abdulraheem
In 1995, the African Service of the BBC ran a very instructive material on the attitude of young people around Africa to sex and their sexuality on the program, AFRICAN PERSPECTIVE. I did the series of interviews from Kano with a group of young undergraduates at the Bayero University. At about the same period, I did a package for NETWORK AFRICA on the problems of marital life and divorce from the same city of Kano. I came from the interviews and the package with a conclusion that problems of sex ansexuality are real enough in our society even if we somehow never get to discuss them in any structural manner. This is largely due to the generally prudish context of our cultural life and our socialisation as well as the deep respect that our people have for the injunctions of our religion. A young man and woman growing up in our society might really be very flustered and confused about the physical changes that accompany theonset of puberty, and in almost all cases, there are not many people to discuss with. It becomes a question of discovery by trial and error or through ill-digested understanding of developments from peer groups. I guess we have all been through this difficult experience of growing into young adulthood and the problems they bring forth. I remember that I was becoming a young adult around the ages of thirteen and fourteen or so; my voice was breaking, my heart was beating faster, hair was growing in the usual places and so on. Frankly, I did not understand the issues and there really was nobody I could discuss these developments with. My solace was in an intensely religious attitude. I come from a family with a strong Quadiriyya background, but one of my uncles had become a leader of the Tijaniyya brotherhood. It seemed an even more religious thing to join their daily recitations and acts of devotion, and that became my refuge from my confusion about the changes that I was undergoing in my physical state. Much later in life, as I intensified my study of the phenomena of social existence, I came to know that all human societies have been obliged to deal with issues of sexuality and sex as serious social issues. One of the most interesting pieces that I have read recently is an article by the American Islamic scholar, Dr Shahid Athar, titled “SEX EDUCATION: AN ISLAMIC VIEWPOINT.” Doctor Shahid said that, “God Who cares for all the aspects of our life and not just the way of worshipping Him discusses reproduction, creation, family life, menstruation and even ejaculation in the Qur’an. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) discussed many aspects of sexual life including sexual positions with his companions.” But it seems that issues related to sex and sexuality are very difficult topics to handle for many parents in Muslim societies. It is as if we leave our youngsters to somehow find their ways through life, unable to handle the ’embarrassment’ of discussing these uncomfortable issues. Dr Shahid added further, “The main reason Muslim parents do not and cannot discuss sex education with their children is because of their cultural upbringing, not their religious training. They are often brought up in a state of ignorance in regard to sex issues. As a result, they may not be comfortable with their own sexuality or its expression”. He went further to quote the Professor Emeritus, Doctor Sol Gordon, from an October 1986 piece, which he wrote for PSYCHOLOGYTODAY, titled “What kids should know”. In the piece in question, Dr Sol Gordon was looking at the attitudes which inform the inability or refusal of parents to breach the taboo topic of sex with their children: “if you tell kids about sex, they’ll do it. If you tell them about VD (Venereal Diseases), they’ll go out and get it. Incredible as this may seem, most opposition to sex education…are based on the assumption that knowledge is harmful. But research in this area reveals that ignorance and unresolved curiosity, not knowledge, are harmful.” Yet this is within an American setting where the average child, according to Doctor Shahid, “is exposed to 9000 sexual scenes per year”. It is this importance of sex and sexuality, which made this Muslim scholar to state emphatically that “sex is not always a dirty word, it is an important aspect of life”. Perhaps no society lived with the ambiguity of sex and sexuality in recent times than Victorian society of the 19th century. It was an age of very stringent sexual codes, and as an era controlled by evangelical ideals, talk of sex and sexuality was regarded as taboo. This patriarchal society had an anti-sensual mentality and it was an expression of the prudishness of the age that the Victorian bourgeois gentleman would out of modesty, even cover the legs of his piano. A medical and moral campaign was launched against the sexuality of children and from one of my readings, one 19th Century doctor was reported to have invented a device “which administered electric shocks to a sleeping boy’s penis upon erection”. Yet 19th Century London, which was the hub of Victorian life, had a prostitute population of 80, 000 women out of a total population of 2.3 million people, according to THE LANCET medical journal of 1887. So it’s clear that either in classical times, Victorian times or in our times, sexuality was always at the heart of existence. I remember that I once read during the 1980s that over one hundred million acts of sexual intercourse take place in the world everyday! But the question might rightly be asked just why I have chosen to highlight this very uncomfortable topic today. The answer is that in recent times, we seem to have been living through a consistent pattern of childhood sex and assorted cases of defilement of young children all around us. Yet so impervious have we become, that nobody seems concerned enough to raise serious issues about it. The media report these cases and move on to other issues, as if it is normal to have an old man rape a three-year-old! It is important to look at this issue in the face, because as parents, have daughters, sisters and other relations who we would not like to become victims of these predatory acts of sexual assault with the dangers that follow as the consequences. Let us check a few editions of DAILY and WEEKLY TRUST newspapers to illustrate what I am talking about. DAILY TRUST of May 3, 2007 carried a report on page 34 thus: “Policeman caught raping 3-year-old girl at Gosa village on the airport road in Abuja. The May 5, 2007 edition of WEEKLY TRUST had a piece about another three-year-old that was raped by an ex-policeman at the village of Bagusa near Gwagwa in Abuja. Similarly, DAILY TRUST of July 20, 2007 reported the case of a 17-year-old in the Fagge area of Kano who also raped (you guessed it!) another three-year-old girl. On July 21, 2007 an alleged 19-year-old victim of rape in Jos, Plateau State was reported to have died. The July 23, 2007 edition of DAILY TRUST reported how a middle-aged man in Ondo State was responsible for raping a septuagenarian woman to death. WEEKLY TRUST of August 4, 2007 carried a report about the 14-year sentence handed out to a 17-year-old teenager in Kano who had raped a 3-year-old girl when he was fourteen. These are just some of the most recent reports of sex-based offences in our country. It is very easy to dismiss them as merely criminal offences (and they are criminal!) which the law was dealing with, but I think it is equally important for our sociologists, psychologists, sexual therapists (do we have them!), parents and the state to look closely at issues related to sexual dysfunction in our society. We are generally very prudish and most of us live in denial about sex and sexuality, but they confront us each day in all kinds of ways. No society can afford to underplay or ignore the problems associated with sexuality, especially given the all-pervasive presence of sex in the media and the suggestiveness of sexuality in modern culture, either in dressing, in dance or even the desperate manner that western attitudes in sexual explicitness, devoid of the moral content favoured by our religions and cultures, have been pushed to the fore today. I honestly think our society must confront the sexuality of the young in order to assist understanding and also help to strengthen a sense of responsibility and pilot the young through the befuddlement associated with a growing body, the physiological evolution and transforming emotional state. Every adult can remember the same processes that he or she went through, but the difference today is the erosion of the controls of old within the loose moral universe of our times today. The increasing spates of abuse of underage children tell a major story of dysfunction which the nation must come to terms with. It is alarming that we live through society where there are sexual predators everywhere. Of course, there is a criminal issue involved, but there is also an underlying problem of dysfunctional sexuality, which is injurious to the health of society. We must face it with courage and knowledge.
