First the glorious past when the traditional African world prevailed was not a blameless place.

The colonial breaking of this world happened slowly and quickly.  I read Al Kag’s first Living Memory story and understood so much about what changes have happened in people’s lived lives. Suddenly I understood the fixation with good and bad girls that seemed to grip my mother and women of her generation.  This good girl/bad girl thing seemed to consume them, it was always on their tongues. 

The story is about a young Pokomo girl, but the place of sex is what really interested me.  The young girl was repeatedly raped by white, brown, black men.  In the new urban spaces (pre-towns and cities) women had to “marry” a man so that she would be seen as out of bounds and so be safe from the repeated rape by random men whom she did not know.  It was quite alarming.  The woman ends by saying many people’s grand parents started life this way.

I learnt a lot from this story, about sex and its place in changing societies.  Traditional societies had a firm place for it.  It happened in marriage.

What the new world looked like:

• Sex went from being a proscribe activity to being a “free” for all.
• Women went from being off bounds, belonging to someone, or under the protection of someone, a father, brother, husband
• Women became easily available “free” unprotected entities
• On the social cultural scene change was also happening.  A new education system became available to young people who literally stepped out of the authority ambit of their parents and elders.  All of sudden the children knew more than their elders about a new world that was not available to the elders.
• There was no one to guide the young.  I found this was still true in Kenya in the 1990s.  One of the reasons young people were getting pregnant was because they could not accept guidance from their out of step parents.  They simply did not recognise their authority or that the elders had anything to offer them.  There was a surprising disdain amongst the young and their parents felt helpless.
• Also our approach to education has been seriously half baked.  It has been an external thing that we use to out compete the people around us.  “I was first in class”.  Book knowledge as it is often quaintly called is for passing exams, we gain little from it.  See the chapter in Obama’s book about his father and there is a very pathetic picture where this guy has gained this education up to PHD level but does not seem to have the social life skills required to navigate a new world.  He simply has poor life skills.

So back to the question of sex.

In my mother’s world a girl was in danger of becoming a prostitute for these reasons.

A girl who …………

Wears make-up is a prostitute

She wears trousers

She is not married or married "late"

She has too much education

She dresses beautifully

She wears red lipstick

Oh oh, she smokes

She laughs with her mouth wide open

She is ambitious

She has a senior position in an organisation

She travels by herself

She goes out by herself at night

She goes to bars

She is married to a white/brown man

I understood from this story that for my mother, sex and women existed in a narrow setting and that a woman who had no protection was dangerous and in danger herself from all men who felt her free status gave then incontrovertible right to the resource sex  that all women provide in society.  So she was urgently trying to make me good and safe.

So maybe what is happening is that our values are now being constructed.  The past seems to me to have been a place of disturbing mayhem.  The values that we need to negotiate a new world where sex is freely available are only now being constructed.  Who do you have to be in such a world sexually speaking that is?  There are many men and women who have constructed new sexual identities that includes them being accountable for their sexuality.  They understand sex to be simply biology and not something they can’t help, something which controls them.

If you all remember the early pattern of  HIV/AIDS infection in our part of the world was that the educated the priveledged were initiatilly hardest hit.  This pattern can be defined as these were the ones who did not have to be accountable around sex and also took advantage of the powerlessness around them to freely indulge without, values or ethics.  The pattern has changed here.  Has the disease helped construct accountable values?  I don’t know.

Our challenge as Africans is that we always have people living in many civilisations in the same space.  So the traditional man and woman lives side by side with the rotten guy who has decided to become a predator, preying on those whom he finds unprotected.  The tragedy of the protector becoming the predator is beyond words.  To me South African men have allowed themselves to become predators.  And oh yes they have compelling justifications which I cannot understand so I wont go into that.
 
What is Rape Used For?

It is also my contention that rape is an incredibly effective weapon for keeping the whole society down.  It is a self-limiting strategy that makes society operate from fear. Rape allows fear to become the foundation on which society is constructed.  It could build society on something else, a sense of possibility for example.  When women and children are raped the whole society is raped.  Have any of you observed young girls and their fearlessness.  The little girls around me are incredible, smart, articulate, fearless, etc.  The young women they become are so often diminished versions of their former selves, they are mostly a disappointment for me at least.  I am watching myself with my daughter, protecting her by reigning her in.  Is this not what we do with the whole society with rape, limit it and reign it in?  And South Africans must be amongst the most frightened people in the world, as they emerge from a comfortingly proscribed world where they “knew their place” as defined by that very useful defining tool called apartheid; into a new one where they have to make their own place in a competitive environment.  It is our greatness we fear, we are safe in familiar failure, limits and smallness, to paraphrase some one famous.