ARTICLE: HOW FAR CAN RURAL GIRLS TRAVEL IN AFRICA SCHOOLS?

HOW FAR CAN RURAL GIRLS TRAVEL IN AFRICA SCHOOLS?

      

An Article by Edward Adeti, Daily Dispatch’s Correspondent for Upper East, Ghana.

Edward Adeti

One of my every-day major encounters in rural newsgathering in Africa is the common sight of girls who, after dropping prematurely from the academic ladder and suffering a sudden “academic demise” at the elementary school stage, roam in the hamlets as pregnant timid “ghosts”.

Some months after, the same girls appear in the busy streets with malnourished babies strapped to their bare backs in the steaming Sun. Those hungry naked babies have no fathers who should hold their hands at sunrise across the road to any nearby early childhood school to begin to learn some quality ABC of life or bring them back home at sunset. Rural single parenting, coated with the rags of a die-hard crippling poverty, accounts for the ever-growing measure of indiscipline and crime that robs Africa of what outweighs the uncounted tons of mineral stones taken away from the continent throughout the invasion and rule of the foreign masters─ Africa’s finest young brains.

With a rural child giving birth to a child in Africa, nature finds itself in a bottomless distress for nurture. And a lot more rural girls, naked girls, who have no new life yet screaming on their own backs for dry milk from the deflated breasts of hungry mothers, either soon turn out to be teenage mothers or carriers and transmitters of expensive infections after their first year in the junior secondary school.

A great number of these girls, who do not know where their next meal will come from, have nowhere to turn. They are inspired by severe economic pains at home and in the rural streets to migrate to the choked cities where they will be compelled by survival instinct to grab and accept anything to remain alive. That is where and when the scary side of life stares at them without mercy. And in their reaction, they make decisions that are bound to deform their once-promising lives beyond recognition forever. In every environment that is physically polluted, moral pollution is an inseparable close-door neighbour. Congested cities in developing Africa are the worst learning institutions that female school dropouts can attend with degrees ranging from a variety of deformities to premature deaths.

The fingers of many girls in Africa are stained with bloods of unborn babies as an unwanted pregnancy and a career dream in the midst of prolonged hunger cannot share the same body and mind. Alarmingly, some girls do not even remember the number of shallow graves they have dug in desperation with their bare hands as they tried to lay to rest idle babies who had done no wrong except turning and kicking inside their mothers’ young wombs. Normally, it is through late confessions by the tearful guilty young mothers that the graves of priceless lives (which never were) finally are uncovered.

In Africa where more boys complete school than girls, girls who naturally learn faster than boys rather suffer raw deal as the very things that frown at teenage pregnancy and other forms of moral rot are the same things that encourage them. We claim we abhor poverty, crime and violence in Africa, yet we ripple our own peace and stability by stirring still waters. We by ourselves propagate the very things that overturn our hopes into nightmares.  African girls, owing to African-made factors, endure more adventures that distance them from the same opportunities that guarantee a secure future for the boys.

Aware and expectant of the fortunes and dignity that lie ahead for their male counterparts, an average pregnant rural virgin in Africa ends up quickly being swallowed up in an extremely poor self-esteem and self-pity. Standing miserably far outside the educational circle, an academically  dislodged African girl with an extra burden to shoulder and carry all alone weeps for missing the early train that leads to life. She is incapable of looking a better-positioned boy straight in the eye in any public conversation. Drowned in early tragedies, her talents may lie buried forever under a towering desert dune or in an endless stretch of a deep sea of unending woes.

There are real wild animals that keep girls at home away from school. We have in Africa untamed beasts in our educational systems, working tirelessly to ensure that girls who are in school do not last up to the top of the academic ladder. During my interactions in 2010 with some rural girls in northern Ghana where the HIV prevalence rate still commands worship from a disturbing height, I observed that that hunger was one of the topmost reasons many girls had abandoned their books for early sexual encounters that would fetch them food.

