JENDA: A JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND AFRICAN WOMEN STUDIES
ISSN: 1530-5686
Issue 8 (2006)
| JENDA: A JOURNAL OF CULTURE AND AFRICAN WOMEN STUDIES ISSN: 1530-5686 Issue 8 (2006) |
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CUT THE HYPOCRISY: PROSTITUTION IS PART OF OUR SOCIETY! |
Sex is mankind’s oldest medium of exchange and Africa is said to be the birthplace of mankind. Therefore addressing the subject of the sex trade pragmatically should be not misinterpreted as “importation of decadent western ideal!” Prostitution was, is and will, always be part of our human society and no amount of moral dictatorship can eliminate it!
The practice of sex in exchange for food and security as in the rural areas, camps, trouble zones or in the “civilised cities” where parents “sell” their daughters to wealthy suitors, is as old as Africa itself - long before the European slave traders arrived! It is always easy to blame western television and materialism for “corrupting our holy African cultures!”
The painful truth is that our compatriots have long been exchanging sex for jobs, for contracts and all kinds of goods and services depending on the sector involved. We are seeing students sleeping with teachers for good results, junior staff sleeping with their bosses for promotion, doctors sleeping with their patients, lawyers sleeping with their clients and even prisoners sleeping with their wardens. All these are qualified applications of sex as medium of exchange in our midst!
As the Sarahule (Soninke) saying goes “if you have a sickness which is refusing to be cured, do not worry much as it will share the same grave with you.” We should stop hiding behind the masks of morality and start addressing this issue of prostitution with common sense as it will exist till the end of mankind.
Before our African political and religious class start ordering the harassments of prostitutes and sexuality rights activists at gun-points, they should allocate part of their defence and extravagant celebration budgets to economic empowerment programmes for young adults and abandoned mothers.
Prostitution is primarily about survival and not promiscuity! I interviewed a lot of prostitutes and they do not have fun in allowing all kinds of “dirty sperms into their womanhoods” - sorry for my language - if men are not paying for their services, the prostitutes will never sell their bodies. Period!
I remember very well when the former finance minister Bakary Bunja Darboe warned that “we should not put all our economic eggs in the basket of tourism”, many people did not take heed. Most of the pen-pushers in our government around the “quadrangle gangs” were obsessed with the transformation of our Gambia “into a service-based economy” and care the least.
It is an open secret that tourism stimulates the sex trade. All the countries that bank on tourism—Malaysia, Ghana, France, Holland, Brazil, Thailand, Cameroon, Kenya, South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, etc—are all facing the sexual exploitations of their people day in and day out by tourists!
The difference is that some of these affected countries like Holland and Malaysia tried to address it by either legalising it or creating semi-legal mechanisms that enable sex workers maintain comfortable standard of living and pay taxes like the normal bankers, civil servants or trader.
We in the Gambia should wake up for this state of denial. We cannot eat out cake and have it. We say we want tourism we should therefore not be surprised when our Tourism Development Area has become “sex trade development area!”
Recently, the German TV station RTL made a documentary about middle-aged European women who fly to the Gambia on short holidays to have sex with “young, healthy black men.” One of the effected young men told the reporter that his Islamic religion and family background are opposed to male prostitution but insist he had no other income generating alternative. I sympathised with the young man for he could only speak openly with the assurance that the report will not be shown in the Gambia and his family would not know of his double life.
It is important to note that while most of the female prostitutes in our streets and clubs are from sister ECOWAS states, the male prostitute sleeping with European sex tourists of their grandmothers’ age are Gambian men!
We must also not narrow our understanding of sex trade to the poor street workers. Every class of our society has prostitution defined in its own terms. The practices of “sugar-daddysm” and “sugar-mammysm” are other forms of prostitution where the well-established party shower the younger (or weaker) party with material wealth in exchange for sexual comfort.”
The “first class” prostitutes on the other hand stay in their self-contained houses or hotel rooms where their clients visit them. Others specialise in comforting diplomats, expatriates and the so-called “very important persons” of our society who, during the day preach morality and when the sun sets, patronise sex workers!
