Women’s Rights Laws and African Custom Clash
It should be a matter of considerable consternation to those of us in the “civilized” world that the lives of women in so much of the Third World still hold so little intrinsic value to men. The prevalence of “honor killings” (an oxymoron if ever there was one), the willful ignorance of (and refusal to enforce) laws that were passed ostensibly to protect women, and the enforced lack of educational and economic opportunities available to women is and remains appalling. In so much of the Third World, women are regarded as property, chattel to be traded as one might livestock or textiles. Laws regarding the treatment of women are not enforced, women continue to be beaten, mutilated, and in some cases even killed…and we in the civilized world continue to condone this behavior with our silence.
Our government continues to support and trade with African governments that condone behaviors that subject women to the worst sort of brutality imaginable. We could, if we were committed to the process, use our considerable moral and economic might to effect change…and yet the US government continues to sit in silence as women continue to be mistreated throughout the Third World.
Female genital mutilation has been illegal in Guinea since 1965 (punishable by life in prison or death), but in the ensuing 40 years, NOT A SINGLE CASE HAS EVER BEEN BROUGHT TO TRIAL. This is certainly not because young women in Guinea are no longer subjected to crude clitorectomies- in fact, one estimate holds that 99 PER CENT of all women in Guinea have been cut.
Zulu women in South Africa continue to be subjected to the traditional crude, inaccurate…and now illegal viriginity tests. Only this month did South Africa’s Parliament agree to outlaw this practice, with violators to be punished with sentences up to 10 years in prison. Of course, whether this law will have any impact upon this tradition remains to be seen. Those who know the region see no reason why a law will suddenly overrule hundreds of years of tradition, no matter how crude, inaccurate, or prejudicial it may be to a girl’s future.
The ban is an example of how sub-Saharan Africa is slowly, but inexorably, enshrining into law basic protections that have long been denied women. But it also hints at the frailty of the movement toward women’s rights in the region. Not only is the new law a watered-down version of what was proposed, but few here believe it will curb a tradition so deeply embedded in Zulu and to a lesser extent Xhosa culture.
“We will uphold our traditions and customs,” said Patekile Holomisa, president of the Congress of Traditional Leaders, a political party in South Africa. “There are laws that passed that do not necessarily have any impact on the lives of people. I imagine this will be one of those.”
The story is similar in much of this region: measured by laws and political status, women are making solid, even extraordinary, gains toward equality. Women’s equity commissions are widespread in sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 nations. Women are now deputy heads of state in at least seven nations and a woman is president of one, Liberia. They hold one in six parliamentary seats, matching the worldwide average.
Certainly, there has been demonstrable progress in some areas. Progress, though, cannot be measured in conventional Western terms, simply because so much of Africa is still so remote, so technologically bereft, and so difficult to reach. It’s in these remote, tradition-bound areas, where the rule of law, at least in the Western sense, has yet to take hold. When you consider that most of sub-Saharan Africa still has little experience with functional democracy and the rule of law, it is difficult to expect full compliance overnight. In some cases, ANY compliance would be wellcome.
In a region where nearly half of women are illiterate and courts and legal aid are often remote, it is often tribal leaders, not members of Parliament, who decide what is law. Almost invariably men, tribal leaders are rural Africa’s cultural arbiters. In some African nations, their interpretations of traditional law overrule civil and criminal statutes, said Colleen Lowe-Morna, executive director of Gender Links, a women’s rights group in Johannesburg.
“For the majority of women who live in rural areas, customary law basically consigns them to be minors all their lives, under their fathers, their husbands, their brothers, or whoever, ” Ms. Lowe-Morna said. Political leaders find it convenient to maintain dual legal systems, she said, “because that allows you to sign up for all these progressive things but essentially do nothing on the ground.”
Laws and punishments and legal guarantees of rights are all well and good, but in a region where iliteracy is more the rule than the exception, tradition can be a tough nut to crack. The reluctance of Western governments to take on the issue of women’s rights certainly is not helping matters.
Stephen Lewis, the United Nations special envoy to Africa on AIDS and a campaigner against inequities between men and women, says women need their own version of Unicef, the United Nations children’s agency. What is missing in the United Nations “is a powerful women’s international agency that emerges and just takes the world on,” he said in a recent interview. “Nobody is responsible,” he said. “There is no money, there is no urgency, there is no energy.”
Instead, he and others say, international donors typically promise to consider women’s issues when designing aid programs, a well-meaning notion that often ensures that those issues are sidelined. Only two objectives aimed at women and girls - reducing maternal mortality and eliminating the gap between girls and boys in schools - are included in the United Nations’ development goals for the next decade.
The United Nations’ own Economic Commission for Africa in February delivered a downbeat assessment of the progress by African women, stating that gains in women’s political mobilization, advocacy and government representation “are not yet reflected in substantial changes in the lives of ordinary women.”
If Western governments are expecting that laws enacted by their African counterparts will simply presto-changeo!! alter generations of tradition, then they are missing the boat. On a continent where so much of effective day to day law is based on custom, statute law is not a concept that many will simply not grasp, much less care about. The grip of tradition is strong, and if things have been done a certain way for so long with no observed (or admitted) adverse effects…well, why should anyone be expected to change? Expecting those who have been influenced and governed by tribal laws and customs to simply change course and obey statutory law whose significance they cannot begin to relate to their own lives is not a reasonable expectation. And yet that seems to be exactly what Western governments are expecting to happen.
I’m not about to launch into a lecture on political and moral reform in Africa, because honestly, I know about as much about African custom as I do about the game of cricket. What I DO know, however, is that until Western governments and the UN act with greater commitment and resolve, the issue of women’s rights in Africa will continue to be something which will draw much finger-wagging and condemnation but little in the way of action, much less tangible results. That we seem willing to accept a part of the world in which women are treated largely as property is a sad commentary on our version of humanity, isn’t it?
