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Category: Value of africanism
AUTONOMOUS THINKING
Autonomous Thinking is thinking that empowers us to think for ourselves, to step out of the generally accepted patterns of thought all around us, and act for our own convictions. It is our power to think for ourselves that brings out our character and helps us to make informed decisions in different situations.
To be autonomous thinker we first have to go through the process of self discovery or self examination by answering the question “who am I” this discovery is meant to assist us to recognize what type of people we are and want to be and the means with which to achieve this. This is made possible when we personally sit and think for ourselves.
Autonomous thinking is important as it helps us make informed decisions. It is in very rare cases that we find ourselves in the same situation as other people. We might be in the same situation but the way we handle it is completely different. This is where autonomous thinking comes into application. In such a situation we should not let other people think for us as their thought pattern may be for their own benefit only. We should base our thoughts on what is best for us putting our priorities first because it is our thoughts that guide our actions. Therefore to avoid taking malicious actions we should think autonomously.
Many people are out to spread propaganda about various issues so as to achieve certain pre-determined goal. Propaganda is a situation where information is deliberately altered, manipulated or distorted by the source so as to achieve its own selfish goals. To prevent our actions from being influenced by propaganda we ought to think autonomously and through our thoughts determine the truth from masses of wrong information.
We ought to be autonomous thinkers so as not to be victims of prejudice. Prejudice is the act of judging something or a person without first carefully evaluating or rather getting to know the person or the thing much better and then make our conclusion then. Autonomous thinking enables us to go out and learn for ourselves rather than listen to what people think about someone, something or about an issue. It is then and only then do we decide if we like or don’t like that person or that thing.
It is our thoughts that influence our actions. If we allow other people to think for us then the actions that we take are not what we would do should we have thought autonomously. It is for this reason that we should think autonomously because for every action we take there are consequences or rather there are repercussions. When other people think for us and we take action based on their thought we are hit badly by the consequences which are mostly not pleasing. Therefore we should think for ourselves so as to avoid regrets and accept whatever consequences come our way as a result of how we think, the decisions we make and the actions we take.
When we fail to think autonomously we tend to be victims of authoritarianism where we place a higher value to views expressed by people in authority. People tend to fall for this because they fail to have confidence or faith in their own thinking. This is in other words to say that many people are intellectually lazy. It makes us accept things without question and fail to ask questions even when there is need to. This is a common phenomenon that politicians take advantage of to influence the masses of their followers. This can be taken to be one of the highest contributing factors to the violence that took place after the 2007 elections where people acted not out of their own peril but due to the influence of political leaders. We should therefore make use of autonomous thinking to avoid a repeat of such inhuman behavior.
In conclusion we can say that the best way to be able to make decisions and take action is when we maintain our ability to think for ourselves other than let other people who we don’t know what their motives are think for us. Although we should be autonomous thinkers it does not mean that we should not listen to other people’s views or comments, we should be able to maintain flexibility by having an open mind but only to good reasoning of which we were currently unaware of. We should have a kind of a mind filter to weigh the reasons that favor a certain thought pattern.
Autonomous thinking does not also mean that we should shun all other thoughts apart from our own but rather be open to new experiences, new ways of looking at things and different ways of doing things. This is because we are living in a world that is constantly changing and we need to be open minded to be able to keep up.
Useful link:http://toostep.com/debate/western-influence-in-womens-attire
African lady traditional clothing
By Claudette Freeman
Natural fibers are popular in African women’s clothing because they allow increased functionality while providing a natural beauty Vibrant colors and natural fibers capture African style.
Africa is a vast continent, with a vast cultural array and a place of close to a thousand different languages and dialects. The cultural array is evident in about a thousand tribes spread throughout Africa. In each culture there is a unique history seen in food, housing structure, family, community cultures and in fashion.
Since each tribe has its specific culture in defining African lady traditional clothing or traditional clothing for African people, one would have to examine each culture. African clothing covers garments from loin cloths still worn by some tribes – if only in ceremonial functions to complex balloon dresses worn as every day fare in some tribes and royal garb in others.
Traditional African clothing is typically dependent on several key factors: faith, culture and weather. Durable and natural fibers are predominant in clothing because they allow increased functionality and provide a natural beauty. Silk, for those able to afford it, is also popular in Africa’s traditional fashions, with Egyptian cotton viewed as among the best fabrics for the climate in various regions.
Some of the most widely seen examples of African lady traditional clothing are similar to Western versions seen in specialty retail stores and sold widely online. The aso oke, which is a traditional African fabric, primarily made from woven strips stitched together in quilting fashion. The fabric is then cut into the shape of the garment. In the Yoruba culture the women’s aso oke, has four parts: the buba (blouse), a wrap skirt, a head tie and a shawl (which is sometimes worn as a shoulder sash). Because of the woven and pieced together colors and textures of the aso oke, some women do not cut or shape into a garment; instead they wear it like the sari draped around their bodies and tied as comfortable.
