Category: Perspective

I wanna hold your hand: Bro-love in Uganda

A friend visiting my hometown recently was quite shocked at the male-on-male affection he had received and witnessed since being in Uganda. As a heterosexual and somewhat macho male, he was uncomfortable with the hand-holding attempts made towards him by his Ugandan male hosts, coupled with the fact that he was completely caught off guard since he’d pegged Uganda as an ultra-masculine country as a result of all the anti-gay media reports. While the affection he was referring to has nothing to do with homosexuality or masculinity, it did make sense to me that an African-American 30-year-old male from New York would feel confused by a guy trying to hold his hand. I suppose I overlooked bringing up this cultural custom in my tourist guidelines for him, but I can see that it is noteworthy to mention, most especially to those with a more Western approach to same-gender PDA.

As a woman, observing male behavior from mannerisms to ego makes for interesting viewing – just as men enjoy peering, prowling and poking fun at our occasional feline cattiness and the mysticism surrounding us going to the bathroom in pairs. When you walk on Kampala’s streets, it isn’t uncommon to see two male friends walking hand in hand, peacefully and jubilantly swinging their hands in the basking sun or grown men greeting each other with a handshake that lingers into a hand interlock that lasts for a substantial part of the conversation. It is a very effortless and comfortable display of friendship, respect and affection. When I was younger I was embarrassed by my male family members holding hands with other males when greeting, most especially when they would do so with men of a different race, culture and background who were obviously uncomfortable and trying their level best to free themselves from the situation.

(Graphic: Kenny Leung)
(Graphic: Kenny Leung)

Western culture regards adult hand-holding as effeminate, romantic, something that generally takes place between a man and woman, a romantically involved couple, not between two heterosexual, non-feminine, virile African men. Once one gets rid of these preconceived and often fear-induced interpretations, it becomes obvious that these displays of affection are actually actions of good nature, solidarity and hospitality, not romantic fondness. In a debate with said African-American friend, I defended the affections he received from Ugandan males as no different to his regular greetings with his American friends. The only difference is that their actions have been adjusted and have conformed to fears and preconceptions of straight vs gay behaviour. I argued that their masculinity is increasingly being defined by rules and definitions of appropriate male behaviour in fear of seeming gay and ultimately fear of being gay, especially among black males. Same-gender affection is a normal part of life; our children do it naturally until they too become molded by ‘acceptable’ behavior, stereotypes and fear.

“I guess it’s an African thing,” he said.

I wasn’t going to let him get away with a conclusion that easily, most especially because I know many other cultures are less inhibited with expressions of bro-love. And I was right. Parts of Asia, the United Arab Emirates and other African countries tend to be more comfortable with male-on-male PDA, but just because it is uncommon in America now doesn’t mean it has always been that way.

I came across some 19th century American photography that proved my point. At the time it was quite common for men to go to a studio with their best friends and pose in seemingly affectionate and loving poses. They held hands, sat on each other’s laps, intertwined their hands and legs … I rest my case.  This was before homosexuality was termed such so perhaps the boundaries for homosexual behavior were less narrow and prejudiced. Men could hold hands because they liked each other, because they felt like it, because it wasn’t wrong to do so. This is all quite similar to 21st century Africa, where we aren’t yet as hung up with creating boundaries between heterosexual and homosexual behavior, although perhaps we are at the early stages of doing so.

When my African-American friend’s favourite basketball team celebrates a win or do whatever it is they do that drives them into a chest-bumping, ass slapping, hugging situation – that behavior isn’t equivocal to homosexuality, because it has been deemed appropriate by the powers that be, because it’s sports, adrenalin, basketball players or any other reason one could concoct, then it is acceptable? I guess so.

My friend felt assured and I suppose relieved that people weren’t making constant passes at him, but he wasn’t sure if he could return the love, and I get that. We can respect the cultural practices of others without having to conform to them. One needn’t feel forced to kiss another man on the cheeks because he is in Rome or walk the streets hand in hand with their buddy in Uganda but, as I said to my friend, if he does he’ll still be a ‘real’ man afterwards – I promise.

