On Monday the 29 November 2021, the highest court in the land upheld the fundamental human rights of the LGBTIQ community as handed down in 2019 by the High Court, adding Botswana to a handful of sub-Saharan African nations to decriminalize unnatural sex. The six-panel bench of Court of Appeal judges unanimously ruled that it is progressive to recognize the rights of those whose sex life might have attracted stigma and discrimination just five years ago. The latest decision seals the dialogue after the government attempted to reverse the landmark decision of 2019. The latest development is cause for jubilation among advocates of same-sex relationships, and indeed those men and women who have been closeted for ages.
Juxtapose the above description with what should happen exactly a week from the landmark ruling on the 6 December 2021 when 21 nations from Eastern and Southern Africa regions will be in Durban, South Africa to renew the earlier five-year commitment to liberalize sex education for children and adolescents during their basic 12 years of schooling. The commitment to comprehensive sexuality education as well as sexual and reproductive health originally acceded to by health and education ministers in 2013 has expired and is now being renewed for another 10 years.
In the introductory paragraph, we are addressing adults, and, in the latter, it is children that we are discussing. I highlight the commonality between these two distinct groups of individuals as “the right to have sex” because they are human beings. In doing so, I posit my discussion in a theoretical framework that gauges the cognitive abilities to understand the ramifications of engaging in sex or even the mere advocacy for those rights. The donor countries especially the United States and Western European nations accompanied by the United Nations and her agencies are the main sponsors of the CSE and SRH where it mentions African children. By and large, the same list of agencies and nations pour in trillions of dollars to help sub-Saharan African nations fight a myriad of her unceasing problems from famine to civil strife, from diseases to supplying potable water—development aid prevents the receiving nations to put their “foot in the mouth,” even where their cultural beliefs suffer a full-frontal assault.
One legendary African American health educator Dr. Dorothy Nyswander is famously quoted as having said: “Start where the people are.” Assuming the UN agencies and donor countries mean well to equip children and adolescents on sex and sexuality to make informed decisions at the right time, “start where the people are” seems to suggest that the CSE and SRH cannot come as a pre-packaged universal solution for Eastern and Southern African nations. In the context of sub-Saharan Africa that carries more than 68% of the world’s HIV burden and whose youth 15-24 ages are the worst hit, the commitment to CSE and SRH should be rooted in the African beliefs and core values. Where beliefs and core values are mentioned, who can replace the family structure? However, the CSE and SRH interventions sound political and adopt a human-rights-centred approach that sidesteps parents about a practice that will change the course of life of these impressionable minds permanently.
The curriculum content of CSE and SRH is not appropriate for a child in standard four, but it is the age targeted by this health campaign to seek their cognitive abilities about expressing their sexual feelings for the other person. And there is a long list of responses that teachers should consider correct for their students including: anal sex, masturbation, oral sex, vaginal intercourse, touching each other’s genitals, and on the other end of the spectrum, equating such drastic actions with harmless acts from caressing, kissing, holding hands, hugging, talking, dancing, and to even saying, ‘I like you.’ In all this sex education that is receiving so much attention, African parents have been removed from the equation to be of force to ingrain family values and they are bystanders in a disturbing scene where their children’s psyche is penetrated with alien ideas, they have not decided it was the right age to impart.
Weeks ago, my thirteen-year-old brought a consent form in which his mother or I should decide whether learning about the reproductive system was appropriate for him. The curriculum content was clearly explained to us, and we had the opportunity as a family to assess the pros and cons of what the school was teaching versus our core values and to make an informed choice. This is missing where sex education among African children is mentioned. In the context of the United States, Congress and the Supreme Court have ruled that certain materials on the touted CSE and SRH education campaigns taking Africa by storm are obscene and pornographic, and therefore, cannot be shown even on television during family viewing slots. Pictures of nude boys and girls to whet the appetite for sex and even entrusting adolescents with the power to decide when they want to lose their virginity is outrageously devious.
Botswana with a national HIV prevalence of 22.6 percent should be concerned and so are the rest of sub-Saharan African nations because they are the hardest hit. In coming up with a solution for sub-Saharan nations, campaigns should pass the litmus test in community engagement concepts and principles as Nyswander stresses. Therefore, the thesis of this paper is that none of these strategies is likely to work effectively because they rigidly ignored the indigenous knowledge and rejected the role parents play in shaping the destiny of their children through the impartation of beliefs and values. The million-dollar question is, did the health and education ministers who signed the original plan know about all these obscene materials, and if they did, were they exclusively wearing the politicians’ hats and not the parents? Are we seeing our elected officials, once more, mortgaging African children to development aid next week Monday?