In Eastern Cape, South Africa we find the Xhosa people, a woman’s clothing style popular in this region is modern Mbaco Clothes. Mbaco is a one hundred percent cotton fabric that comes in three primary and traditional colors for the area: cream, red and orange. In the past few years, Mbaco garments are finished with traditional braids in black with colorful bead work. Braided embellishments are the norm in several regions of the content.
The Zulu women, particularly older women wear clothes that cover their full bodies. They may wear the isicholo; a wide hat made of straw and decorated with beads (ubuhlalu). They also frequently wear isidwaba; a pleated skirt made of cowhide and softened by hand. Younger women sometimes decorate their isidwaba with beads, whereas older women tend to wear theirs without embellishment. Beads, by the way, are the pride of the Zulu nation; they encompass a symbolic language that may include reprimands and warnings, messages of love, and encouragement.
Traditional African wear for women comes in a variety of styles and a surprising array of colors and prints. Colors vary from earth tones into vibrant colors such as indigos. Designs are from the flowing kaftan to the more traditional fitted African Queen outfits.
Other common designs are: The traditional African Kaftan or Boubou originally worn by the West African men they have become traditional wear for women. Developed and passed down from Cleopatra Queen of Egypt; silk kaftans embellished with prints, embroidery, small mirrors and amulets are often seen. The tie dyeing technique has been used for traditional African wear for women for thousands of years. The Tauregs (believed to be a people so dark, they are called blue people of the desert) used the indigo plant for dying and the method of tie dyeing spread through out Africa for traditional African woman’s wear. The patterns, symbols and designs are worn with meaning and some believe some women wear tie dye patterns for fertility.
Modern royal queens and traditional African woman’s wear is more stylish yet has a unique look with the ruffled sleeves and flounced bodice. It is commonly thought that this styling has been influenced by the South African ‘Voer trekkers’. The Voer trekkers were white people that made their way up through Africa in ox wagons bringing with them a western influence. The influence of the west merged with the colors and natural fibers of several African regions, to create fashion trends still prominent in contemporary fashion in Africa.
source: www.catalogs.com
ORIENTATION
Identification. The official name of the country is the République Centrafricaine (CAR). Previously it had been Oubangui-Chari, one of the four territories of French Equatorial Africa, bound by the Ubangi River to the south and the Shari to the north. Before independence, there was no sense of a common culture among the indigenous peoples, who thought of themselves as members of lineages and clans, and as villagers. After colonization, when members of different ethnolinguistic groups came into contact, there developed a sense of being riverine (Sango, Gbanzili, and Ngbaka on the Ubangi River), forest (Mbati and Isungu) or grassland peoples (Gbaya and Banda). There is also the hunting, gathering and patron-dependent culture of the Babinga (pygmies) in the forests of the southwest.
Location and Geography. The country lies at the center of Africa in a region where wooded grasslands adjoin dense rain forests and has an area of about 239,400 square miles (620,000 square kilometers). The capital, Bangui, originated at the site of a French military post established on the banks of the Ubangi River in June 1889.
Demography. The population in 1988 was 2,688,426, of whom 43 percent was less than fifteen years old. Bangui’s population has increased because of forced labor in the hinterlands in the colonial period and, since independence, urban attractions and economic opportunities.
There are fifteen secondary urban centers of populations with from twenty to thirty thousand inhabitants that consist of villages inhabited by persons with different employment and ethnic identities. The vast majority of residents speak languages belonging to the Ubangian family, the most important of which are Banda and Gbaya, some of whose dialects are mutually unintelligible; Nilo-Saharan languages are spoken near the Chad border, and Bantu languages near the Congo (Brazzaville). Although Muslims have been in the territory since it was first colonized, their numbers have increased in the last two decades. In 1992, there were estimated to be forty thousand Mbororo, or nomadic Fulfulde pastoralists. Although it is forbidden to use ethnic names in governmental documents, the average person is very much aware of the mara (“ethnic group”) of others, and ethnicity figures highly in daily life and politics. Tribes in the technical sense never existed in this region, although in the east there were two indigenous non-Muslim sultanates.
Linguistic Affiliation. After colonization, the conquered people began to communicate in Sango, the pidgin that emerged quickly out of contacts between the diverse foreign Africans who were brought by the French—and the Belgians who preceded them in 1887— to be used as militia, workers and personal servants, and the inhabitants of the upper Ubangi River. By 1910, Sango had become a stable lingua franca spread by soldiers and others serving the whites. Never used by the French in a serious manner, the language was adopted in the early 1920s by Protestant missionaries and later by Roman Catholics as a religious language. Written material in Sango was first published by Protestants. Since independence, competence in spoken Sango has become almost universal except among the Mbororo. In Bangui, Sango is the most frequently used language even in households where an ethnic language is traditional. In 1996, Sango was declared co-official with French. It remains primarily a spoken language in government and education, while French is used in written communications.
