The Africans (9 page)

In the first-grade class room across from Mathini’s office, thirty or
forty boys and girls were learning to count with the aid of little twigs. They applauded with gusto each time one of them gave the teacher the right answer. The teacher spoke to them in Swahili, a language they had difficulty understanding because their native tongue was Kikuyu. In the tenth-grade room nearby, an ancient wooden radio sat on another teacher’s desk and the dozen or so teen-agers there strained through the heavy static to hear the “creative writing” lesson being broadcast in English from Nairobi. The nursery school, a cement-floored room with bare blue walls located at the far side of the yard, had only a handful of children and fifty empty seats. The parents of the missing youngsters had been unable to pay the $1.85 semiannual school fee due the previous month and had been forced by the headmaster to withdraw their children from school until they came up with the money.

“These children know that without education there can be no employment,” said the first-grade teacher, Francis Waruiru. “They are desperate to learn. Their parents put great pressure on them to learn so they can go to Nairobi and get a job with a good salary.

“Even William here tries hard, but William’s a funny little boy. He writes everything upside down. See”—and the teacher, who had had no training in special education, held up William’s paper for us to examine—“you cannot read what he writes.”

“I don’t know why he does that. I sit down with him and show him slowly and then he writes the right way. Then he goes back to his desk and writes upside down again. The whole trouble is that William is forgetful. I have told him he must just practice harder. He’s really quite a mystery.”

The school has no facilities or money to serve lunch, so at noontime we drove with the headmaster a mile or two over the hills to the Happiness Café in Kurai. Ours was the only vehicle in sight and it drew stares from the people along the road who wore, like African villagers everywhere, a bewildering array of Western clothing: ski caps with tassels, broken straw hats, tattered suits with wide lapels, winter overcoats with holes and patches—clothing that had once hung in the closets of American families, had been collected by charity organizations, sold by the ton to junk dealers in New York and, finally, shipped at a profit for sale in the marketplaces of a thousand African villages.

To an outsider, Karai had the make-believe aura of a frontier town on a Hollywood set. A donkey dozed outside the First and
Last Starlight Bar. The market, known as Oliver Njoroge’s Popular Store, was empty. Except for a woman hunkered by a pile of potatoes, the wide dirt path leading through the town was deserted and the only stirring was that of the wind, which had turned everything dust-brown. Karai was a time capsule, exuding neither ennui nor energy. It was just there.

Eight peasant farmers sat at the long benches in the Happiness Café, eating the daily special, a thirty-six-cent bowl of beef stew. A sign on the wall said: “No credit Sunday through Sunday.” The farmers ate in silence and paid no heed to the village idiot, who moved from table to table in a series of froglike jumps, holding out his palm for chunks of beef and grabbing crumbs of bread from the floor.

“I would be the first to admit that we don’t have very advanced people here,” said the subchief of Karai, James Kamau, as we finished our stew. “But the problem is that all the young men, anyone with an education, go to Nairobi now to find jobs as casual laborers, or to be servants and
askaris
.
^*

“Now, before long we will have water taps in Karai. The pipeline the government is building has already reached the hills by the primary school. Then we will have development and maybe the people will come back from the city. But if they do, how are we going to support them? Our farmland is not good here and all the land is taken. This is the very poorest part of Kikuyuland.

“What we need are more educated ladies, people who will come to understand family planning and the need for smaller families, many less children. Our children face a very hard life ahead and it will be even harder if there is no family planning. Pills are sent to the clinic but no one uses them.”

As common as large families are, premarital sex is taboo in much of rural Africa and is punished severely, even by death in a few cultures. Removal of the clitoris—a brief, bloody operation that is performed without anesthetics—reduces the woman’s potential for
arousal during intercourse, making sex a female activity of procreation, not pleasure. Marriages are arranged soon after the circumcision ceremonies, when the boys are about seventeen, the girl fifteen. The purpose of the union has little to do with companionship or sharing as we know it in the West. Rather, it is solely to produce a bountiful crop of children, who can help in the fields and can eventually take care of their parents in old age.

