African women – heroines or hindrance?

African women do everything. I mean everything!

It’s a pretty sweeping statement, I know, and since I’ve only been to Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, I can only really talk about east Africa. And I’ve only been here for six weeks so I am by no means claiming to be an expert on African women’s issues. Likewise, I don’t claim to have single-handedly solved the ‘Africa issue’.

With the disclaimers out of the way, however, let me share with you my observations on African society: African women do all the work while the men sit under trees, in the shade, making ‘decisions’.

No man moves fast in east Africa, unless he’s training for a marathon in Eldoret, that is. If you want something done, ask a woman. The only waiters I ever saw moving at more than a snail’s pace were the female ones.

And yet, women here are still regarded as the weaker sex. No matter that they build the houses (as is the case in the Maasi tribes), collect the water, tend the fields, cook the dinner, look after the kids and clean the house. I have seen women carrying at least 20 kilograms of goods on their heads, with both hands carrying bags at their sides and men walking next to them carrying zilch. Nothing. Nada. She’s a woman, let her do the work.

It’s no wonder they don’t share in the decision-making – they have no time! But is it really that they’re too busy to worry about advancing their rights in a society that survives on their shoulders? Can they really not insist their husbands wear a condom? Why can’t they just say, ‘If you don’t wear a condom I will not finish building this house, or fetch our water tomorrow, or harvest the crops or cook your dinner?’

African society would just collapse without them, so why can’t they use this power to change things? Are African women hindering the progress of all Africa by failing to stand up to their men?

I realise I’ve probably just offended a lot of people. I know I offended Jack Ojiambo when I said this to him. He said I really didn’t understand African society, or something like that, but in a much more polite manner. Then I figured out Jack’s mother is Kenya’s most famous feminist, earned a Masters degree from  Harvard University, was the first woman to earn a PhD from Nairobi University and became that university’s first female African lecturer and was Kenya’s first female assistant minister. I politely pointed out to him that his family did not fit the standard African mould. I’m pretty sure his mother didn’t have to walk seven kilometres to the river every morning just to pick up the day’s water while Jack was off at boarding school in England. He said I had a point.

I’m clearly not the only one to have made this observation. Many NGOs are already filtering money to families through the women. It’s a well-known fact that money given to women gets spent on the family, whereas money given to men gets spent on him alone. This is by no means unique to Africa but Africa is unique in its dependency on charity, which is why it becomes so important here. The Nike ‘Girl Effect’ programme targets adolescent girls in order to lift “the world” out of poverty. The programme emerged from the Girls Count research, which found that providing support to girls aged 10-18 dramatically improves their lives and also results in significant benefits to society at large.

Long drives through Africa provide ample thinking time. Watching out windows at field after field of women with hoes, women carrying extraordinary sized packages on their heads, women working everywhere and a lot of men sitting under trees, really makes you think.

Has it always been this way? Or did the women just say one day, ‘My family needs to eat and the blokes around here are useless so I will go and plant some vegetables.’ How did it get like this and why hasn’t it changed?

Is it right for the NGOs to make the decision that women are the ones to be trusted? Will it even work? To me, it makes perfect sense. Even to my Italian friend it made practical sense. Let me tell you his story.

Paolo went for a walk near Lake Bunyonyi in Uganda. He met two young boys who were funny and lively and he struck up a conversation with them. They told him that their parents were dead and they couldn’t afford to go to school and asked for some money. Paolo, being no fool, asked them what they needed it for. ‘To buy some dinner,’ they wisely told him.

‘No, if I give you money, you go and buy beer!’ he said.

‘No, no, we don’t buy beer!’ they insisted, but Paolo didn’t believe them. He asked them to show him their home and that only then would he give them some money.

At their home, he discovered they were at least partially telling the truth – their parents were dead but they should have been in school. As Paolo suspected, that money would have gone straight to the liquor store. Instead, Paolo met the boys’ sister. He got talking to her and she told him the straight truth, including not to give the boys money. So Paolo gave the money to her and she thanked him gratefully and told him what she was intended to buy with it – stuff for the whole family, of course.

Paolo doesn’t work for an NGO. He hasn’t got a degree in African studies. He’s a human being with intelligence and instinct and it made perfect sense to give a little girl money and no sense to give two little boys any.

Maybe I am enforcing my own values on a different society. And maybe the NGOs are too. Maybe the money shouldn’t be given before there’s adequate representation of women in parliament and adequate protection of women’s rights enshrined in law. Maybe African society needs the empowerment of women to truly lift it out of the state of poverty and corruption it is still mired in.

I genuinely don’t know the answers to these questions. All I know is that African women work bloody hard for no pay and they deserve better: from NGOs, from African men, from tourists, especially the ones who pay for sex, and from us – western women.

What I see here is a terrifying culture of dependency and women working bloody hard to keep their families alive. I would help if I could, but something tells me more charity from mzungus would be seriously counter-productive. It’s time more African women followed the lead of women such as Julia Ojiambo and her peers. And we support them from afar.