Symbolism. The state’s “linguistic unity” was declared in the constitution of 1986, and Sango’s history
Central African Republic
of denigration by the French, ubiquity, and distinctness from co-territorial languages has made it the primary national symbol.
H ISTORY AND E THNIC R ELATIONS
Emergence of the Nation. The plebiscite offered to its colonies by France initiated the steps taken toward independence. The CAR first became a member of the newly established French Community, eventually becoming a fully independent state in 1960.
Ethnic Relations. Barthélemy Boganda, the first president, had an ambitious view of French-speaking central Africa, but the government was controlled by riverine ethnic groups until the election of Ange-Félix Patassé, a person of mixed ethnicity from the populous northwest in 1993. The animosity between the riverine and grassland groups manifested in civil and military strife in 1996 in Bangui, can be traced to the earliest years of the territory. In most cases, however, members of indigenous and foreign ethnic groups get along satisfactorily.
U RBANISM , A RCHITECTURE, AND THE U SE OF S PACE
Villages, mostly inhabited by the male descendants of a lineage or clan, are located along and face the roads. This practice was introduced in the 1920s, to create “plantation villages” for cotton cultivation. In the 1970s, villages often were consolidated, ostensibly to modernize agriculture.
The typical dwelling, which must be replaced frequently because of termites, is made with sundried brick and thatched with wild grass; in the deep forest area palm fronds are tiled on. Mud-and-wattle structures were discouraged under French rule but still exist. Floors are made of pounded earth, on which people sleep on mats with adults sometimes using home-made beds. A whole family lives in a single dwelling, the interior of which is divided, especially when the owners have been influenced by Western culture. Nearby may be a goat pen, but there rarely is a latrine, which are more common in urban centers. Dwellings are used primarily for storage and sleeping. However, in the six-month dry and hot season in the savannah, people frequently sleep outdoors. Family life occurs in open spaces or on a narrow ground-level verandah, and food is prepared at a family hearth situated in the front of the dwelling.
The village interior extends up to the road and is kept cleared and swept by women, while the ngonda “bush” (uncultivated land) begins a few yards behind the houses. Village space is therefore completely open, so that one’s activities are visible to all and passers by can be seen, greeted, and engaged in conversation. There are no enclosures except among the Muslims and the few people who have adopted their cultural traits. For indigenous Central Africans, concealment and secrecy violate cultural norms.
Urban centers are the sites of prefectural (provincial) and subprefectural administration. They are conglomerates of villages, but wealthier people such as civil servants and merchants live in dwellings constructed of cement blocks, laid with a cement floor, and roofed with metal sheets. Larger buildings of that construction type from the colonial period are used by government departments and religious organizations. These secondary centers are connected by a dirt-road system created between 1925 and 1938 with indigenous labor that has facilitated migration and travel, contributing to quasi-urbanization and the nationalization of the culture. Because links between the members of a lineage are maintained, much travel—often as paid passengers on the tops of transport trucks—is associated with illness and death among kin. An extensive network of privately owned bus systems serving the interior has degenerated into “bush-taxi” services. The increase in the population of secondary centers and the agricultural practices of Central Africans have led to disastrous ecological changes, because trees are used for both house construction and firewood, and deforestation around all the urban centers has caused a need for the importation of wood from afar.
Bangui is more a huge agglomeration of habitats clustered chaotically around a colonial core than a city. The cost of Bangui’s increasing size is the loss of agricultural land on its perimeter. Permanent buildings of cement block and metal roofing are backed by houses adapted to the country with sun-dried brick walls and roofs thatched in grass or palm fronds. These clusters of buildings belong to close kin and resemble precolonial familial villages. Their style is determined in part by ethnicity but largely by wealth; the number of partitioned rooms, by acculturation and number of inhabitants. Few of these houses have electricity, running water, or access to roads. Most people walk to their destinations, but even the poor have been able to afford private buses or taxi-buses while wealthier people have motorbikes or automobiles.
F OOD AND E CONOMY
Food in Daily Life. The staple is a doughlike mixture of processed and dried detoxified cassava ( gozo ) or sorghum. This is accompanied by a sauce made of vegetables, poultry, meat, or fish. Traditionally, beer was made from sorghum, although locally manufactured beer is now more common along with soft drinks. A hard liquor is made from cassava or sorghum. Chickens and goats in the villages are used as currency in marriages and as gifts and occasionally are sold for cash; wild game, killed in the dry-season grass-burning hunts, supplements the rural diet.