If I were to choose between American Playboy guru Hugh Heffner and our so-called moral apostles, I will go for Heffner because he is not hypocritical!
I am currently working on a TV documentary on migrant Africans in Europe and USA and I have discovered that large part of the money people are sending back home for school fees, family-upkeep, housing projects and other business ventures are not just generated from hard labour but from drugs and prostitution as well.
I met many ambitious young men and women from “publicly respected Gambian families” who confessed that they had no other choice while the families back home are pressing them to keep wiring money and to keep up with these family pressures, they have to sell their bodies!
Some of the men and women living between Seattle and New York City (USA) and from London to Rome (Europe) work as strip tease, call-girls and exclusive prostitutes. Even married men and women are joining the show because white men and women are now willing to pay high fees for “sexual experience with an exotic African!” This does not mean that all economic migrants are into this practice. The majority earn slowly and legally.
So the ECOWAS citizens are prostituting in the Gambia in the same way some Gambian daughters and sons are selling their bodies in Europe and America!
Though our Islamic Faith laid strict penalties for adultery and fornication, the sexual exploitation of women is condoned by the elites. The harem culture in which hundreds of women are packed in golden cages for the sexual satisfaction of the Sheikhs and religious leaders is still rampant
In 1996, I wrote a report about young Gambian girls who were lured by a local religious leader into sex-slavery in Kuwait, Dubai, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and other Arab-Muslim states.
In Present day Islamic Republic of Iran, there is an Islamic tradition of short-term marriages which effectively encourage the sex-trade. This tradition is called “sighe” and through it men and men can go to any official cleric or mullah who then approves their short-term martial contracts ranging from 15 minutes to 30 days or till death—depending on the hidden agenda of the parties! This practice is now widespread across Iran and other Shiite-Muslim communities where men and women exchange in short matrimonial unions for sexual adventure.
In Egypt, Morocco and other North African states, young men engage in sexual acts with tourists who sponsor them or help then enter Europe! The other alternative for them is terrorism as they are condemned in vicious cocoons of poverty! All these shady practise of our Islamic word are not reported on in the public media because the conservative elites who control the media outlets continue to propagate golden social façades that are rotten from within.
The trial of Amina Lawal by a Nigerian Sharia court for extra-marital affair failed because the man who impregnated her was freed while she (Amina) was publicly humiliated. The hypocrisy and mockery of justice in our world makes me vomit. Can a woman impregnate herself?
The Islamic burden-of-proof rules say three to four witnesses must corroborate an act of illegal sex. Tell me how many people have sexual intercourse in public? Even if an alleged prostitute talks to a potential client in the street it does not mean they are having sexual intercourse and they are innocent as there is no crime in people talking peacefully!
Before our moralists start blaming the teenagers for unwanted pregnancies and sexual frustrations, they should ask if they (teenagers) had access to balanced education on the pros and cons of sex!
You will agree with me that there is deficit of sex and reproductive sex education in our society. Parents pass the responsibility on to the schools and the school expect the families to help the teenagers.
In this state of uncertainty, people tend to swallow whatever junk the preachers cook.
The fear that young people will indulge in sex when they know about the positive and negative sides of active sexuality does not hold. In today’s internet and mobile age, it takes only a mouse click or text message for a teenager to access the global database of pornographic materials.
The challenge is for us to tell the young people about sex and sexuality in our anthropological settings. We need more “coming-of-age” ceremonies, beyond female circumcision, so they can understand sensuality, reproductive health and family life values. Giving birth to a child is easier but becoming a successful mother is very difficult. Likewise, it is easier to impregnate a woman than father a child!
In Uganda, there are traditional female counsellors called “ssengas, who advise women in sexuality and healthy sex. Their services are not only engaged by teenagers but also by married women and other female executives who want to rediscover sexual satisfaction in an African context.
We all know that HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted infections (STIs) are not transmitted through portable water or polluted air. I would like to add that is also un-African to wait till when half of Africa’s population is sent to the graves by HIV/AIDS/STIs due lack of leadership will to allow public discourse on sexuality!
