TOO MANY CONDOMS, VERY FEW USERS

The National Aids Council of Zambia reported that the usage of condoms in the country has gone down. There are about 40 million uncollected pieces of condoms which were supposed to have been distributed to various communities.  I don’t know what you think but to me this could either be good news or bad news. 

Let us hope that the National Aids Council is not just interested in offloading the condoms to the public without studying the reason why the demand for condoms has gone down. AIDS is a killer and therefore fear would be the first thing that comes to most people’s minds when confronted with this situation. This may mean that people have stopped using condoms and are now infecting each other with the virus. There is no doubt in my mind that this is what the National AIDS Council’s fears are and it is what led them to issue this statement.

A condom is a consumer product whose sales figures will depend on demand.  If there are many people having illicit or casual sex then the demand for the condom will be high. If there are fewer people engaging in such kind of sex, then the demand will be low. People who are faithful and only have one sexual partner rarely use condoms. Look at it this way, if the sales of ammunition drops on the market then there must be few people shooting guns.

The big question is; has the number of people having illicit sex reduced or have people just become careless and stopped using condoms? Ironically, even the numbers of adverts warning people to use condoms seem to have reduced. A few years ago condom adverts were very common both in the print and electronic media. You couldn’t have turned on the TV for an hour without seeing a condom advert.

These adverts have been replaced with misleading adverts informing people to go for male circumcision if they wanted to reduce their chances of being infected with HIV and other diseases that are sexually transmitted. I would not be surprised if the campaign for male circumcision can be partially to blame for the drop in the demand for condoms. Some people may have foolishly stopped using condoms after being circumcised.

If there are tons of condoms lying around uncollected, is it not the responsibility of the people keeping the condoms to take them to the people? I am sure there are certain areas where prostitution is rife and where the infection rate is high. These are areas where these condoms should be taken for massive distribution alongside sensitization messages.

Many people avoid walking in a store to buy condoms from the counter.  This is not because they do not like using condoms but they just do not want people to think they are going to have sex and this is because condoms have been associated with promiscuity.  Some public places have tried to come up with innovative ways of distributing condoms by placing them in the toilets and this has been a success because the condoms usually finish in a short space of time.

This method of condom distribution is effective but someone has to buy the condoms and the people who use them pay nothing. Although condoms are not very expensive, very few public places would take up the responsibility of buying condoms for their patrons.  

Whatever the case may be, the drop in condom use is surely one that must be studied thoroughly so that we understand if we are heading in the right direction or not.

Image courtesy of Africa/freedigitalphotos.net

HAVE WE FAILED TO HELP THE GIRL CHILD?

It was recently reported that 70% of girls that are re-admitted into school after falling pregnant at one school in Solwezi, Zambia, fall pregnant for the second time. 

 

The head teacher of the school said some girls are abusing the re-entry policy that the government has put in place to help them complete their education after falling pregnant. He further advised the government to attach a limit to the number of times a girl can be re-admitted into school.

There is no doubt that government had good intentions when it introduced this. Some girls have benefited from this and have managed to put their education back on track but such a high figure of girls from this particular school falling pregnant for the second time is not only alarming but a concern.  The 70% represented here is from one school only but it may be a reflection of a larger picture.

The school mentioned above is in the rural part of the country and we all know that the problem of early marriages is rife in rural Zambia than it is in the urban areas. I would not be surprised if some of the girls that are re-admitted back into school after giving birth have also been married off to the men responsible for their pregnancies.

It is common that when a boy makes a girl pregnant he must marry her. This is because that girl is now considered a “used product and no one is going to have intentions of marrying her. This could even be the reason why some of these girls have fallen pregnant for the second time because they may even be married to the fathers of their first children and hence they do not have a choice but have sex regularly and in the end become pregnant again.  

Some parents in the rural areas still think that sending girls to school is a waste of time and money because when these girls grow up they will find a man, get married to him and the man will take care of all their needs.  These are people who have lived almost their entire life in areas where people do not have formal employment based on their education qualifications.

Their livelihood revolves around farming, fishing or hunting.  This to some extent can make us understand their reasoning because  what use would it be to them to spend more than 12 years in school and just end up farming and fishing?  Most of these families are very poor and have very little resources. In some cases they have to choose among their kids who to spend the little resources on in terms of providing education.