At roadside stands, bakery bread and homemade fried bread ( makara ), sandwiches, barbecued meat, and other snacks are sold by women. Restaurants are frequented mostly by expatriates. Coffee and tea, prepared with sugar and canned evaporated milk, are popular in urban centers.
The inhabitants of the forest area subsist on cassava, bananas, plantains, palm-nut-oil, forest caterpillars, and the leaf of a wild plant ( koko ). Individuals, in turn, bring these foods to Bangui to sell at the market. Protein is at a low level in the diet throughout the country.
Basic Economy. Central Africans are mostly self-sufficient, growing their own staples (manioc, sorghum, peanuts, sesame, corn, and squash), supplemented by wild tubers, leaves, and mushrooms. Peanut oil is produced commercially. Most products in the stores are imported from other African countries, Europe, and Asia. The most sought-after employment is in government service. In 1989, there were 25,000 persons in government service and only about 4,300 in the private sector, most of them in Bangui.
Commercial Activities. Cotton production was obligatory under French rule as early as 1925 and had an irreversible influence on population movements and the politicization of residents. In 1961, 50 percent of one’s hours at work were devoted to cotton agriculture, and in 1971, 90 percent of the income from exports was attributed to cotton. Coffee plantations and lumbering are also important.
Major Industries. There is one factory that produces cloth. Industry is at a low level, and commerce
A boatman brings home a bat for soup to the banks of the Ubangi River in his dugout canoe. His wife wears a traditional print wrap dress.
is carried on by entrepreneurs. Diamonds and gold are surface-mined mostly by individuals in the Haute-Sangha and Haute-Kotto prefectures; their purchase and sale are dominated by recent Muslim immigrants from nearby countries. The importance of this immigration is reflected in the establishment of diplomatic relations and air service to Cairo and Djedda that provides transportation to those making a pilgrimage to Mecca. Uranium has been found around Bakouma.
Trade. Cotton, coffee, and tobacco make up a major proportion of exports, grown by about 80 percent of the population.
S OCIAL S TRATIFICATION
Classes and Castes. Social class is differentiated by place of residence and work: rural versus urban. In recent years, the imitation of French culture has led people to refer to the “provinces” and to their inhabitants as paysans —”peasants.” Power differentiates the bureaucrats from the governed. People with power, economic security, and education are considered intellectuals. These constitute the upper class. The middle class consists of people in commerce and business, most of whom are Muslims. Employees in the public sector support at least a tenth of the population. In 1982, only 52,000 people had regular employment. The vast majority of people are either farmers, self-employed, or are unemployed, including in urban centers the partially educated.
Symbols of Social Stratification. Traditionally, people avoided the display of power and wealth because they were shared in the lineage. In spite of the acquisition of wealth and Western goods, egalitarianism continues to be the ideal.
P OLITICAL L IFE
Government. The government, patterned after that of France, has a parliament consisting of the National Assembly and an Economic and Regional Council that is led by the president. The president is elected by universal direct suffrage and serves a six-year term. There are ministers with domestic and international portfolios, but the president has personal control of the radio and television systems. The nation is divided into prefectures and subprefectures. At the village level, the government is represented by an appointed “chief” approved by the government whose main role is to represent the villagers and enforce laws such as the annual head tax imposed on males. In urban centers, there are wards and neighborhoods also headed by chiefs.
Leadership and Political Officials. Leadership at the highest level has usually come from the military, and sometimes from the civil service. Those holding high office play their roles with formality and a sense of invulnerability. Distance from the mainstream is maintained by the use of the French language.
Social Problems and Control. Very little has been done to control forced payments from drivers of cars and trucks at road blockades by young men and the violent highway banditry in the hinterland. Under most regimes, the security forces have not been paid regularly, leading to civil strife. Structures for social control resemble those of France; the gendarmerie (police), like the military, is largely ineffectual in controlling theft, a crime which often takes the form of armed robbery. There are two parrallel systems in the judiciary system, one similar to that in France, and one based on customary law.
Military Activity. An army serves to protect the presidency and maintain civil order.
A group of children surround a boatman near Bangassou. Men constitute most of the employed workforce.
G ENDER R OLES AND S TATUSES
Division of Labor by Gender. Women traditionally are responsible for the production and preparation of food. Women also work in private holdings growing cotton and other products to participate in the money economy. They are the principal vendors of food products in markets. Men contribute heavy work in rural areas and constitute most of the employed workforce.
The Relative Status of Women and Men. In politics, the civil service, the military, and the police force, women are well represented despite being less educated. Women are less likely to attend, much less finish, primary school.