Coercing communities that have different value systems to adopt new, outside interventions that did not respect their nuances, disregarded their public opinion, and whose decision-making rejected their input, inevitably, is a recipe for disaster because there is likely to be no social action on the part of the target audience. An equal partnership with the cultures of sub-Saharan Africa to co-create practical solutions to help her rise above the health crises is overdue. Recognizing the indigenous knowledge about initiation schools, where adolescents and youth transitioning between stages are taught the groundwork of being men and women, their role in the community to seek a partner and perpetuate lineages, the importance of providing for families and nurturing little ones are all readily accessible in these societies and have sustained generations. These provide a foundational cornerstone upon which CSE and SRH could build rather than denigrate every practice while inserting the technology of condoms and contraceptives as the only panacea for the children and youths to enjoy sex without understanding the consequences of their actions.
In a memoir set in Botswana about AIDS, Doctor Daniel Baxter who spent nine years in the frontlines of [an] AIDS war, having successfully applied the science and technology among the minorities in New York City, where he worked as an internist, he admits being sobered by the differences that the United States and donor agencies usually take for granted when tackling health challenges around the world. Baxter returned home a humbled expert to have assumed the one-size-fits-all approach in HIV prevention.
A University of Botswana professor, Bagele Chilisa decries this universality alluded to by Baxter and supports her argument in the article, “Educational Research Within Postcolonial Africa: A Critique of HIV/AIDS Research in Botswana,” (2005) that “The error of sameness or universalism is that it can only proceed by massive domination and silencing of the less powerful,” (671). By this, Chilisa is lamenting the tendency to dismiss the plight of the Africans when they narrate their experiences and understanding of diseases including HIV/AIDS that is indigenous knowledge often dismissed as mere ‘myths,’ ‘superstitions,’ ‘assumptions,’ and ‘abstractions’ to engender the hegemon of the superpowers in their acts of altruism including “planned parenthood” and “sex education” that receive generous financial backing. The superpower nations intentionally disregard and disparage Africa as an unequal partner who cannot create knowledge that suits her needs or co-create solutions, unless she was told what was appropriate for her.
The power of erasure is made profound in universalizing Western messaging while drowning the voices of the host cultures by removing parents from involvement and participation in the general health promotion strategies affecting their children. Herein lies the agenda of the UN agencies and the donor countries, quite a sad reality when African governments are spectators in a humiliating show of disrespect with stretched-out hands to receive development aid.
Edward C. Green and Allison Herling Ruark in AIDS, Behavior, and Culture: Understanding Evidence-Based Prevention (2011) offer an insight into the tendencies by Western superpowers to marginalize Africa on matters that affect her core:
A 10-country research report on multiple and concurrent sexual partnerships in southern Africa did not mention positive cultural practices that might mitigate the spread of HIV. Thus, even good studies fall back into the habit of seeing African culture only in a negative light almost any time. (47)
According to the above statement, understanding the relationships between the dominant practices surrounding sex and sexuality by Black Africans on one hand, and the need for people to change behaviours can guide those designing health communication to target their message for impact. These social, environmental, and religious realities merit completely different approaches to be designed by unique societies to exploit peculiar vehicles of communication best suited to connect with the cultures to save lives in the health campaigns.
To better grasp the disproportionate influences in sex education infiltrating sub-Saharan Africa, different cognitive theories account for the levels of prevalent perceptions that determine the outcome of behaviours in these health promotional campaigns. These cognitive theories consider how the receivers of information will likely process and decode the message. The cognitive theories impact behaviours and attitudes. The social cognitive theory relies on observation, to hear and make sense of the activity on display before the brain tells the heart to do what the eyes and ears have encountered in the campaign. It is described as ‘cognitive’ because the decoding takes place in the brain, and it is my argument that a nine-year-old cannot be trusted to have cognitive abilities to withstand the CSE and SRH campaigns designed by adults with the sole aim to persuade her to engage in sex. It is an unfair approach employed by Western nations to exploit Africa and diminish her rates of success in the future.
African parliaments need to ignite debates about the looming Durban renewal of the commitment because once it is done, the destruction to innocent lives cannot be reversed.
*Author is a Ph.D. candidate in Mass Communications and Media Arts