In the cities, sexual morals are much looser, but affection between men and women is only rarely displayed or expressed. You will never see a young couple in East Africa exchanging touches or simply sitting quietly in a restaurant, looking at each other. Africans skip the preliminaries known in the West; where a European couple might kiss, Africans copulate.

It is also curious by Western standards that homosexuality in Africa is virtually unknown. True, in the cities you will often see men holding hands, but it is a sign of friendship, not homosexuality. Africa’s tradition is rigidly heterosexual. Sexual roles—because of the emphasis placed on producing large families—are clearly defined, and parents never allow their children to play roles that would confuse their sexual identity. Any African having a homosexual relationship is quickly ostracized and in Kenya, for example, is guilty of a felony, punishable by five years in prison and up to a hundred lashes.

Perhaps more for economic than sexual reasons, male African prostitutes have appeared in recent years in areas where foreign influence is strong, such as touristy Mombasa on the Kenya coast, and Lagos, the boom capital of Nigeria. In 1978 a Swiss tourist spending Christmas in Mombasa was caught having an affair with a Kenyan male and sentenced to nine months in prison. But such incidents are rare, for the guilt of homosexuality is great. During Kenya’s Mau Mau war in the 1950s, the Kikuyu guerrillas recruited new supporters by sending teen-age boys into the prisons to tempt inmates into performing sodomy with them. The disgrace was so painful that the inmates, fearing the act would be revealed, were beholden to the guerrillas and became, as ordered, part of the Mau Mau movement.

The one constant amid the changes that are transforming the character of a continent is the role of the African woman, a person whose physical and spiritual strength is nothing short of remarkable.
More often than not she is uneducated, barefoot, stoop-shouldered and beefy. Her comforts are few, her burdens many. But if liberation means the freedom
to
work, rather than
from
work, she is the world’s most liberated woman.

The African woman produces 70 percent of the food grown on the continent, according to the United Nations. She works longer and harder and has more responsibilities than her husband. She is the economic backbone of the rural community, the maker of family decisions, the initiator of social change, the harvester of crops. She is the hub around which the spokes of society turn.

Drive down almost any country road in East Africa and you will see a procession of women padding along the shoulder, their backs parallel to the ground under the weight of huge piles of firewood or jars of water. The outdoor marketplaces—the most important source of economic activity in any village—are run and staffed exclusively by women. In the fields it is only women you see with hoes and sickles. And the men? The elderly ones are apt to be sitting in the shade of the trees, smoking their pipes, drinking homemade beer, discussing their cattle—or saying nothing at all. The younger ones are either in school, in the city or in the local beer hall.

“Our daughters are more important to us than the sons now,” a woman with thirteen children told me in one Tanzanian town. “They have not forgotten how to work. But the sons are no good. They go off and get drunk, and when you find them, they have been knifed and killed.”

Hyperbole aside, her statement reflects the frustration the African women feel, knowing that they remain second-class citizens despite their contributions to family and community. The Africa of the 1980s is still a man’s society, as chauvinistic as the pubs of Australia, and it is an unusual woman who can rise above the positions of secretary, nurse or teacher.

In Kenya, women represent only 10 percent of the university enrollment, 16 percent of the labor force and 6 percent of the jobholders earning more than $375 a year. Their illiteracy rate—70 percent—is double that for men.

With few exceptions, women in Africa inherit nothing from their fathers and can be divorced by their husbands without any settlement. They are expected to remain sexually faithful, while their spouses are permitted, even expected, to have as many wives and girl friends as they can support. Every cent a woman earns goes to the
family; a man’s salary is spent on whatever he pleases, often himself. For the most part a woman is viewed as a baby machine, and with abortion being illegal in Africa except for medical reasons, and illegitimacy not being a stigma, they are productive machines indeed.