M ARRIAGE , F AMILY, AND K INSHIP
Marriage. Traditionally, and to some extent in modern-day rural areas, marriages were arranged by the members of a family’s lineage. Few could afford polygamous marriages, although polygamy varies both between rural areas and urban centers, and between ethnic groups. The young man is obliged to work for the girl’s family for as long as up to four years, after which his family pays a brideprice. With the increased emphasis on acquiring monetary wealth, the brideprice and the accompanying gifts have become onerous or unachievable for many in urban centers. Due to the increased expenses associated with weddings, the number of church weddings among Christians has dropped. Stable common-law marriages are parallelled by liaisons (“relationships”) in Africa, in which a woman remains with a man as long as he cares for her. A man can “divorce” his wife by putting her belongings in front of the house and locking the door. Divorce traditionally depends on the return of the brideprice, with added contributions that depend on the number of children. The woman’s family can continue exacting payments as long as she bears children, who become members of the man’s lineage.
Domestic Unit. The basic unit consists of the biological father and mother, their children, and other close kin for varying periods of time. The parents’ siblings also take part in the rearing of the children and their resident cousins. Children in rural areas are sent away to serve adult kin, sometimes to receive a formal education in a larger village or town.
S OCIALIZATION
Infant Care. Infants traditionally were not weaned until about age two, and everyone in the family was involved in their care. Children are lectured by their
Men march in traditional dress to celebrate the coronation of Emperor Bokassa I.
parents on social behavior, and corporal punishment is never severe. A child’s exaggerated screams bring adults to mediate on behalf of the child. Siblings avoid fighting.
Child Rearing and Education. A child’s most important responsibilities are to respect, obey, and serve adults and to avoid causing trouble (such as theft) with non-kin. Respect for age is encoded in the language. Education follows the French system, and is available to all, although the system is handicapped by insufficient funding. The educational system is frequently disrupted by walkouts by unpaid teachers. Attendance in primary school is around 50 percent but drops progressively in the upper grades. Dependence on foreigners for teachers has been almost eliminated, but the quality of teaching has fallen.
Higher Education. With a baccalaureate degree a person may enroll at the University of Bangui to prepare for a career in public service or to emigrate to France. The majority of the students attending higher education are male.
E TIQUETTE
People adjust their speech according to the age and role of their interlocutors. Although the second person plural pronoun is used to express deference in speaking to an individual, among young urban dwellers there is an ideology of equality and solidarity that leads to the use of the singular pronoun.
R ELIGION
Religious Beliefs. The practice of traditional religion has declined since the 1950s in favor of various forms of Christianity. The first missionaries established Saint Paul des Rapides at Bangui in 1894, and Protestant missionaries, mostly American, arrived in the early 1920s. Protestant Central African churches, once aligned with the denominations of the early missions, have splintered into several factions as a result of competition for leadership in the clergy. Charismatic forms of Christianity are practiced in independent churches. There are also syncretistic movements with traits from Catholicism, Protestantism, and Islam. Islam is growing through immigration and conversion; boys sometimes convert to gain employment.
Rituals and Holy Places. Traditional religious practices continue in the annual grass-burning hunts of the dry season and in rare initiation rites. More common are ceremonies associated with clitorectomy, although modern-day circumcision has been almost entirely secularized with boys being sent to a local clinic. Expressions of traditional religion in Bangui are rare, but marches and parades, especially among Christian youth and women, are common, with uniforms and banners displaying one’s allegiances. Members of syncretistic churches wear special clothing.
Death and the Afterlife. Most people believe that death is the consequence of ill will (sorcery). At traditional wakes, kin frequently charge each other with having killed the deceased; all-night dancing and mourning last for several days. There may have been traditional burial grounds, but cemeteries were introduced by Christians and Muslims. In Bangui and other urban centers, burial in cemeteries is obligatory.
M EDICINE AND H EALTH C ARE
The only major hospital is in Bangui, but there are mission-operated, private, and governmental clinics. By the 1950s, specialists in traditional medicine began to decline in importance. Belief in sorcery is widespread even among Christians, and protective charms on a person’s body may be more common among some Muslims than among other Central Africans. The most common causes of death are AIDS, malaria, and schistosomiasis. Epidemics of meningitis occur frequently.
S ECULAR C ELEBRATIONS
Mother’s Day has become a holiday of considerable importance in urban centers, used by women to exact gifts and privileges. The political celebrations are Independence Day and Memorial Day in honor of Barthélemy Boganda, the first president.
T HE A RTS AND H UMANITIES
Literature. The CAR is an oral society and the percentage of literate people in both French and Sango is very low. There have been only intermittent and ephemeral periodicals, mostly in French. A poorly stocked nonreligious bookstore for readers of French exists in Bangui.
Performance Arts. Popular dance music, a local version of the style characteristic in Kinshasa, Democatic Republic of Congo, and Brazzaville, Republic of Congo, has been recorded and sold commercially and played on the radio.
