very nature inconsistent and chaotic yet for some reason we often refuse to acknowledge that. Nowhere – in my experience – is there more labelling and identity policing than in the LGBT community.

If one takes a glimpse into not-so-conforming Black Woman spaces, one will find a mess of labels and rituals. There is very little freedom to manoeuver because, oftentimes, you are exiled to a box that defines your mannerisms, behaviour, speech, style and the people you like. I remember being on a date with a woman when she made a comment like “you femmes have it easy”; it stopped me dead in my tracks. At the time I didn’t quite have the language to tell her my thoughts on the subject other than to say “Uh… I don’t like labels, it’s just not something I do but I will call myself African“. In retrospect, after countless accusations about my gender identity and romantic preferences, I realise that statements like that are inherently selfish. It is selfish to tell people who and what they are based on some measure that you have chosen for yourself.

African women are complicated. How we live and love is complicated. Our politics and ideals are woven into the way we are and not because of an adherence to some ideology. There are numerous pieces written about “fat shaming” and body politics, and these are important, but other people actually live body affirmation. They carry their small breasts and muscular arms with pride and are quick to appreciate the beauty of a short round woman with a full belly and child-worn breasts. They acknowledge womanhood in its various forms and do not need words like feminism, queer-theory, discourse and praxis to do so because they live Black Womanhood. They head households, love their partners, appreciate the power of female friendships and do this all while being driven by something internal and unregulated by the outside world.

I sometimes wonder whether it is this fundamental understanding of our womanhood that creates a sense of cohesion among us. At almost all Black Women gatherings one will find that sexual orientation and gender identity aren’t the common denominators. There have been numerous times where I was in “mixed company” – in the sense that we didn’t call ourselves the same things or live the same lifestyles. There would be women snuggling their girlfriends in one corner, engaged women, man-eaters, virgins, masculine women, the odd “down for whatever” girl and decidedly fluid women all in one room politicking and relating, just because. This is something that I think we need to work hard at nurturing and maintaining. African Women’s spaces should not become exclusive clubs where people only gain access by being “radical” or well-versed in anything other than living life in this skin, at this time.

People know themselves and it’s up to them to tell us who they are. Increasingly, African Women are more open about the fluidity in their being(s) so it is important to legitimise that fluidity. Nesting people’s “selfness” under rigidly defined labels isn’t cool and seems so counter-intuitive. There are people who are not sexually attracted to other people at all. There are also people who only find masculinity or femininity attractive and only in certain bodies. If one considers how deeply attraction and gender are rooted in the individual then it’s easy to see that it is not easy at all. It is complicated and not something that should confined within hard lines. People are not objects that can be collected, measured up and sorted. Identity necessarily changes and no matter how contradictory the people you have been are, they make sense in your story.

Culture makes things difficult because there is an archetype of who “the African Woman” is. People would describe her as maternal, strong, patient, traditional, long-suffering, soulful and protective. Her life is not her own, it belongs to her family and community. Think about it for a second… we all know who she is because she is the woman that lies in the cradle of our conscience and makes us wonder why we are the way we are. Still there are problems with who she is. She is the ideal but that doesn’t make her perfect. Nearly all of us know that we are not her and many more of us do not want to be her despite the fact that her voice has taught us how to understand ourselves.

However many of us have figured out that there are numerous ways of being a woman and many more ways of living up to the ideal. Since the nature of our self-exploration(s) is very much determined by our societies, what makes us outliers will be relative. In some cases it may be a person’s gender presentation and in others it could be the fact that they have piercings, tattoos and love FKA Twigs. This state of being “not-quite-” or “not-so-” or “non-conforming” is refreshing and it’s time to acknowledge that while our parents have already given us our names, we are also quite free to rename ourselves and respect that process in others.

Tatenda Muranda is a self-identified suit in a feminist activist. She co-founded HOLAAfrica and currently sits on the advisory committee for FRIDA The Young Feminist Fund. When she is not feministing she happily works in private equity in Johannesburg, South Africa.

11 years ago

Kenya: Teens are having sex, so let them have it safely

It may be a hard fact for some to digest, but children younger than 15 in Kenya are having sex. This is according to the 2008-09 Kenyan Demographic Health Survey, which is the most recent such research carried out in Kenya. It’s now 2014 and I don’t have empirical proof, but if the rate and age of teenage pregnancy in Kenya is anything to go by, this age of sexual debut has dropped considerably.

Alarm bells are raised about teenage pregnancies in all countries. The target of well-meaning campaigns is almost always the girl – but not always in a good way. Even in our everyday language, we say “Susan fell pregnant” – because it’s similar to tripping over a sidewalk you didn’t see. It just happens, and Susan has little to no agency in the sex act that culminated in her becoming pregnant. But we hear that “Johnnie impregnated Jane”, putting Johnny in a position of power over the girl that he had sex with. The idea that young girls and boys engage in sexual activity for pleasure is a bitter pill to swallow for many African parents. In an attempt to keep young people chaste and pure, the other side of the story – the boy-meets-girl story, the raging hormones and carnal desires story – is never told.

