Culture! A Murderer?

Hi.

Kaleidoscope is my favourite  Danielle Steel novel. I would put it on my top 20 list of best books ever written. I love it, read it in Form 3 and cried a lot because I couldn't imagine anyone going through all the stuff that Hilary and her sisters went through. I repeated the story to my brother and sister as a bedtime story, the tough little kids broke down and cried without even reading the book. The storyline was that powerful and so was my emotion when I told it. But if I ever read a book from Danielle Steel that got me thinking really deep, emotions set aside, then it's the Silent Honour. The book has a Japanese and American setting but it got me thinking of Africa, of Zimbabwe, of Insukamini, of my home. And so here we are revisiting culture and where it has failed most of us.

I would define culture as a collective set of ideas, customs and social behaviour, which a certain group of people adhere to. Take note of the words, Collective set and People. We will be revisiting those.

So first question is do I think culture is a bad thing? No, not always! But is it so bad that it could be  a murderer? Yes, I think it is! And I feel that a lot has to change because somehow we all have been tied to the heavy yoke of a culture which has done nothing but kill our dreams and in the process of killing our dreams, sent many of us to early graves of depression, goody-two-shoes, fake lives, repression, hate and suicide. And I know most of us don't want to hear an attack on culture, well, we're gonna tug it apart, not the good, just the bad.

There is thing called internalised oppression. This is oppression so deeply woven into our daily systems, so deep that it becomes almost normal. Societal institutions like government, education and culture reinforce these internalized systems of oppression and we all become so blind to it that we all accept it as normal yet it's wrong and destroying everybody. 

In my view, culture is the most effective of these systems in preserving and reinforcing internalized oppression. It is the most rogue culprit, in most cases of oppression and repression because somehow as an individual despite your own convictions, you're somehow obliged to follow some collective ideas which do not help you at all, which you do not believe in, which do not fit your narrative and which block your path to a future you.

In the definition of culture, I highlighted the words collective set and also the word people. There is nothing wrong with those words but come to think of it, culture seems to group people into one composite thing. Like it erases the individual person and makes him a part of a people. I get it, it really is for social identification purposes but is that it looking at it now? Do we all have to pay allegiance to  certain standards of living, governed by the same set of ideas when we are all separate individuals, with different ideologies? In that case is someone obliged to follow certain cultural ideas which go against their personal convictions? I mean he/she is a person not a people, he is a person before he becomes a people.

So I got a big problem with culture when it becomes repressive and oppressive instead of progressive. I remember a friend of mine who got accepted for a USAP Scholarship and got a place at some Ivy League university in the States. I don't know if this story has anything to do with culture but her parents definitely made it so. Her father expressly told her that she could not go to that American University because America was no place for a 19 year old girl on her own and it wasn't good for her cultural upbringing. The main issue was how she would go there and start wearing bikinis or start living the American way which to her father was an unacceptable thing for any African who has been raised well to indulge in. Like really? Just like that, because of the father's  cultural convictions, my friend is at UZ yet she had that opportunity to go and make it at a better institution. And she is depressed, it gets so bad, all in the name of culture. I don't get it.

The fun thing is how people are always all for the fact that culture is dynamic. They know how to say it, but be pragmatic about it, I don't know if they even attempt it. I'll give you an example of a dynamic culture. Remember the book Takadini? Yea you know it, the famous Zimbabwean book wasn't just a novel. There was once a time when culturally, albinos were deemed to be curses or bad omens. And it didn't stop with albinos only, twins, babies born with disabilities and many many more people were viewed as bad omens. And viewing them as bad omens was not just a point of view where you would see them roaming around and say "ooh that's a bad omen", these unfortunate individuals were murdered at birth and it was culturally justified. But fortunately, culture being dynamic, we no longer have such killings and discrimination justified under any cultural laws. 

Why then did we stop viewing culture as dynamic then? Why did we stop at that?

We live in an age and a country and a culture where it is acceptable to discriminate on certain individuals because somehow their person does not happen to be able to adhere to a set of ideas followed by a collective group of people. You all know what I'm talking about. I'm talking of Insukamini which would hate a lady and call her a whore because she wore trousers and wore a bright led lipstick. I'm talking of a Gweru tabloid which would have a field day on a man who does help his wife with the housework. I'm talking of people in Harare who would taunt a man who carried his baby, his baby on his back. Yes, I'm talking of Zimbabweans who would say it is unacceptable for a woman to be way too powerful because no man would want to marry her. There is an Africa which would do anything to criminalise someone's sexuality all in the name of culture, I'm talking of it. An Africa which pushes for a death sentence on not being heterosexual? It's crazy but we see it and we do nothing about it because if you do speak out against it, cultural guns waste no time silencing you. Isn't that oppression?

Culture is a good thing but it does not really have to go all reformer on an individual's conviction. How many people did not realize their full potential because culture defined their limits? A Christian culture which would view too much wealth as a gateway to hell and in the process it's people are always most willing to be rich but not too wealthy. An African culture where the children won't be able to talk about certain things to their parents and in the end they are sexually molested and they suffer all alone in silence and parents would only find out about it in a morning paper. A culture where when one aspires to be in the entertainment industry, their mother would say she is very disappointed and their father would tell them to pack their bags and leave. A culture where aunties are the loudest voices in the promotion of gender based violence for they would say a wise woman keeps her home tight, endures the beatings in silence for men are all like that, just little boys with a beard and balls. A culture where men suffer in silence for they have to man up or else they are called some nasty names or sissy boys. A society where 50% of its dark skinned girls would do anything just to marry a white guy so their kid will not have to go through what they know very well they would.

A society where kids grow up in toxic homes, watching their parents fight every single day because once their mother leaves that marriage, she is called some names and her means of finding a livelihood are scrutinised and most always found to be unacceptable in society's eyes. A culture where a girl is afraid to make dreams a reality for not only is she sexually labeled, she is a threat to men and her life is threatened, a culture where I can't say I don't like cooking because my mom gets worried that she won't have a son in law and my friends will tell me that I just upped the probabilities of my husband cheating on me and the pastor would say that's the devil talking through me. A culture where because of religion and moral laws, one cannot do the profession they have always wanted because there are more seats in hell than there is in heaven. A culture where people won't talk of their  mental health issues which need urgent help because then they become too Westernised or crazy or ungrateful  little people or weaklings or living too much in a world of fantasy. 

And then we all act clueless and surprised when mental health related illnesses are on the rise. When 1 out of 4 children has depression, when 4 out of 10 Zimbabwean adults have attempted suicide. When 1 out of 3 people have tried highly intoxicating drugs, when 2 out of 10 spouses have tried hurting their partner and kids. 

If culture means oppression then I don't think it still serves the purpose of social identification and unity. A culture which doesn't agree that at the core of our being a people, we are different individuals but it doesn't mean we should alienate some of us because they are different. Where our differences break us instead of build us. It ceases to be culture when it discriminates, when it preaches hate, when it murders, when it buries it's own.

So be careful of nurturing a snake that would bite your children some day, if not you.

Till next time

Mitchel.