It is worrying that rural-poor girls in their search for well-deserved three square meals a day would have to pay for those meals with at least three sexual encounters a day with men, some of whom are twice the age of their fathers. For such girls, the more they unavoidably are hungry, the more they must avail themselves of the waiting arms of sexually aflame men. And what is more worrying is the fact that some of the men who carry Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) demand raw or unprotected sex with the unsuspecting hungry poor girls. Rural hunger, one may safely conclude, is strengthening the HIV/AIDS whip and hepatitis scourge in underdeveloped and developing Africa.

HIV/AIDS is spreading fast in rural communities like a dry-season wild fire due to the same chronic hunger and malnutrition that threaten education. In the Monday 1st November 2010 edition of the Daily Dispatch, I gave a detailed news report on how hunger had been diligently recruiting young prostitutes in the rural Upper East Region of Ghana. It is captioned “POVERTY EXPOSES MORE RURAL GIRLS AND WOMEN TO HIV/AIDS” on page 5. The details are there. Even though the World Food Programme responded after the publication by providing 2000 HIV-infected persons in the region with a variety of food stuffs, the situation still is not any better as I speak. Grippingly, my interaction with the Upper East Regional President of the National Association of People Living with AIDS (NAPLAS), Mrs. Teni Ayuepaadu, confirmed that the youngest member of the association in the region was a two-and a-half-year-old girl, not a boy. And again, the oldest member, according to Mrs. Ramatu Abdullai (Upper East Regional President of the Women’s Wing of NAPLAS), was a 72-year-old woman, not a man.

Mr. Victor Nti-Berkoh, 57-year-old President of Yinepanya, another HIV/AIDS patients’ support group in the region’s capital, told me that four of the five HIV-positive patients who committed suicide as a result of stigma, discrimination, rejection and depression, in the capital between 2002 and 2010 were women. Two women, 24 and 35 years of age, owing to the same reasons died mysteriously at Chuchuliga in the same region. Mrs Ayuepaadu told me that the 35-year-old infected woman died, leaving two girls behind, after stigmatisation cut her off from public access to treatment.

After her death, one of her daughters got married when she was only about 16 years, an average basic-school final-year age in Ghana, and today she has two children whose future just might be a sour repeat. Mrs. Ayuepadu is in the Upper East and she is reachable to anyone to confirm more incredible realities for anyone in doubt. Through needless hunger in rural Africa, HIV/AIDS is spreading and having a backbreaking toll on communities and economies. And the vulnerable, particularly girls and women, pay to possess the dreaded disease with their education, future and dear lives. If you had also read the feature I wrote, entitled “Hunger in a Food Store” in the Daily Dispatch, you would have by this flashback been reminded by now of how hunger is raiding, colonising, misgoverning, embarrassing and harassing households in underdeveloped and developing Africa, and how it is recruiting a formidable army of robbers and criminal pilots in the gutters we call streets.

There are rural communities across the face of Africa where the age-long prohibitive funeral performances are casting a huge doubt on meeting with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) numbers 1, 2 and 3: to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, achieve universal primary education and promote gender equality and empower women respectively. Emptying the food stores to entertain funeral guests and sacrificing all the farm animals in the house to pacify the gods in honour of the dead are part of the funeral activities that have continued to truncate basic education in some African communities.

When hunger sets in, education is only fit for the dustbin. Scores of school-going children go hungry and naturally cannot concentrate with empty stomachs in a learning environment. In seeking lasting solution to the daily misery of hunger that confronts them at home and at school, the young learners resort to all sorts of engagements that are harmful to their education, health and future. The same negative consequences do not affect them alone. They affect the continent as well.

Inside Africa, boys will continue to travel farther in education than girls as most communities are of the strong gender view that most of the domestic responsibilities are burdens that girls must not share with boys. As long as such views persist, boys and girls who attend the same school and are taught the same thing by the same teachers always will not end up the same. Daily, the girl wakes up from her raffia mat during the wee hours to fulfill the gender promise they say she owes nature and society by cleaning the rooms, sweeping the compound up to the borders her family shares with neighbours and presenting herself in abundance at the family’s smoke-blackened kitchen if there is any food for the family to eat that morning.