In most cases a boy child will be preferred over a girl child to be the sole beneficiary of the meagre resources available to the family.  Apart from the idea that boys have a better chance to migrate to urban areas where their education may be of use, some parents fear that the girl child may just fall pregnant midway through her education and fall out of school.

If that happens, it simply means that all the resources that were poured into that girl’s education were just wasted when it could have been used on something else which would have benefited the family.

Boys have always had an advantage over the girls. This is one reason why in Zambia examination selection points for girls are lower than the ones for boys.  It was felt that many Zambian girls were disadvantaged because they did a lot of work at home compared to the boys. The girls would wake up in the morning, sweep the house or the compound and even wash the plates before leaving for school while the boys would only wake up, wash and dress for school.  This also meant that unlike the girls, the boys had a lot of time to study which gave them an advantage over the girls when it came to the final examination.

The boy child always had less work to do especially in the urban set up. He had a lot of time to study and even spare some time to play football and other social games. It is also traditionally accepted that a child must learn some chores at an early age and hence chores are a normal part of the growing up process of many African children. It is even believed that if a girl child does not do some of these chores in her early years such a girl will grow up to be a useless woman who may even fail to look after her own family when she grows up.

In a way, the chores that the girl child does are not necessarily to help the mother but it is some kind of curriculum to prepare her on how to look after her own house when the time comes. This implies that there was no way this was going to be easily discouraged so the government devised a system of doing the girl child  a favour by lowering examination selection points.

This however did not make the girl child entirely free from impediments in her educational process. The onset of puberty brings its own challenges. The hormones start raging and the curious mind keeps probing.  At a certain age, the girls and boys start to have sexual feelings for each other and engage in premature sex. Without the full knowledge or experience, these girls do not know how to use protection against unwanted pregnancies and this is where some of them get pregnant.

This is the stage where most of those who fall pregnant are given a second chance to go back to school and start all over again by being given a second chance. It is quite obvious that most of these girls who are caught up in this predicament do so out of ignorance or pure mistakes.  But why do some of them repeat the same mistake and fall pregnant again?

I remember when I was still in school, we used to have situations where all of a sudden one of the girls stops coming to school. Days went on and on until at last we heard that she was married. This used to be a big shock because we tried to comprehend why someone who was still in school and always had this great idea of being a doctor or professor would all of a sudden change her mind and decide to get married.

What we did not know was that the reason these girls dropped from school was because they got pregnant and were forced to get married to the boys or men who were responsible for their condition. It only dawned on me years later when I was old enough to grasp the whole the truth. It was shameful and a disgrace for the girl and her family when this happened and the affected family had to make it look honourable by claiming that the girl just decided to get married on her own.

There is no doubt that some of the girls may have envied this because they thought marriage was an easier option than toiling in class to get a better grade. Some girls opted to drop out on their own before the school authorities knew what was going on while others used to come to school with a “hidden” womb. It was not strange to hear rumours of girls who would hide their pregnancies by tightening their belts around the stomach.  It was also uncommon to hear of inspections conducted on girls to check for hidden pregnancies.

Some of the girls who were caught in these random inspections were very bright girls and with a brighter future but the mistake of falling pregnant put an end to their ambitions and dreams.  However, their partner in crime, the boy child, was not expelled from school for this misdemeanour of causing the pregnancy. This was the case even in situations where the boy was reported to the school authorities.

Despite the boy being charged for making a girl pregnant and in some cases even asked to marry her after he completes his education, he had some kind of immunity from the punishment of being expelled from school.  The government thought the only way to help the girl child was to give her a second chance where she was going to be accepted back in school and continue with her education after giving birth. That was a fair and brilliant idea and many people welcomed it.

Now we are being told that some girls are abusing this privilege by falling pregnant for the second time. Does this mean that this policy has completely failed? Are these girls truly abusing this privilege intentionally? I strongly feel that these cases need to be studied thoroughly to determine the real cause for this. Some girls may have been raped or tricked into having sex or enticed by money and that may have caused them to fall pregnant.

We cannot rule out the notion that some of these girls were completely aware of what they were doing and they knew the consequences.  They may even have decided to fall pregnant purposefully because they knew that they were still going back to school after giving birth.

This could be a lesson that teaches us that changing the rules or softening them does not mean the problem has been solved.

Image courtesy of Africa, freedigitalphotos.net

THE OFFENSIVE BREAST

A few years back in Ndola, a number of statues were put at the Ndola Central hospital roundabout. This was a new thing in Ndola and it was all done through the effort of one of the local businessmen through his company. 