Melinda Ozongwu is a writer based in Kampala, Uganda. She writes television scripts and regular opinion pieces on the subtext of urban culture in African countries. Her blog SmartGirl Living is a cocktail of thoughts, recipes and advice for the modern African woman. Connect with her on Twitter. 

  

 

Nuruddin Farah: Getting kids back to school in Somalia

A child’s right to education is as sacrosanct as a child’s need for water, food, shelter and peace. But tragically the education system, like much of Somalia, has been virtually destroyed over the last 20 years by the terrible, senseless civil war. Now only four out of every 10 children go to school – one of the lowest enrollment rates anywhere in the world. And the numbers are far lower for girls, who are often kept at home for housework or pushed into an early marriage.

I travelled home to Somalia back in 1996, which was after only five years of civil war and already the schools had stopped functioning. At that time, I told anyone who would listen that education needed a kick-start and in the intervening years the situation has only got worse and worse. Students attend religious schools learning Arabic rather than Somali, and secondary education has been almost wiped out. So, teenage boys were attracted to the militias, like al-Shabab and other militant groups, for the food and money they provided.

When I was a young child, we lived in the Somali-speaking part of Ethiopia. There were no decent schools at that time there either. So my father took it upon himself to travel around, recruit a few teachers and personally pay them. I got to go to school – and as I was nearing the end of my primary education, as luck would have it, some missionaries set up a secondary school.

I clearly remember after a week at the secondary school thinking that this was a different world from the one in which my parents and my grandparents had grown up. This was because I could see myself through the eyes of the world to which I was being introduced. Through education, through books, I was given the chance to expand my universe far above that of my classmates and my parents. And this was all due to the exposure that I had to other languages, other cultures and other world views.

As a child I was able to place myself in the shoes of a child growing up in England or in America and my ambitions flew far ahead of my contemporaries in the same town simply because they didn’t have an education. The chances I had in the classroom quite simply made me the person I am today and gave me the opportunity to make a success of my life.

(Pic: Unicef)
(Pic: Unicef)

I believe that if you give any child the opportunity to read and study they will use the opportunity to take themselves – even if only in their imaginations – out of misery, out of civil war and out of strife to a higher plane.

Literacy also changes an entire community, an entire nation. It is not only schooling that is important, it is the idea of training the mind that becomes important. A child who attends school regularly behaves differently from one who is a truant and is more likely to be self-destructive and more likely to break rules.

It is discipline, patience and continuous learning that educates the mind, that makes a person produce peace: first of all within themselves and then moving that peace outside of themselves and sharing it with many, many others.

A peace process is therefore just another form of schooling – training adults’ minds to accept that there is no alternative to peace. And above all, that is what Somalia needs right now.

Nuruddin Farah is a prominent Somali novelist. He was awarded the 1998 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. 

On September 8 2013 – World Literacy Day – Somali education authorities with support from Unicef launched the Go 2 School initiative, an ambitious three-year campaign that plans to provide one million children and youth in Somalia with access to quality education. Farah and Beninois musician Angelique Kidjo have urged support for it.

Italy’s first black minister is here to stay

Three mannequins stained with fake blood were dumped last week outside a town hall where Cécile Kyenge was due to make a speech, the latest in a stream of racist protests and insults aimed by furious Italians at the country’s first black government minister.

After being likened to an orangutan by a former government minister and having bananas thrown at her while on a podium, it is getting tougher for Congo-born Kyenge (49), to keep up her oft-repeated mantra that Italy is a tolerant country – but she is trying hard.

“I have never said Italy is racist, every country needs to start building awareness of immigration and Italy has simply arrived very late,” she said on the day the mannequins were discovered.

Cécile Kyenge. (Pic: AFP)
Cécile Kyenge. (Pic: AFP)

Judging by the venom directed at Kyenge since she was named minister for integration in April, Italy needs to do some fast catching up as the ranks of foreign residents in the country swell to around four million, about 7% of the population.

