Why Cameroonians prefer lesbian to gay marriage
on Mischa in Cameroon (Cameroon), 29/May/2010 10:10, 34 days ago
If you ask a girl at one of my primary schools what chores she does every day she will tell you she: cooks meals, washes the dishes, sweeps the compound, goes to the well or the pump to get water, washes the cloths, goes to the bush to look for firewood, pounds the millet, cleans the rice, waters the garden, look after her younger brothers and sisters, help out in the fields, and perhaps goes and sells food at the market.If you ask a boy at one of my primary schools what chores she does every day he will tell you he: looks after the cattle, helps with the fishing, makes bricks out of mud, helps out in the fields, cuts the wood, and searches for rushes to make the roofs.While it’s true that both girls and boys here do far more household work in a day than their UK counterparts could possibly imagine, it’s also true (and even the boys admit it) that the girls do a lot more than the boys. This has a serious knock on effect for the girls’ education: they are often latefor school because they haven’t finished their chores and they don’t have time to study after school. It’s normal to see that in a class where there are equal numbers of girls and boys in the end of term exams the highest- ranking girl will only be in eighth or ninth place.At one of my schools we ran a session with the top class (ten to fifteen year olds) to discuss this problem and to suggest to the boys that they try and help their sisters more at home and to suggest to the girls that they try to make time to study in the evening. We started by showing two pictures: in the first a girl was sweeping while her brother slept, and in the second both children were sweeping. We asked the children which they preferred and the boys (unsurprisingly) all chose the picture where the boy was asleep. What surprised me was that so did about three quarters of the girls. When we asked them why they said that sweeping was girls’ work. Boys couldn’t do it.The only argument that eventually cut ice with the kids was that a girl who has done well at school will eventually make a better wife. If she has a job she can contribute to the household income, if she’s studied hygiene she will be able to keep the house clean, and if she’s studied science she will know about natural birth control and be able to keep down the number of children she has.That evening a group of men gathered on the porch or my concession to chat in between the 6.30pm and 7.30pm prayers. Prince Moustapha, one of the Sultan’s sons, asked me what I’d been doing at work that day and I explained the purpose of our session at the school. He translated for the older men and was met with a reaction of panicked horror at the idea of men helping women with household chores.The men assured me that their wives would be very upset and confused if they started helping out in the kitchen and would feel they had lost their purpose in life (to cook for their husbands). One man explained that he was a traditional justice: next thing they knew, he complained, I’d be saying that women could be justices as well as men (everyone laughed at this absurd idea). One man joked that if I agreed to marry him (he already has three wives) he would agree to cook for me. The man sitting next to him told him very seriously that he would fight him if he continued to talk like that.I asked Moustapha, who like a lot of well-educated young men cooks and cleans for himself while he’s away at teacher training college, whether he’d ever consider helping out his mothers/sisters/wives with the household work. Of course not, he told me, that was a ridiculous idea. All the other men would lose respect for him at once. Moustapha’s younger brother told me the other day that hewanted a wife who hadn’t been to school at all, because he didn’t want someone who was confused in the head and who might think that a woman’s place was outside the kitchen.People often ask me whether polygamy exists in the UK, and are surprised when I tell them its illegal. To try and demonstrate the way that different cultures have different attitudes to marriage I explain that in the UK it is legal for a man to marry (or at least have a‘civil partnership’) with a man, and for a woman to marry a woman. They universally find this incredibly weird, but on thinking about it say that they can understand how a marriage between women could work, but not a marriage between men. When I ask why they tell me that in a marriage between men there would be no-one to do the housework.