The four statues comprised of a warrior holding a spear and it was quickly named “Shaka” by the residents. The second statue was of a man with a pick on his shoulders and wearing a hard hat. This was called “Shi Maini” (The Miner). Then there was a statue of a woman with a clay pot on her head. The last statue was of a woman sitting on what looked like a tree stump while holding a fishing basket on her lap.

The last statue of the woman with the fishing basket was topless and this caused a furore among some residents who claimed that it was against our tradition to show a woman’s breasts in public. They claimed that the statue was demeaning and portraying women as sexual symbols.  The statue was promptly removed and modifications were made to it. The exposed breasts were covered with “cloth” before it was returned at the roundabout.

In Zambia we do not have a lot of statues. The only statues that come to mind are that of David Livingstone, the freedom statue in Lusaka which depicts a man breaking chains of bondage, the statue of a woman holding a baby in her arms at the Ndola Civic centre and that of a man throwing stones which is in Kitwe. There is also one more statue in Ndola of a man fighting with a lion just before the traffic lights at BBC Boutique.

When I first saw the statues at Ndola Central hospital roundabout, I was overjoyed because this was something new and unique.  The bare breasts on that statue did not even provoke any harmful or obscene thoughts in me. It came as a shock to me when people felt offended and requested that the statue be removed.

 The argument has always been that it is indecent for a woman to go topless in public and that it is not traditionally right according to the African culture. The later has been disputed by some people because the African traditional dressing for women has a background of using hides and skin to cover the bare essentials. Is it truly un-African for a woman to expose her breasts in public? 

In my view, I do not think it is a valid point to say it is un-African for a woman to go topless because many people have witnessed African traditional ceremonies where women go topless without covering their breasts. We have the famous reed dance in Swaziland where girls go topless while with very short skirts. In Zambia we have similar ceremonies too where women, including very old women, go out dancing without covering their breasts. The Masai women in East Africa go about their daily chores without covering their breasts.

It is believed that breasts became sexualized when people began to clothe themselves.  It is no doubt that our ancestors did not cover their breasts. The lack of clothing above the waist for both females and males was the norm in traditional cultures of not only Africa, but North America, Australia and the Pacific Islands until the arrival of Christian missionaries.

Even then, men were attracted to breasts but they did not have the great urgency to view them because they were constantly exposed and the men some got used to seeing them like that.  In societies where breasts are covered, an exposed breast becomes more desired. 

Breasts may be viewed as just mummery glands by some people but there is no doubt that they attract men and make them think about sex. This makes breasts sexual by nature.  Breasts are considered as secondary sex characteristics, and are sexually sensitive in many cases. Bare female breasts can elicit heightened sexual desires. 

Since they are associated with sex, in many cultures bare breasts are considered indecent, and they are not commonly displayed in public. So what makes other cultures freely allow women to walk without covering their breasts and not cause a commotion?

Views on covering the female breasts have differed widely throughout history and across cultures. Exposed breasts were a norm in many indigenous societies. Most cultures in the world today have informal and formal dress codes, legal statutes, or religious teachings that require females to cover their breasts in public. 

Contemporary Western cultures permit displays of cleavage in appropriate social contexts, but exposing the nipples is usually regarded as obscene and is sometimes prosecuted as indecent exposure. From early prehistoric art to the present day, women have been depicted topless in visual media from painting and sculpture to film and photography.

Breast-baring female fashions have been traced to 15th-century courtesan Agnès Sorel, mistress to Charles VII of France, whose gowns in the French court sometimes exposed one or both of her breasts. In the 16^th century, women’s fashions displaying their breasts were common in society and were worn by both Queens and common prostitutes. From the mid-19th century onward, however, social attitudes shifted. Women's breasts required to be covered in public.  

The extent to which a woman may expose her breasts depends on social and cultural context. In our Zambian society, it is not common to see a topless woman in public except at traditional ceremonies of some tribes. There is also an occasional time when you can see a woman breast feeding in public. Showing the nipples or areolae is almost always considered partial nudity and sexually appealing by many people. Women who expose their areole and nipples are also considered as immodest and contrary to social norms.

I don’t know exactly what the law in our country says on women who expose their breasts in public. The puzzling thing is why is it indecent to expose breasts at a beauty pageant or any other social gathering and not at the N’Cwala ceremony or any other traditional ceremony that allows women to go topless? 

Image courtesy of marin, freedigitalphotos.net