All this while, the boy, who slept several hours before the girl the previous night, is still snoring and skipping from one terrible dream into another. When he finally gets up, maybe he will only do the occasional emptying of an overflowing dustbin after rubbing his eyes before leaving for school with a stomach filled with the food that the girl feverishly had prepared before dawn. When they return from school, there is a lot more for the girl to do at home than there is for the boy.

She continues to do this, doing even more at weekends, until her father announces his desire to give her in marriage to an impatient man who is old enough to be her grandfather. Already, the burden of the house chores was responsible for her abysmal performance at school; and now, a girl-child marriage, to which she cannot say no, has come to paint the future bleaker. Her father will give her out in exchange for cows.

When the cows are sold, the money greases the boy’s palms to grab the academic ladder more firmly and climb higher. Some of the money goes into emptying bottles of beer with father’s good-weather friends. Her mother can say or do absolutely nothing. It is the way of life in the community. She, too, was brought up that way. She must think and behave that way, too. By the time the highly favoured boy is becoming a graduate, the girl (who was denied the necessary push) is expecting her fourth malnourished child outside the four walls of her school. The boys always will be heads because they always are ahead. Boys are the main business in those communities; girls are the capital investment that goes into the setting up and expansion of the boys’ future. 

On another reason why some African communities still practise child bride, Esther Mwangi, an essayist in Kenya, writes: “Some parents justify the denial of girls of their right to education, saying it is a way of preventing them from bringing shame to the family through early pregnancy. Yet, others believe that women who are at the same level of education as the men are a disgrace to the community because more often than not, they will not get married and if they do, it will be to a foreigner. For such parents, early marriage is the best way to prevent this and at the same time preserve traditions.”

She adds: “In a number of Kenyan communities, it is girls who spend more time on household chores than boys, leaving them with very little time to study at home. In case a family member falls sick, girls drop out of school to look after the sick relative.”

Even worse than that is the iron link between girl-child education and the scourge of HIV/AIDs in rural Africa. Mwangi confirms: “The situation gets worse when a mother dies, forcing the girl to take over her responsibilities. The situation has been exacerbated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has forced children out of school to take up odd jobs in order to play the role of their parents.”

In Ghana, as in Kenya, the girl child lacks role models especially in science and technology. Statistics from the education ministries in many African countries (particularly in Nigeria where I attended school) show that female teachers account for far below-50% of the teaching staff. Most of them taboo posting to the rural areas where their fingers are most needed to transform the needy leaders of tomorrow.

Again in Ghana, particularly in the north, there is what is known as widowhood rites. When a married man dies, his widow is suspected to have a hand in her husband’s death. To swear to her innocence, she must drink the dead man’s bathwater, have her hairs shaved with a broken bottle and walk naked in the streets.

The treatment of widows is as varied as the various communities in Ghana. Some widows are confined and starved for a number of days that are too long to be true; yet it is real. Whilst in the tight cage, one person on one side splashes cold water at her naked body from a bucket whilst another person follows the splash from the other side this time with hot water from a different bucket.

They continue to splash until she says she was behind her husband’s death. Even if everyone knows that the man committed direct or indirect suicide, she still must go through that horror to prove her innocence. What a continent! Inescapably, she dies out of the torture and the conclusion is drawn that she knew about her husband’s death. Her shameful death ignites public mockery on her girl child (who is now an orphan) in the school. This is an undesirable crunch of a turning point for her children. Her boy child is branded “son of a bitch’. And her schoolgirl is tagged “daughter of a witch”.

To fend for their very selves and to avoid further public ridicule, they kiss school goodbye and join the singing bands in the streets. But for the pro-widow campaign by a lonely warrior like Madam Betty Ayagiba, leader of the Widows and Orphans Movement in Ghana’s Upper East Region, and with support from committed stakeholders, the world of widows and that of the orphans, too, could have exploded by now. How can the MDGs see the light of day in the unreserved darkness of savage customs?

