Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Nigeria's immorality is about hypocrisy, not miniskirts
Hetty ter Haar
> To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/apr/02/gender.equality
>
> Nigeria's immorality is about hypocrisy, not miniskirts
> A bill that seeks to stop women dressing indecently shows how warped our
> notions of culture have become
> Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
> Wednesday April 2 2008
> The Guardian
>
>
> My friend Funmi Iyanda hosts a talk show on Nigerian TV in which she
> interviews state governors, actors and pastors. Her social consciousness
> is crusading without being self-righteous, her journalism intelligent and
> honest, her mind deeply kind. One day last December, on her way back from
> Lagos, she was stopped by policemen. They pointed at her knee-length dress
> and called her a prostitute, a harlot, a useless woman. They told her she
> was immoral, that women like her were the reason Nigeria was in such a bad
> state. Other women have no doubt experienced similar harassment, but
> things will become worse, horrendously so, if the senate passes a bill
> that would criminalise "indecent" dressing: necklines must be two inches
> or less from the shoulders, and the waist of a female over 14 must not be
> visible. It would be hilarious if it weren't so dangerous.
>
> When I told a male friend who lives in Lagos that this bill is an attack
> on women, he said it was not about women because the senator who sponsored
> the bill is a woman. Very facile reasoning, I thought. Gay people have
> supported institutionalised homophobia. Black police officers in the US
> have carried out anti-black racial profiling. I know men and women who
> don't accept any oppression of women. I know men and women who do. That
> the senator is a woman does not make the bill any less targeted at women.
> As Reuben Abati wrote in the Nigerian Guardian: "Men are quick to complain
> about how they are exposed to sexual intimidation from women. They do not
> talk about indecent dressing among men."
>
> As always, gender will be complicated by class: women who do not have
> cars, who have to hitch up their skirts to climb on okadas (motorbike
> taxis), who do not know a Big Man or Big Woman to call for help, who will
> be vulnerable to rape at police stations - these will be
> disproportionately harassed.
>
> Many Nigerians have pointed out how silly the bill is when we have serious
> problems with power, health, education, roads, water. Still, to offer
> these alternatives is to give the bill a legitimacy of sorts. If we solved
> these serious problems, would it then be acceptable to punish a woman in a
> putative democracy who chooses to wear a miniskirt?
>
> This bill is, in a larger sense, about societies for whom women are safe
> scapegoats, and Nigeria is only one example. The country is immoral, and
> we must legislate morality by imprisoning women in miniskirts. (Most
> Nigerians use "immoral" to mean sexual. They rarely use the word to refer
> to real immorality: institutional corruption.)
>
> Even challengers of the bill have mostly agreed that it might be a good
> thing to regulate immoral dressing, but best to leave it to private
> organisations. This is the populist way to reason in a country where a
> majority of people choose to be rigidly conservative when it is
> convenient. (But is dressing ever really an issue of morality?)
>
> I was once asked to leave my church in Nsukka because my blouse had short
> sleeves (I refused); apparently my bare arms would tempt the otherwise
> pious men. To accept that dressing is a moral issue is to accept this: a
> woman must not tempt a man. We focus on Adam eating the apple because Eve
> gave it to him. We don't focus on Adam's responsibility, on why he did not
> say no. This Judaeo-Christian-Islamic notion of controlling the female
> temptress so as to save the helpless male dehumanises women and insults
> the dignity of men since it assumes that men are incapable of restraint at
> the sight of a woman's flesh. Or incapable of simply looking away.
>
> "Culture" is the other justification. We must preserve our culture, and
> miniskirts aren't our culture. Rape and incest and sexual abuse of
> children are not our culture, even though they happen all the time. There
> are accounts of rape all over Nigeria, especially in urban areas, yet a
> collective silence reigns. This bill is particularly dangerous because it
> increases the likelihood of women being blamed for rape: if she hadn't
> worn that blouse, she would not have been raped.
>
> Perhaps it is time to debate culture. The common story is that in "real"
> African culture, before it was tainted by the west, gender roles were
> rigid and women were contentedly oppressed. There are men and women who,
> while holding their imported cellphones and driving their imported cars,
> say that women should conform to certain gender roles so as to preserve
> our "real" culture. The historical truth is that most of these reductive
> gender ideas came from Victorian England.
>
> But assuming that we agree that there is such a thing as a "pure" culture
> and that we would like to return to it, then we would go back to
> pre-colonial west Africa when gender roles were fluid, when there was
> little gender differentiation in Yorubaland, and when Igbo women could
> marry women. The culture-preserving senator would be surprised if she were
> transported back to her home in 1800. Never mind low-cut blouses. The
> women trading in the markets would be bare-breasted.
>
> There has always been a strange dissonance between the public and the
> private in Nigeria. We say what we think we should in public. This bill
> has many supporters who must surely know that the moral decadence in our
> society is not because women are wearing miniskirts but because men and
> women are stealing and publicly thanking God after they have stolen;
> because the ability to speak honestly is compromised by a literal and
> figurative hunger; because we have embraced and codified the culture of
> hypocrisy. And it is this culture of hypocrisy that the bill will
> preserve.
>
> · Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is the author of Half of a Yellow Sun,
> which won last year's Orange prize for fiction; next Monday she will be
> discussing her work with the writer Jackie Kay at the Bloomsbury Theatre
> in London
> halfofayellowsun.com
>
> Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
>
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Moses Ebe Ochonu
There is enough in the world for everyone's need but not for everyone's greed.