But from her office in Rome, Kyenge insisted that children growing up in Italy’s burgeoning melting pot are free from the prejudices of their parents. “It’s easier for the young who have grown up with a different mentality, who have come across people from other places,” she said. “If you ask a child in a class who is their friend, it is more likely he will say ‘the one with the green jumper’ rather than ‘the black one’.”

That is not quite how Forza Nuova, the far-right party that left the Ku Klux Klan-style mannequins at the town hall, sees things. Kyenge’s work on behalf of immigrants, said party member Pablo de Luca, was aimed at “the destruction of the national identity”.

Such views are keenly shared by members of the Northern League, Italy’s anti-immigrant party, which propped up Silvio Berlusconi’s government until it collapsed in 2011.

MEP Mario Borghezio set the ball rolling in May by claiming that Kyenge would impose “tribal conditions” on Italy and help form a “bongo-bongo” administration. Africans, he added for good measure, had “not produced great genes”.

Public insults
In June, a local councillor for the party called for Kyenge to be raped, while in July Roberto Calderoli, a party member and former Berlusconi minister, compared her to an orangutan before bananas were lobbed at her as she made a speech.

To top a vituperative summer, a rightwing deputy mayor in Liguria compared Kyenge on his Facebook page to the prostitutes – often African – who line a local road, while a well-known Italian winemaker, Fulvio Bressan, shocked wine lovers by reportedly calling Kyenge a “dirty black monkey”.

It has been a tough reception for a woman who moved to Italy to work as a home help while she trained to become an ophthalmologist, marrying an Italian man and plunging into local politics in Modena to push for greater rights for immigrants before winning a seat in parliament in February.

“When I arrived in 1983, I was one of the few; I was a curiosity. Then, in the 1990s, when mass immigration started, immigrants began to be seen as a threat,” she said, recalling patients who had refused to be visited by her. “The process needed to be accompanied by more information in the media, in schools, better laws.”

A shock survey in 2008 found that when people were asked who they found “barely likeable or not likeable at all”, 81% of Italians mentioned Gypsies, 61% said Arabs, 64% said Romanians and 74% opted for Albanians.

Then came the crippling economic downturn, which sliced 15% off Italy’s manufacturing sector, pushed the unemployment rate up to 12% and further hardened perceptions of “job-stealing” migrants.

Citizenship law
What is really upsetting the Northern League is Kyenge’s work to overhaul Italy’s citizenship law, which currently forces the children of migrants born in Italy to wait until they are 18 before they can apply to become Italians, leaving a generation of children growing up feeling like Italians, talking local dialects like Italians, but unable to be Italian.

It has been dubbed the “Balotelli generation”, after black footballer Mario Balotelli – who was born to Ghanaian parents in Sicily and is now a mainstay in the Italian national team, but has faced stadium chants of “a negro cannot be Italian”.

Kyenge points out that she is not pushing for a US-style law that hands a passport to anyone born in the country, but for a toned-down version that would require the child’s parents to have spent some time in Italy or to have taken integration courses.

Meanwhile, she has backed new measures simplifying the bureaucratic nightmare faced by the children of immigrants, who have one year to complete a blizzard of paperwork needed to gain a passport when they turn 18. “You have from the age of 18 to 19 to apply and requests are often turned down due to a few missing documents,” she said.

It is just part of an ambitious programme to which the soft-spoken Kyenge has committed herself, stretching from working on housing issues for nomad families to inter-religious dialogue designed to make it easier for Italians to adopt overseas.

Her key task, she said, is convincing a country that has no shortage of culture – from its food to its art – that there is always room for more. “Diversity, sharing something you don’t have, offers a huge amount,” she said.

Turning to her own field, medicine, she said: “There are small examples of foreign customs which are being adopted by hospitals, like carrying your baby on your back, which can help children with ankle ailments as well as increasing physical contact with the parent while helping the posture of the parent.”

Critics have rounded on the fact that Kyenge’s father was polygamous, fathering 38 children by numerous wives, a custom she said she would not trying to encourage in Italy. “Let’s be clear,” she said, laughing, “this is a form of marriage I don’t agree with.”

