Free The Africans by David Lamb Page A

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 arebound 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 similarto 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.
    Somalia, a Moslem country where some girls’ vaginas are stitched together to ensure purity until marriage, was less subtle in its attempts to improve the women’s lot. President Mohamed Siad Barré declared in 1975 that henceforth men and women were equal. Many Moslem scholars in Somalia protested, contending that the Koran held women inferior. Barré settled the argument by executing ten of the scholars and sentencing twenty-three others to prison for up to thirty years. The executions didn’t provide any new opportunities for women, but no one debates the merits of sexual equality in Somalia anymore.
    Only two hours by air from the