B IBLIOGRAPHY
Cordell, Dennis. Dar al-Kuti: A History of the Slave Trade and State Formation on the Islamic Frontier in Northern Equatorial Africa (Central African Republic and Chad) in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries , 1977.
——. Dar al-Kuti and the Last Years of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, 1985.
Decalo, Samuel. Psychoses of Power: African Personal Dictatorships, 1989.
Hewlett, Barry S. Intimate Fathers: The Nature and Context of Aka Pygmy Paternal Infant Care, 1991.
Kalck, Pierre. Central African Republic: A Failure in Decolonisation, 1971.
——. Historical Dictionary of the Central African Republic, 1980, 1992.
—, compiler. Central African Republic, 1993.
Le Vine, Victor T. Political Leadership in Africa: Post-Independence Generational Conflict in Upper Volta, Senegal, Niger, Dahomey, and the Central African Republic, 1967.
Mangold, Max. A Central African Pronouncing Gazetteer, 1985.
O’Toole, Thomas. The Central African Republic: The Continent’s Hidden Heart, 1986.
Samarin, W. J. “The Attitudinal and Autobiographic in Gbeya Dog-Names.” Journal of African Languages 4: 57–72, 1965.
——. “The Art of Gbeya Insults.” International Journal of American Linguistics 35: 323–329, 1969.
——. “French and Sango in the Central African Republic.” Anthropological Linguistics 28: 379–397, 1986.
——. “Damned In-Laws and Other Problems.” In Mohammad Ali Jazayery and Werner Winter, eds. Languages and Cultures: Studies in Honor of Edgar C. Polomé , 1988.
——. “The Creation and Critique of a Central African Myth.” In Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer (318): 55–81, 1998.
——. “The Status of Sango in Fact and Fiction: On the One-Hundredth Anniversary of its Conception.” In J. H. McWhorter, ed., Language Change and Language Contact in Pidgins and Creoles , 2000.
——. “Explaining Shift to Sango in Bangui.” In R.Nicolai, Ph. Dalbera, and De Feral, eds. Leçons d’Afrique: Filiations, Ruptures et Reconstitutions des Langues: Un Hommage a` Gabriel Manessy , 2001.
Titley, Brian. Dark Age: The Political Odyssey of Emperor Bokassa , 1997.
Villien, François. Entre Oubangui et Chari vers 1890, 1981.
—W ILLIAM J. S AMARIN
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By truecath
Skirting the DifferenceWhat’s wrong with women wearing trousersby Dr Carol Byrne
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The ancient Egyptians were afflicted with plagues of various kinds – blood, frogs, lice, beasts, cattle, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness – each one more deadly than the one before, but the last and worst has been reserved for our times: a plague of legs. They get everywhere now that women have adopted the trouser culture. Once not considered in keeping with sartorial propriety, everywhere in the Western world trousers on women now predominate. If you walk down the street of any city or town, the proportion of women wearing trousers to skirts is something like 10:1. The fashion has become so institutionalised that some women can be said to ‘live in trousers’. For nearly 6,000 years, women always wore long dresses, but only since the last 40 years, a dress is suddenly “impractical” to wear. Formerly, women performed a wide variety of jobs, including farming, in skirts. Nowadays, they can’t so much as rake a few leaves in the garden without feeling the need to put on a pair of pants.
The moral consensus
Feminine modesty has been understood as being distinctive from its male counterpart in every society since the dawn of history, even in places where God’s word has never reached. (St Thomas Aquinas holds that the behaviour of all is subject to moral judgement, whether or not they know of the Revelation of Christianity.) Women have never, in the entire history of civilization, in any era from earliest antiquity or in any part of the world until our times, stalked about in trousers that delineated the lower half of their body and gave visual prominence to their hips and legs. Why not? Because they had the good sense to realise their physical vulnerability as the ‘weaker vessel’ vis-à-vis male readiness to exploit it, and besides, they wanted to be cherished and respected for their personal qualities other than their physical endowments. The fundamental issue is that a bifurcated garment worn as outer attire was considered by people of all civilisations, even the most barbarian and pagan, to infringe basic levels of feminine decency and identity.
The custom of women wearing trousers did not start with Catholic women. Like the New Mass, the fashion was inaugurated and promoted by liberal-minded people, particularly feminist agitators, intent on discarding Christian traditions and altering people’s understanding of Christian values. (It is true that the Dress Reform Movement was also a protest against the cruelly restrictive clothing of the 19th century that was injurious to women’s health, but there are modest and immodest solutions to every problem.) Just like the New Mass which broke with the whole of liturgical tradition, the custom has in no way developed from the innate sense of decency passed down from one Catholic woman to another throughout 2000 years of the Church’s influence on society. The skirt-trouser dichotomy had become established within all civilisations, including Christian culture, as one of the main differences between men’s and women’s clothing. Only very recently has this difference been obscured.