Although man has become a regular guest in Space and the nations of the world have advanced into the 21st century with awesome supremacy and unquestionable authority, some communities in Africa still laugh at girl-child education and ridicule women empowerment because they believe that the girl was made for the sake of the boy. Black Africa had always held that view long, long before the Europeans brought the first Bible to Africa centuries ago. The first pages that hold an account on the origin and beginning of man in the Bible puts the girl in an inferior position where her existence and survival must hinge and wait on the desire and decisions of the boy.

In fact, the great book makes it clear that the girl could not have come into being without the boy. The boy arrived on the planet ahead of the girl for how long only God knows. Out of his deep sleep came her magnificent creation. When children are told the creation story, psychologically they get the message that the girl is the boy’s second rate. Out of the boy was the girl made. She was not part of God’s original plan. The boy was. And not until the boy was lonely that God thought the girl was necessary. So God introduced the girl to fill the emptiness in the boy. She is a stranger, a companion who should stand behind the boy, not beside him. She is an instrument for the boy’s mission on earth.

She, therefore, must not initiate; she must suggest. She must not decide; she must comply. She must not lead; she must follow. In some communities, she must not provide; she must depend. She is an alien in a man’s world no matter how close and how long she lives in a man’s world. She did not merit the taste of life; the boy virtually rallied with his own emotion to demand her existence out of nonexistence.

As a matter of fact, some believe the boy is the gap between God and the girl. In some communities, the girl is seen as useful idiots. The sledgehammer that can shatter that strong traditional view in Africa is not yet made. The blacksmith is probably not yet born. The African fathers seem to have over the years orally adopted the Bible as a backing document to favour the boy against the girl. How wrong they are! Every woman was an already-existing man that God decided to change (upon Adam’s withdrawal syndrome) into a form that would balance her own form with the form in which the man was made. The African fathers seem to have ignored the fact that the same book only says the girl must be submissive; it does not say she must be illiterate.

Physically and historically the boy may dominate, men and women have the same intellectual ability and destiny. That is why it is injustice to keep girls out of school. That is social robbery. And perpetrators should be brought to book for robbing girls of their books. Timothy, a young admirer of Paul the Apostle, was taught the Scripture by his mother, who must have been learned.

In some parts of Africa, when a woman gives birth to a girl, the man who owns the baby is seen as a weakling. Baby boys are signs of strength. A man whose children are all girls, disturbed though, can only be sure of harvesting farm-size cattle at last when men of the tradition knock on his door to buy the best he could show that he, too, was a man. Some communities are so unwelcoming towards the girl-child that they find her birth as a boring arrival of a loathsome creature.

In the same communities, deafening cheers great the birth of a boy. There, a man who makes his wife to produce male twins is a man with a lot of strength. Within the circle of his friends, he commands a lot of respect. In fact, he is envied. On the other hand, it is double slaps in the bare face of a man whose wife breeds twins that will grow up to answer to another man’s surname. That is a generally accepted discrimination for you in the eyes of a blind tradition. Maybe through thorough education, such communities would accept the dictates of change after being told in the frankest terms the fact that the days of ancient wars and primitive farming methods (when victory and bumper harvest mostly favoured men-dominated kingdom) are over.

Research conducted in 2004 by Eileen Kane, who established the first Department of Anthropology in Ireland and chaired the Irish Aid advisory programme, shows that girls seem to be more sensitive to school quality than boys and that the quality of teachers has a greater impact on the demand for girls’ education than that of boys. A 1998 study in Kenya by Barbara Mensch and Cynthia Lloyd also shows that house chores, homework, tutoring, punishment, sex ratio and class size have slightly different effects on girls than boys.  In 2006, researchers in Malawi found out that girls were more affected than boys by teacher behaviour and the availability of desks.

Concluding from what researchers say and as far as I know, attending school in Africa as a rural girl is, indeed, something else. Esther Mwangi once said “Even with the introduction of free primary education, access to education still remains a pipe dream to many Kenyan children. Whereas the introduction of free primary education last year saw an increase in the enrolment, a sizeable number of children, especially girls, still find themselves out of school owing to a number of reasons.”