Until and unless we Africans are prepared to face the truth and promote responsible education is sexuality and reproductive health in the open, we will be only caricaturing ourselves like the naked emperors.
At this juncture, we must realise that nakedness or nudity is a symbol of innocence and not decadence! It was only when Adam and Even sinned that they discover shame and started covering their private parts out of guilt. So if when see the Sans of Kalahari desert, the Indos of Amazon, the Pygmies in Central Africa, and other native people walking mostly naked, it has nothing to do with decadence but with innocence and connection to nature.
Nudity becomes decadent when it is taken out of its anthropological context as in the cases of the music, film, pornography and advertisement sectors where “sex sells.” Such practise reduces sex, nature and women into mere commercial products for consumption and should be addressed.
The strippers in Euro-American red districts are selling sex just like the Arab belly dancers in Arabo-Islamic closets.
We must not forget that global sex industry is said to worth around 5 billion US dollar. This has attracted organised criminals who copy the tactics the drug cartels and human-traffickers.
Germany recently join and Holland in recognising prostitution as a legitimate profession. Prostitutes pay tax and enjoy state essential services like police support and medical care. The German state also pays for professional training of young men and women who want to become qualified sex workers in licensed brothels, escort services and massage parlours.
These moves are meant to cut-out the criminals who are exploiting vulnerable women.
The recent conviction of a male brothel operator in our Gambia may send warning signals to other sex-slave masters and ring leaders operating this prostitution rings at the expense of economically-desperate women.
But, I am appealing to my Gambian Government and the law enforcement agencies not play themselves into the hands of rival gangs fighting for control of the local sex industry. These sex-gang leaders usually adopt mafia methods like including police and government officers into their pay-list in exchange for clamp-downs on their opponents.
I for one do not care about the legalisation of prostitution or same sex as it was, and will always remain with us in this world. Both Nelson Mandela of South Africa (Christian) and Hassan al-Turabi of Sudan (Muslim) agree that the “moral police” cannot go into peoples’ homes to investigate the so-called anti-social behaviours (ASBs); they risk legal nightmares over trespassing!”
If I were a lawyer or human right activist or a lawmaker, I will fight for the rights of sex workers.
Our Gambia is secular state and a secular constitution. It is therefore our secular constitution and not the religious dogma that can help us devise pragmatic solutions. The sex workers who were unfortunate to be arrested for prostitution should be coached by the women’s bureau and social welfare department. They should be integrated into the various micro-credit schemes so they can develop alternate income generating activities.
One cannot solve the problems of prostitution in one generation but it is better to start than to beat about the bush. It took Thailand almost 30 years bring opium (drugs) production in the Golden Triangle to controllable point. Prostitution which is millions of years old will take much longer time.
Sex workers are human beings. And like you and me, they have the freedom to do what ever, the fell like doing with their sexual organs as long as they do not trample on the freedom of their neighbours because one’s freedom stops where his/her neighbours freedom starts!
In conclusion, the problems with my home continent of Africa are taboos, religious dogma and moral hypocrisy! I ask the following questions:
The cultural hypocrites should keep their mouths shut—we are tried of dogma! Taboos kill!
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Mr. Bubacarr Sankanu (full name: Abubacarr Balaqeesha Sankanu) is journalist, producer, social critic, pan African cultural activist and entrepreneur. He started as reporter for “The Point Newspaper” in The Gambia and as freelance correspondent for the “Voice of America English-to-Africa”, “BBC Focus on Africa” and radio “Deutsche Welle”. Before relocating to Germany where he started “Afromedia Film & Television International Group (www.afromediafilmtv.net), he worked as a producer for the “Gambia Radio and Television Services (GRTS). He chairs the “African Council for Arts & Culture, AFCAC” a Panafrican Cultural NGO based in Germany.
Citation Format:
Bubacarr Sankanu. “Cut The Hypocrisy: Prostitution Is Part Of Our Society!” JENDA: A Journal of Culture and African Women Studies: Issue 8, 2006.
Copyright © 2006 Africa Resource Center, Inc.