Free The Africans by David Lamb

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 thefamily; 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