James Mwangi, an inspector of primary schools in Kenya, reveals that most girls enter school at a late age because of the demand for their labour in their homes such as assisting in looking after their young siblings.

Mary Gathoni, 15, in that country had this experience: “I had this rare chance of going back to school when education was made free. However, my dreams were cut short when my parents decided to marry me off to their creditor without my consent. When I tried to resist, they threatened me with death”, she says amid sobs.

When I travelled by road from Ghana to Nigeria in November, last year, to visit my mother in Lagos, I met some of the many African girls whose potentials are dying and decaying within them every hour that passes. A 14-year-old Yoruba girl, Funke Babasola, who comes from Ado Ekiti in south-western Nigeria but lives at Gowon Estates in Egbeda, a community in Lagos, told me (almost in tears) how predictable hunger, elephantine house chores and highly unstable electricity had rendered useless her early dream to be a pilot.

Funke is a common hawker in Lagos streets, piloting oranges for those who can wait to buy amid the razzmatazz of the busy city. She is one of the many trafficked girls who are busy hawking and bearing fatherless children in African streets and villages. Ironically, Africans do not love practical poverty; but things that beckon poverty are the very things we proudly indulge in. A hunter who carries home an ant-infested bundle of firewood should not be surprised if lizards begin to pay him visits because he who shares the same bed with a dog wakes up with fleas.

I have gone through the borders along Togo and Benin times without number. Girls, some below ten years, run as in a hot contest under the weights of trays of fruits and wares behind impatient drivers and passengers along the busy borders. The situation is not different when one enters Burkina Faso from Ghana’s Paga Border and travels beyond to Cote d’Ivoire, Liberia and Mali. Young faces of hunger, malnutrition, desperation and fear line up along African borders; behind the health-wrecking jobs they do is a silent scream for financial freedom. And no one seems to hear them as they sing in the streets for bread. Africa seems to be in a big mess of not really knowing what to do about the comfortable sloppiness of its leaders and the open indifference of the grassroots towards ending the silent disaster of girl-child labour, injustice and illiteracy.

Remembering the solemn fact that these girls ought to be competing at school as it should, and not in the street as it is, one is abandoned in sheer pity at the extreme weight of the economic gravity that has continued to suppress upward-aiming rural Africans. The world may have to add some “injury time” to the stipulated period of the MDGs just to favour Africa by the time the globe rolls and grinds to the year 2015. Africa might need another extra eternity to catch up. Hungry school-going girls are digressing from school paths into deep bush where they hurl heavy stones at premature fruits whilst the borders blare with juvenile screams. The Clinton Foundation may have to come in here since its mission is “to alleviate poverty, improve global health, strengthen economies and protect the environment by fostering partnerships among governments, businesses, nongovernmental organizations, and private citizens to turn good intentions into measurable results.”

Esther Mwangi writes further about the situation in Kenya: “In similar circumstances, a 16-year-old girl from the central Kiambu district, who preferred anonymity, was married off as soon as she was circumcised at the age of 13, thereby shattering her academic dreams. She said: ‘I thought of becoming a doctor but my dreams were shattered when my father, a Maasai, decided to marry me off so that she could get dowry to add to his riches. At the age of 14, I gave birth and almost died in the process.’ The girl, now expecting her second child, did not escape from poverty and her parents have nothing to show for the dowry they received.”

Liberia’s Nobel winner Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Kenya’s late Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Ghana’s Ama Ata Aidoo and other great African women, who rose from underprivileged roots in Africa, are monumental indicators that show how far girls can travel if given the same chance as boys. Great women in Africa who have managed to rise to global prominence are tangible testimonies that Africa can be a much better place if we could begin to fasten our belt at girl-child education and clear the hurdles of hunger and unfavourable traditions that stand in their way.

Africa has fought and won the independence battle with the foreign masters. It has been more than half a century that the freedom war ended in Africa. The rest of the world is tired of waiting for the moment that Africans shall free themselves from themselves. One question that we should be asking ourselves in Africa is: “When, Africa?”