Rather than threatening Italian traditions, Kyenge said the asylum-seekers now heading for Italy from sub-Saharan Africa and Syria could be taught to revive trades now being abandoned by Italians, especially if they were allowed to set up shop in the medieval hilltop villages that are rapidly being abandoned up and down the country.

Take, for example, the Calabrian town of Riace, which has reversed depopulation by welcoming the migrants landing on rickety boats after a perilous Mediterranean crossing and setting them up in trades such as dressmaking, joinery, pottery or glass-blowing.

“This is a good practice, using depopulated villages where there are many empty houses, where old farms, shops and workshops can be reopened,” said Kyenge, who visited Riace in August. “It offers a welcome to migrants, it’s good for the national economy and good for saving trades that risk disappearing.”

Back in Rome, as she works to get her message across, Kyenge is getting ready to dodge the next bunch of bananas as she continues to insist that Italy is not a racist country, just learning fast.

“Balotelli and I are both opening new paths in our fields,” she said, “and anyone who does that will face huge difficulties.”

 Tom Kington for the Guardian

Morocco’s African immigrants fear rising racism tide

“Is it a crime now, being an immigrant?” asks Eric Williams, a Cameroonian living in Rabat, where the murder of a Senegalese man has stoked fears among Morocco’s sub-Saharan community.

On August 12, Ismaila Faye (31) was stabbed to death near the capital’s central bus station during an argument with a Moroccan over seating, according to the preliminary investigation.

Local media highlighted the racist nature of the attack, sparking concerns of a rise in hostile behaviour towards black Africans, many of whom pass through Morocco illegally in their quest to reach Europe and a new life.

A week after the murder, hundreds of mostly Senegalese immigrants gathered outside the morgue in Rabat to pay homage to the victim and protest against racism.

A Senegalese man follows the hearse carrying the body of Ismaila Faye during his funeral procession in the Moroccan capital on August 19 2013. (Pic: AFP)
A Senegalese man follows the hearse carrying the body of Ismaila Faye during his funeral procession in the Moroccan capital on August 19 2013. (Pic: AFP)

Moroccans have also been active on social media to denounce violence against the African community.

Just a stone’s throw from Spain, Morocco has increasingly become a permanent home for sub-Saharans seeking a better life in Europe but unable to get there, with local NGOs putting the estimated number of them at more than 20 000.

But their coexistence with Moroccans is often fraught with difficulty.

Earlier in the summer, notices appeared in Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city, baldly stating that sub-Saharan immigrants were barred from renting certain properties.

“Our situation is really bad. Nearly 15 immigrants were attacked in just one week,” says Williams, who heads an anti-racism group in Morocco.

“There needs to be a racist murder for people to take our problems seriously,” he adds.

Williams says some Moroccans are fundamentally opposed to their presence, which they see as a threat to their jobs, in a city where unemployed youths stage regular street protests demanding work.

In Morocco’s main cities, sub-Saharan women are often to be found begging at the side of the road, while young men try to peddle their wares, selling anything from cheap watches to polished wood carvings.

“I don’t understand why some Moroccans treat Africans in a contemptuous way. Coming here I thought I would be in a neighbourly country, a brother country,” Williams says.

Anna Bayns, a Senegalese student at Rabat University, agrees that violence against the sub-Saharan community is on the rise, even if there are no official statistics to prove it.

“We are often referred to as ‘negroes’,” she said.

‘Like slaves’
In the poor neighbourhood of Takadoum, six immigrants, most of them from Cameroon, share a small room which gets stiflingly hot during the summer, and together they struggle to make ends meet in a sometimes hostile environment.

“We are treated like slaves,” says one.

In the informal sector, workers get paid a pittance, less than five euros a day, he says, and finding accommodation is difficult.

Without a rental contract, the migrants are dependent on the goodwill of their often unscrupulous landlords.

“For this room, which is normally rented for 500 dirhams [47 euros], we pay 1 500 dirhams!” says another resident.