“You see all these men running around the city, saying they are looking for work,” said Margaret Mugo, the only woman on Nairobi’s forty-four-member city council. “What they really mean is that they’re trying to get some money to pursue their own pleasures. The money they make doesn’t get back to their wives and children in the village. They spend it on themselves.”

In 1979 the Kenyan parliament (168 men and 4 women) considered a bill to legalize polygamy—a common practice which many Africans consider a sign of wealth and prestige—and to codify marriage standards. The intent of the bill was sensible enough: the attorney general merely wanted to safeguard the interests of wives and children, who often lose their inheritance when a husband dies, his possessions and property being divided among other spouses.

Many members of parliament didn’t see it exactly that way, though. One of them, Kimunai Soi, argued that the corporal punishment section of the bill would deny a man his traditional right to beat his wife. “It is very African to teach women manners by beating them,” Soi said on the floor of parliament. “If this legislation is passed, even slapping your wife is ruled out.”

Another lawmaker, Oloo Aringo, contested a clause requiring a man to get permission from his first wife before marrying another. This, he said, was putting the horse before the cart. What was needed instead was to educate women so they would understand the necessity of polygamy. The majority agreed and the bill was scrapped.

“We are the people in the middle and we, the women, suffer most and we suffer quietly,” said Felicita Olchurie, a college professor whose father had received three cows for approving her marriage.

“When you get married,” she continued, “you belong to your husband. As simple as that. He treats you any way he chooses, usually disrespectfully, but as long as he doesn’t beat you, you stay with him. Our problem is that we’re not aggressive enough yet. We’re too inhibited by our society, by our families. We’d rather suffer silently inside.

“I don’t think our daughters will tolerate it. Their rights are
bound to be broader than ours and their society will be much more open. In the end, though, the African man will still be the African man, and his main preoccupation will still be proving his virility.”

Traditionally the male role in Africa was waging war, hunting, clearing land and building huts. Women were responsible for gathering wood, fetching water, raising children and harvesting crops. If there was extra food to sell, the woman kept the profits. She was the resource of Africa’s rural development, and her role was largely autonomous, seldom subservient.

In the Fur society of western Sudan, men and women operated separately, each group cultivating its own plots. In parts of Ghana it was the “Queen Mother” of a village, not the chief, who determined the line of descent. In the Ivory Coast it is the women who still run the market economy, and in Kenya it is the women who own and operate the most successful farming cooperatives. But as Africa strives for modernity, complex social forces have upset the male-female relationship and handed the greater share of educational and economic opportunities to men.

The first vehicle for upsetting the balance was the missionary, who tried to convince Africans that their sexual mores were unhealthy, immoral and barbaric. Next came the colonialists. They built no schools for girls until after World War II on the premise that African women did not need education, and they introduced male-controlled cash crops such as coffee and cocoa that undercut the economic power of women, who traditionally grew the subsistence crops. Gradually the male’s warrior-hunter role began to disappear and the young men drifted into the cities. They became the focus of the newly independent nations’ rush into the twentieth century.

The universities changed their emphasis from the arts to math and science, subjects that customarily are male-oriented. The girls who managed to graduate from high school—65 percent of high school enrollment in Kenya and Ghana is male—found few places in college available and even fewer responsible positions in an already tight job market.

“I know of no inherent reason why social change, industrialization and modernization has to negatively affect the status of women, but we are seeing it happen in Africa,” said Audrey Smock, an American sociologist working with the Kenyan government. “The African woman increasingly is falling backward to a position similar
to that of the Western woman in the early stages of the industrial revolution.”

Kenya has moved cautiously in the area of women’s rights. In 1977 it gave working mothers entitlement to two months’ paid maternity leave and discarded the law making it illegal to employ women between 6:30
P.M
. and 6:30
A.M
. The new law, however, grouped women and minors together, implying that the former were still something less than responsible adults.