As we shall see later, Catholic clergy, nuns and educators before the Council denounced the fashion of women wearing trousers as unbecoming in the sense of being unfeminine (appropriate only for men) and indecent (inviting immodest regard). Thus, in the period before Vatican II, a Catholic dress code for girls and women was closely linked with the concept of feminine decorum and the avoidance of the occasion of sin. From their knowledge of the Gospels in which Our Lord demanded purity in glances, thoughts, desires and actions and warned against giving scandal, Christians generally understood that immodesty is related to lust and causes temptation to others. And so a moral conscience was formed which told them that immodesty, particularly in a woman because of her nature as the temptress of man, involves an offence against God and a lack of respect for ourselves and our neighbour. Not to disapprove of trousers for women is to shrug aside the seriousness of the situation.
* In non-Christian countries such as India and parts of the Far East, where women wore trousers, they took care to cover them amply with a flowing robe or a long tunic that concealed the outline of their body below the waist.
* Among Eskimo women and those who inhabited the Polar region there was a tradition of wearing long dresses made of hide or an ensemble consisting of seal skin leggings worn under a poncho-style garment that descended well below the knees. Whether they were the early Celts or Vikings or the women of the tribe of Attila the Hun who swept down from the Steppes of Central Asia, there is no recorded case of a fashion for women to wear trousers as an outer garment until the 20th century.
* In the eighteenth century, the Empress Elizabeth of Russia known as the “Merry Tsarina” organised costume balls in which she regularly required that women dress as men and vice versa. Trousers were indeed worn by women as part of a fancy dress costume but they were only partly visible under shortened skirts, and their use was restricted only to a frivolous occasion.
* During the Napoleonic era and in the American War of Independence there were women volunteers called “vivandieres” and “cantinieres” who wore trousers as part of the military uniform. These were the “filles du régiment”, wives, mothers and daughters who followed their men to war to share the dangers of battle and the hardships of life in the camps. They braved the bullets to administer sustenance to the soldiers and tend the wounded. The important feature of their uniform was that all wore calf-length dresses over trousers or baggy “Zouave” (Turkish-style) pantaloons.
* Moralists of all denominations raged throughout the Victorian era against the emergent fashion of trousers on women. Amelia Bloomer gave her name to a revolutionary style of dressing, but even her ‘shocking’ innovation (1851) that sent ripples of indignation through polite society and drew fiery condemnations from every pulpit, came with a mid-length skirt worn over billowy pantaloons that were tied at the ankle.
* There is no doubt that from Victorian times women wearing trousers were considered both immodest and unfeminine. The early feminists who wore trousers were often lampooned in the press in their attempt to ape manliness. A common criticism was that trousers gave a woman “an extremely mannish look”.
*Here is what G.K. Chesterton thought about women wearing trousers:
“And since we are talking here chiefly in types and symbols, perhaps as good an embodiment as any of the idea may be found in the mere fact of a woman wearing a skirt. It is highly typical of the rabid plagiarism which now passes everywhere for emancipation, that a little while ago it was common for an “advanced” woman to claim the right to wear trousers; a right about as GROTESQUE as the right to wear a false nose…It is quite certain that the skirt means female dignity.”
This commentary was written in 1910 when the custom was in its infancy; it may be a century old, but it is even more relevant in our times than it was in Chesterton’s.
* All dictionaries up to the early 20th century defined “trousers” as “a garment worn by males.” This identification of trousers as a male garment did not change until the 60s after women began to liberate their legs publicly in the 50s, thus altering the public perception.
* In wartime, women workers in munitions factories wore dungarees under overalls.
It is evident that trousers were historically associated with men, and wherever they were adopted by women they were subject to ‘purdah’, that is skirted around by cultural restrictions and limited to specific circumstances. There is thus no recorded history of women adopting the fashion of wearing trousers like their menfolk until the 20th century.
We can deduce two things from this enduring and universal phenomenon:
- a moral consensus, based on instinctual feelings of shamefacedness, existed up to modern times among all women, and that their desire to conceal rather than reveal was not a social construct but a natural reaction.
- trousers as an outer garment are not and never have been feminine apparel, and by putting them on women (with a different designer label) does not make them any less men’s clothing.
This evidence quite escapes those who deny the significance for our time of God’s edict given to Moses: “A woman shall not be clothed with a man’s apparel; neither shall a man use woman’s apparel: for he that doeth these things is abominable before God ” (Deuteronomy 22:5). The mere mention of such an edict is enough to make some people hiss “Old Testament fundamentalist” in my direction, but it was the basis on which the Church formed her teaching that women must dress in a distinctively feminine manner and be modest in heart as well as apparel (I Peter 3:3-4).