---Mohandas Ghandi
Amina Mama
Dear Colleagues,
I am equally delighted by Adichie’s skillfully worded critique of this latest nonsense in my own dear country. May I take the liberty to refer you to further discussions of our gender cultures in Feminist Africa issue 5 ‘Changing Cultures’ and the two most recent Issues 8 & 9 ‘Rethinking Universities’ all of which address the challenges of culture from a gender studies perspective in the context of our post colonial African condition? We would love to hear some responses to this forum, which is edited and put together by a network of African scholars, including myself, as an open access online publication and distributed in hard copy to feminist scholars based on our continent.
Click www.feministafrica.org and go to the archive for back issues.
Thank you for your interest.
Nnaemeka, Obioma N
U.S. Library of Congress to honour
Achebe for Things Fall Apart
From Laolu
Akande, New York
AMID ovation heralding the African literary classic, Things Fall Apart, by Prof. Chinua Achebe at its 50th anniversary, world's largest library, the United States (U.S.) Library of Congress, has announced plans to host an event in honour of both the novel and its author.
The event, The Guardian learnt, has been fixed for November.
The U.S. government-owned Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, according to U.S. government records. Located in the U.S. capital city of Washington DC, the library has "more than 138 million items on approximately 650 miles of bookshelves. The collections include more than 32 million books and other print materials, 2.9 million recordings, 12.5 million photographs, 5.3 million maps, 5.5 million pieces of sheet music and 61 million manuscripts."
Speaking with The Guardian last Wednesday, Achebe's U.S.-based medical doctor son, Chidi Achebe, confirmed that the U.S. Library of Congress had written to invite his father to an event on November 14, two days to the world renowned author's birthday.
He said the event is to honour the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart and also celebrate Achebe's 78 birthday, which comes up on November 16.
Several events and ceremonies have been held in the last two months to celebrate 50 years of the publication of the globally acclaimed novel.
Achebe's son explained that the professor could not possibly attend most of the events, but that he intends to honour the U.S. Library of Congress invitation personally.
The Library's offer to honour a particular book is said to be a rare privilege in its tradition, initially founded in the year 1800.
Indeed, a U.S.-based publisher, Anchor Books, is releasing a new Golden Jubilee version of the novel, which is 209 pages edition in paperback and is now on sale for $10.95 in the U.S.
The blurb describes the book as "one of the most widely read and beloved novels of our time. It's a true modern classic - translated into 50 languages, taught in high schools around the country, studied in college history and anthropology classes."
On Tuesday, April 1, one of the many celebrations across the U.S. honouring Achebe was held at the Buffalo State University in New York. The school's African and African-American Studies Interdisciplinary Unit had held its own celebration of the 50th anniversary of Things Fall Apart, where it was described as "a seminal novel in African and world literature."
At the event, as in many others that had been held in the U.S., there were screenings of the author's interviews and scholarly presentations with Buffalo State Faculty, staff, and students in attendance.
Last week in Washington DC, Achebe was present at the Washington Post newspapers where he met with top editors of the paper and several top-notch U.S. English and Literature professors.
The Washington Post event was organised in commemoration of Things Fall Apart by the U.S. arm of the international writers' group, PEN/Faulkner Foundation, Anchor Books and the Washington Post Book World.
Tagged an "Evening with Chinua Achebe" on March 24, Achebe read from his works in an event sold out way ahead of the date.
Although the PEN/ Faulkner Foundation was started in 1980, using William Faulkner's Nobel Prize funds to create an award for young writers and to bring together American writers and readers in a wide variety of programmes to promote the love of literature, the decision of the foundation to celebrate Things Fall Apart, an African novel by Chinua Achebe, is seen as a major cultural and literary milestone for a purely American literary group.
Two days after the Washington Post celebration, the Things Fall Apart at 50 celebration moved to Princeton University - one of America's oldest and most distinguished Ivy League institutions of higher learning.
There, Achebe was also in attendance and held a public discussion with the eminent Princeton scholar, Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Philosophy.
Achebe - who won the 2007 Man Booker International Prize for achievements in fiction - and Appiah discussed his (Achebe's) work and the state of literature in Africa and around the world.
Interestingly, the discussion was a culmination of a community-wide reading of Things Fall Apart in Princeton, under a programme called Princeton Reads, which "encourages everyone to read a selected book and to participate in discussions and events centered on that book." For this year, the university selected Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.
From Princeton, New Jersey, the celebration train moved to the Free Library of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where on Thursday March 27, Achebe also discussed the book at the well-known library.
In a column he wrote on the renowned author, a Washington Post writer, Carlin Roman, said he asked Achebe whether Things Fall Apart is the best of his novels.
Quoting Achebe, the columnist reported: "That's a question I refuse to answer...Each of my books is different. Deliberately . . . I wanted to create my society, my people, in their fullness.
"For everyone of the five novels I have written, somebody, or a small group of people, call it my masterpiece... So, I feel really that I shouldn't do anything. Just sit back and let them sort things out."
Obioma Nnaemeka
Professor of French and Women's Studies
President, Association of African Women Scholars (AAWS)
Dept. of World Languages & Cultures Phone: (317) 278-2038
Cavanaugh Hall
543A
317-274-7611/0062 (messages)
Indiana University Fax:
(317)
278-7375
425 University Boulevard E-mail:
nnae...@iupui.edu
Indianapolis, IN 46202 USA