A Culture of Change in Africa

A Culture of Change in Africa
Boston Globe - Editorial Notebook - April 1999

by Renee Loth

ACCRA, Ghana-- It isn't far from this bustling capital with its modern hotels and office towers, to traditional villages were there is no electricity or running water, much less the Internet or "Oprah." In most of this West African nation; traditional values and practices are yielding only slowly to the new ideas presented by foreign aid workers

Alhaji Amidu Sulemana, the government's regional health minister in the rural northeast district, crystalized his country's suspicion of change when he said that many people still believe family planning is "a conspiracy from the West" aimed at reducing the population of Africans. "A people without a culture is not a race, he said. "We shall guard our traditions jealously."

It was in response to such resistance that the 1994 world summit on population and development, sponsored by the United Nations, designed a broader approach to attaining stable populations than simply pushing birth control. The summit's Programme of Action, signed by 179 countries including Ghana, features better overall health care, education, and especially the empowerment of women and girls in a more holistic approach to keeping families small.

"We want to educate women and give them income-generating activities as an alternative to having children," said Ghana's first lady, Nana Agyeman-Rawlings. "If you just say, 'Distribute condoms it goes in one ear and out the other."

The wife of President Jerry Rawlings is a true activist for women's rights in Ghana. Several years ago she formed the 31st December Women's Movement, which has been sustained with help from the United Nations Population Fund. It provides loans, equipment, and training to women in small businesses such as a palm-oil extraction plant in eastern Ghana. She has pushed free compulsory education and prenatal care for pregnant women. And yet even she is sensitive to pressure from outsiders and the need to hold on to traditional values. "Christianize me, but don't Europeanize me," is the way she put it.'

What Agyeman-Rawlings does want to change are practices she calls "truly inimical to the development of women' These include polygamy, rules against women inheriting property, and the ritualized female genital mutilation that is still widespread despite being outlawed by Parliament.

In some rural communities FGM -the excision of a woman's clitoris and surrounding tissue -is observed in as much as 38 percent of the population. According to doctors, aid workers, and community leaders, some traditional Ghanaians still believe that wives must be "circumcised" to keep them docile or faithful; a woman's in-laws will sometimes demand it as a condition of marriage. Other rules prohibit a woman from attending her mother's funeral if she has not been cut.

Doctors who have gained the confidence of local chiefs can, and do, persuade them to advocate an end to the practice. Chief Bolga Naba Martin Abilba III, dressed in his chiefly regalia in a town square in northern Ghana, said "We are fighting against all these outmoded customs, to speak out forcefully. We say: 'God put it there; why take it away?' He said the practice of cutting tribal scars, into children's faces was dying out, and he expected the same eventual fate for FGM.

Other unhealthy practices are being challenged through community organizing at the grass roots. I One doctor said when he first came to northern Ghana he was confronted with the belief that washing a child with measles would kill it. Other communities routinely kept their dead in the open for seven days before burial.

A system of indentured servitude called "trokosi" is also fairly common in rural Ghana, where- by young girls are sent to serve tribal priests for life to payoff the debts of their families. Trokosi is illegal, but few district police enforce the law.

These traditions -in addition to basic survival struggles and shockingly low literacy rates, especially among girls -are just as much impeding Ghana's sustainable development as the lack of affordable birth control. Developing countries may have slightly different concepts of human rights than the West, but it is not cultural imperialism to suggest that women should not be mutilated, enslaved, or condemned to die in childbirth. Only when women are true partners in the growth of their country can Ghana and the rest of Africa.