If culture is an ever changing social construct, Nice Nailantei is on the right side of history

Nice Nailantei Leng'ete attends the TIME 100 Gala celebrating its annual list of the 100 Most Influential People In The World at Frederick P. Rose Hall, Jazz at Lincoln Center on April 24, 2018 in New York City. AFP PHOTO | ANGELA WEISS 

In Summary

• If only Kenya would stop for a minute its obsession with honouring useless politicians also give Nice Nailantei the recognition she so rightly deserves!

By TEE NGUGI
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There are people who make the news because their convictions and actions transform communities and nations. Others grab the headlines because of notoriety of some kind or by stoking a self-serving controversy.

The first kind are selfless, and often take great risks to bring about change and progress.
The second have no agenda other than being in the news, and their actions often bring division and retrogression. The first gain universal recognition and respect, and inspire millions across the globe. The second only inspire our worst instincts and eventually fade away into infamy.

There are no better examples of these two kinds of newsmakers than two Kenyan women currently in the news.

The first one is Nice Nailantei, who has been campaigning against female genital mutilation (FGM), and has rescued thousands of girls from the barbaric practice.
The other is Dr Tatu Kamau who has gone to court to challenge the outlawing of FGM.

FGM has absolutely no benefits. On the contrary, it causes a number of medical problems.

First, it often leads to complications during childbirth. Sometimes, these complications result in the mother’s death.

Second, FGM could lead to fistula, a condition that can only be rectified through surgery.

Third, FGM leads to painful intercourse.
Additionally, many deaths occur due to excessive bleeding during or after the cut, or as a result of infections from the unhygienic conditions in which the cut is performed.
Last, and I have this on excellent authority, FGM denies its victims sexual pleasure.

FGM has no use except to control women by curtailing their sexuality. Patriarchy, by its very design, seeks to subjugate women using culture, religion and psychology.

Patriarchal cultures restrict what women can do, say or wear. Many of our religions have as their core doctrine the idea of women as being inferior to men.

In fact, Christianity portrays women as the cause of the Original Sin for tempting Adam to eat the forbidden fruit.

Through psychological warfare, using, for example, sayings or proverbs, women are convinced of their inferiority and the need, therefore, to have as their greatest ambition the acquisition of a husband to make them whole.

There are many examples in Kenya’s recent history of women having their moral integrity questioned and their ideas dismissed because they were not married or were divorced.

Adapting a biblical phrase, Ghana founding father Kwame Nkrumah’s exhortation to colonised Africa was: “Seek ye first the political kingdom and all else shall follow.” As we now know, only dictatorship, beginning with Nkrumah’s own in Ghana, poverty and misery followed.

In similar fashion, it would seem that patriarchy’s exhortation to women was: “Seek ye first a husband and all else shall follow.” But we know from the endemic killing of women or chopping off of their limbs by husbands that, for many women, nothing but sheer misery followed.

But there have always been women risking everything to change the political, cultural and religious dehumanisation of women.

Nailantei is among these women. Last week, Time magazine named her among the 100 of most influential people in the world.

If only Kenya would stop for a minute its obsession with honouring useless politicians also give Nailantei the recognition she so rightly deserves!

Dr Kamau, who should be using the science of her profession to help fight the vice, argues that outlawing FGM is going against African culture.

But where, for the love of God, does it say that just because something is a traditional custom, it is right, true and just: If that were the case, then Dr Kamau should not have gone to school, because traditional culture was against the education of girls.

She further argues that FGM can be done under more sanitary conditions in hospital. She might as well advocate for those who beat their wives to use more “humane” ways of doing it.

In the 1980s, we were told by dictators and some Afrocentric scholars that democracy and individual rights went against the African traditions of humanist communalism and sagacious gerontocracy. It was a lie.

Culture is a social construct to be reinvented constantly to keep up with changing views on a whole range of issues.

The theme of Kenya’s 2010 Constitution, implicit or explicit, is the idea that every human being must enjoy freedom from oppression and harmful cultural practices. That is the future.

Efforts in the past that attempted to reverse societal progress ended up in the rubbish heap of history. Dr Tatu Kamau’s rearguard action will not even qualify as rubbish.

Tee Ngugi is a Nairobi-based political commentator.