Last week, I had the disconcerting experience of meeting an African version of myself at a party in Nairobi. Small and stroppy, she was happy to share her views on a woman's position with all and sundry.
She came, she said, from the Kenyan town of Nyeri, where the women are renowned for their bossiness. Domesticity? Pah! Having carved a niche in the world of human resources, she wasn't going to quit now - her salary kept her parents afloat. Man? Yes, please, as long as he didn't threaten her financial independence. Children? Hmm, her aunties would love it, but she was too worried about how it might destabilise an eventual relationship to want to risk it.
I meet a growing number of women like her in Africa, renegotiating their roles in a male-dominated society, and it always cheers me. But any thought that African men are keeping up with this new breed of self-reliant female has taken something of a beating. In South Africa and Kenya, recent events have conspired to expose the creaking obsolescence of male attitudes on the continent. Boy, do these girls have their work cut out.
In South Africa, we have the former deputy president Jacob Zuma to thank for this insight. His acquittal on charges of raping a family friend did nothing to lift the depression South African women feel at the evidence heard during the trial and what it revealed about Zulu attitudes to the opposite sex. We learned what Zuma regarded as provocative attire - a knee-length skirt. We heard him claim he had been obliged to have sex with the plaintiff because failing to satisfy a sexually aroused woman was, in his culture, itself a form of violation. The fact that, as a self-professed lesbian, this woman was unlikely to be aroused in the first place didn't seem to register.
In Kenya, the trigger for a heated debate on relations between
the sexes has been the tabling of the Sexual Offences Bill. In the past few years, Kenya has experienced an explosion in rape statistics. And yet, given that the police force ranks among the country's least trusted institutions, it is difficult to know how new the phenomenon really is. Because Kenya's colonial-era penal code classifies rape as a misdemeanour, not a crime, most perpetrators get off scot-free or with small fines. The Sexual Offences Bill, championed by a female MP, aimed to end this anomaly and obliged the state to prosecute. In its original form, it recommended chemical castration for the worst offenders, while also tackling issues such as marital rape, female circumcision and sexual harassment.
Amid much ribald chortling, Kenyan MPs last month set about neutering the bill. Marital rape? An utterly nonsensical notion: a man obviously has the right to take his wife whenever he wants. One MP protested that if the sexual harassment clause was retained, 1.5 million men from Kisii District would be jailed. Another MP said courtship would become impossible, as it was a well-known fact "that an African lady says 'no' when she means 'yes'". Forgetting that the bill's main purpose was to protect their daughters, mothers and wives from assault, they fretted over the possibility that the ordinary Joe might face prison for accidentally jostling a woman's buttocks in a crowded matatu. Exasperated, the female MPs walked out in disgust.
Kenya's main newspaper, the Daily Nation, was so shocked by the nudge-nudge, wink-wink level of debate, that it published the Hansard account. "It was unbelievable. Simply unbelievable," wrote the columnist Muthoni Wanyeki, a campaigner for women's rights. "Their barely suppressed lasciviousness suggested that they actually thought the debate was about sex . . . But the bill is not about sex. It is about violence."
Talking about the Sexual Offences Bill with Kenyan women - who positively drip with contempt when the subject comes up - I have asked whether the debate exposed a divide between the sexes or between the generations. Optimists insist the views expressed were those of a traditional old guard. "No, it's a gender thing," disagrees a friend. "Young Kenyan men put on a good act, but under the surface their attitudes are identical to their fathers'. Men my age openly talk about beating their girlfriends to keep them in line. They expect the permanent girlfriend to stay at home and prepare dinner while they go out drinking and trawl for women."
In South Africa and Kenya, there is a bitter sense that both episodes have highlighted attitudes women always really knew existed, but preferred to ignore. Just as African men don't "get" rape - in the words of one columnist - they also don't "get" how angry their womenfolk feel at the archaic attitudes they still encounter. "Oh, I'd castrate them all," was the airy recommendation of one Kenyan actress I met, and she was referring to the MPs, not the rapists.
A newspaper headline caught my eye the next day: "Woman kills husband as wrangle over Sex Bill gets out of hand". Enraged by her husband's lofty dismissal of her arguments, a young woman in the northern village of Kanamkemer had hacked her husband to death with a machete. Watch your step, men of Africa . . .