Puberty is a tumultuous time for young girls and boys. All the changes and attractions that the body and mind go through, and how to deal with them, is a trial-and-error minefield that young people find themselves in. The standard lesson many teenagers get from parents is: don’t have sex. Don’t get pregnant. Just don’t. But very few parents offer a conversation about the feelings that teenagers have at that time. Sex is presented as this scary, impossible to understand thing which should be reserved for marriage. But the will of the flesh often wins over the threats of parents, whether well-intentioned or not. Teenagers are having sex, and are going to continue to have sex because that’s what their bodies are telling them to do. But with little to no information on how to have safe and informed sex, the Russian roulette that young people play with their lives is dangerous.

Kenyans walk past condoms exhibited in the streets as workers distribute them on February 14 2014 to promote safe sex practices during the Valentine week and to mark International Condom Day. (Pic: AFP)

But Kenya might have a solution for this. The proposed Reproductive Health Care Bill 2014 is, according to its sponsor Senator Judith Sijeny, meant to “provide a framework for the protection and advancement of reproductive and health rights for women and children.” Those in favour of the Bill point to its potential to reduce teenage pregnancies and manage population control. Those against it are outraged by a clause that allows children from the age of 10 to access sexual reproductive health services and information without the consent of parents. This, as you can imagine, has parents, religious leaders and all sorts up in arms, saying that the government is bypassing their authority and allowing children to access contraceptives without their consent. What parents against this clause in the Bill are really resisting is their moral authority over their children who might not share the same philosophies about sex anymore. It’s being dubbed the Condoms-for-Kids Bill, which by inference is not a positive thing.

Sections 33 (2-3) and 34 (1a-c) of the Bill are the problematic parts and read as follows:

In the provision of reproductive health services to adolescents, parental consent is not mandatory… nothing prevents a health care provider from whom reproductive health services are sought by an adolescent, from referring the adolescent to a qualified person for provision of the necessary services.

The Board is consultation with government institutions and other bodies shall –
(a) facilitate the provision to of adolescent- friendly reproductive health and sexual health information and education;
(b) facilitate the provision to adolescents of confidential, comprehensive, non-judgmental and affordable reproductive health services;
(c) develop policies to protect adolescents from physical and sexual violence and discrimination including cultural practices that violate the reproductive health rights of the adolescents; and facilitate adolescents access to information, comprehensive sexuality education and confidential services.

If ever there was progress, this is it. And I say this not as a once horny teenager, but also as a parent with a child who will one day grow up and want to have sex. I won’t be there when these decisions are made but I would like to know that there are places where my child and his partner can go to access information and appropriate contraceptive options, free of judgment and harassment.

As parents, we like to think that we know our children better than they know themselves, but the truth is that we don’t. In fact, they probably know us better than we know them. Young people learn from each other easier and faster than they learn from their parents and other older role models. Kenyan parents are scared that making sexual reproductive healthcare information and facilities available to children without their consent will normalise pre-marital sex and encourage promiscuity. Condoms have been presented as a “burden” that school-going children do not need to be made to bear. The civil society organisations that start sex education clubs are accused of pushing donor-driven agendas with their endless access to condom money, and reducing these clubs to “fornication dens where condoms are handed out like sweets“. One opinion went as far as to suggest that this push for legislation to liberalise access to contraception for school-going children is a conspiracy between Members of Parliament and pharmaceutical companies looking to make a killing.

All conspiracy theories aside, the hard fact is that young people are having sex. Parents try, and fail miserably, when they play the morality card. Also, making girl children passive actors in the sex experience doesn’t help. Consensual sex is not something that ‘just happens’. And, much as no one wants to say so: in the same way that adults enjoy sex, so do young, sexually active girls and boys. The threat of teen pregnancy, school drop-outs, even the chance of contracting HIV, is not sufficient to scare young people off having sex.

The decent and right thing to do is to create an environment where it is safe for young people to have safe, consensual sex. This would mitigate all the other issues that unprotected, uninformed sex brings up. A Bill like this empowers young people to know that they are in charge of their own sexuality and sex related choices. And this puts power in the hands of young people to shape their own futures.

Leaving the power to make these decisions in the hands of adults and parents opens young people up to abuse by the same parents and so-called adults. This Bill might empower students enough to refuse the advances of teachers and other adults in positions of power who are notorious for abusing their positions.

I’d imagine that when my own child is at a sexually active age, and finds it hard to speak to me about sex, he has a safe place, free of judgment, where he can go and get all the information that he needs to make sure that he protects himself and his partner. I say pass the Bill unedited, and be brave enough to allow Kenyan children to have agency and power over their own sexuality and sexual choices.

Sheena Gimase is a Kenyan-born and Africa-raised critical feminist writer, blogger, researcher and thought provocateur. She’s lived and loved in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Botswana and Namibia. Sheena strongly believes in the power of the written word to transform people, cultures and communities. Read her blog and connect with her on Twitter.