Senegalese immigrants and Moroccan children sit in front of a building where they rent flats in the Takaddum neighbourhood of Rabat. (Pic: AFP)
Senegalese immigrants and Moroccan children sit in front of a building where they rent flats in the Takaddum neighbourhood of Rabat. (Pic: AFP)

Several months ago, medical aid group Doctors Without Borders raised the alarm over increased violence by the authorities against illegal migrants, and announced that it was closing its projects in Morocco in protest.

Contacted by AFP, the head of migration and border control at the interior ministry, Khalid Zerouali, insists that authorities’ main objective is to “protect citizens”, adding that their “[border] security strategy is directed against criminal networks” and no one else.

“Our African brothers are welcome, but within the law.”

The European Union, with whom Rabat enjoys “advanced status” relations and which is the favoured destination of most African migrants in Morocco, is following the situation closely.

“We are obviously concerned about the reports that we have concerning the poor treatment of illegal migrants, mostly of sub-Saharan origin,” Rupert Joy, the EU ambassador to Morocco, told AFP.

“In my opinion the worst mistake one could make would be to pretend that the problem doesn’t exist and that it isn’t serious,” he said.

Jalal Al Makhfi for AFP

Who’s really broke and who’s not?

I have been on the lower end of the income scale for considerable periods of my life. I’ve been jobless, cashless, food-less and hopeless. I learned how to value money, which is totally different from being cheap. I shared a doma (fruit) with a friend as dinner, I am an expert at recycling old food and I am very good at making Al-Hamam Tar –  “the pigeon flew” – soup, which is basically boiling onions, salt and lemon. It looks, smells and supposedly tastes as if there was a pigeon in the soup.

I discovered something new: broke-ness is in the eye of the beholder. I developed some sort of desensitisation to broke-ness. I have lowered my living expenses and standards, I compare myself with people with worse standards. I look at genuinely poor people, stop for five seconds, scratch my head and then think, “I’m rich, Alhamdulillah” (Praise to God).

Broke-ness is relative. I have a friend from one of the Gulf countries who declares bankruptcy when he reaches a couple of thousands of pounds in his bank account. I abuse him for that. I usually consider myself still rich if I have more than 50 pounds in my pocket. So basically this out-of-money mental state depends on the person’s original financial status. A guy with a 10 000 pound-salary may think he is broke if he only has 100 pounds left, while another might consider himself quite rich if he has 10 pounds in his pocket by the end of the day.

(Graphic: sxc.hu)
(Graphic: sxc.hu)

So what is “broke”? How can we define someone as being financially broke? We can say broke is a state of not being rich, but this is just like defining black as not being white. And on the other hand, how rich is rich?

Broke-ness in my humble opinion is definitely not the lack of cash. It is rather a state of mind. It is a terrible fake feeling, but if the person thinks too much about it, he will eventually believe it. An individual may consider himself broke in the following situations:

1. If the person was in a better financial status previously. For example, last week he could have afforded to eat in Real Burger, while this week he can only afford to eat at A’awad Torash (a local restaurant). Such people should learn that they were not born kings –  if you can’t afford a smart phone, buy an Abu Lamba (“the one with the bulb”. This refers to the Nokia 100 handset, which has a built-in flashlight.)

2. When a person compares himself to richer people around him. They have “better”, or I have “less”. This mostly leads to jealousy. These people should learn to appreciate what they have.

3. Jobless people. Some people are actually jobless, but some are just proud. This is quite common among educated people. They feel shame in working in different, less financially rewarding fields. These people have no excuses whatsoever. If you want money, go and get it. I am a dentist; other than fixing bad teeth, I worked many jobs. I was a shopkeeper, I taught English, I coached basketball and I once sold cookies in public. I feel more proud and less broke than the proud non-working people.

What I’m saying is, being broke is relative rather than true. Unless you can’t afford to put food on your table, get over it, you’re not broke.

Yasir Elkhider for 500 Words Magazine, an independent online magazine about Sudan. It is an amalgamation of various thoughts and opinions on Sudanese society, culture and life, and provides a platform for discussion among Sudanese youth. Connect with 500 Words Magazine on Twitter and Facebook.