The Church’s teaching before Vatican II
The Church’s teaching on dress is an authority prevailing over every social tendency and every fashionable choice, because it was to her and not to society that Christ entrusted the supernatural wisdom to discern what constitutes a spiritual danger and to fight soul-destroying customs such as immodest and egalitarian clothing. Many of us are too quick to write off the Church when it comes to subjects like trousers on women. It is claimed that the Magisterium has not issued any prohibition on them and that in dubiis libertas (where a doubt exists freedom should be granted). But this argument overlooks the fact that it was only in the second half of the 20th century that women in general began to exchange their skirts for trousers, and that by the time this fashionable option had become widespread, the post-Conciliar Church had fallen silent, having already adopted a more indulgent attitude to the question of modesty in general and the sins of the flesh in particular. It is hardly to be expected that in their condemnation of immodest fashions the pre-Conciliar Popes would have given particular emphasis to a fashion that was rarely seen in public. (Certainly before 1960 it was unheard of for women to wear trousers to church). However, it was customary before the Council for individual bishops, especially in Catholic countries such as Ireland, Italy and Latin America, to make statements regarding the unacceptability of trousers on women.
The Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, John Charles McQuaid C.S.Sp., was well known for his tirades against women wearing trousers. He continually denounced women’s participation in athletics for reason of dress in mixed company. For example, in a sermon to a congregation in his native Cavan, he voiced his opposition to young women rowers being dressed in men’s scanty athletic attire. There is no doubt that throughout his lengthy career (he reigned for more than three decades from 1940 to 1972 before resigning in 1972 in disgust at the reforms of Vatican II and dying, they say, broken-hearted the following year), the legendary Archbishop McQuaid exerted an enormous influence on every aspect of Catholic Ireland. It was common knowledge that Dr McQuaid had a direct influence on University College Dublin, and this has been confirmed with the recent opening of the Archbishop’s archives. I have a vivid recollection of an incident that occurred during my university days in Dublin when a foreign female student wearing trousers was approached by a woman official and asked to leave the premises because she had infringed the dress code. What would McQuaid have said about today’s trousered women? He would have used up all his vocabulary, and have had nothing left but tears.
The last official document on the subject was, significantly, issued shortly before Vatican II. It took the form of a letter by Cardinal Siri of Genoa warning all the clergy, teaching sisters, those involved in Catholic Action, and educators in his diocese, of the grave dangers in women wearing trousers. Written on the 12th June 1960 at a time when Italy was more or less still a Catholic country, the letter addressed people who still had some instinctual sensibilities concerning modesty, formed by centuries of Catholic culture. Its very title, “Notification concerning men’s dress worn by women”, indicates that slacks and shorts were considered as men’s clothing, and that the fact that the offending garments were tailored for the female figure and therefore not bought in the menswear department of clothes shops, does not justify their adoption by women.
Cardinal Siri condemned trousers on women from a two-fold perspective: firstly that they involved a degree of immodesty (albeit not as grave as abbreviated skirts), and secondly that they were a symbol of feminist ideology, “the visible aid to bring about a mental attitude of being ‘like a man’”. (Incidentally this is exactly what Bishop de Castro Mayer meant when he said that trousers were even worse than mini-skirts because the latter attacked the senses while the former attacked the mind, thus constituting an ideological weapon in the feminist battle for the de-feminising of women). Since the clothing a person wears “modifies that person’s gestures, attitudes and behaviour”, the Cardinal predicted that the change from skirts to trousers would modify the Christian perception of womanhood as essentially ordered towards motherhood, and that it would subvert the divinely ordained order in which the husband is the protector of his wife and head of the family.
Alas, it has all come to pass as he had forecast: women have adopted men’s dress, and there has been a wholesale paradigm-shift in society’s perception of femininity. Misled by the tenets of feminist dogma, women are being won over to the idea that the Catholic teaching of the man being the head of the woman and family is all irrelevant nonsense, and totally absurd in the modern world. The effect of this is to blur God’s purposes in giving men and women distinctive, though complementary, roles in society, and to abolish the “headship of man” doctrine in every area of life – Church, family, education, government etc. As Cardinal Siri put it:
“First, the wearing of men’s dress by women affects the woman herself, by changing the feminine psychology proper to women; second, it affects the woman as wife of her husband, by tending to vitiate relationships between the sexes; and third, it affects the woman as mother of her children by harming her dignity in her children’s eyes. … This changing of the feminine psychology does fundamental, and, in the long run, irreparable damage to the family, to conjugal fidelity, to human affections and to human society…Nobody stands to gain by helping to bring about a future age of vagueness, ambiguity, imperfection and, in a word, monstrosities.”
Because shorts and slacks break both the modesty and gender barriers, we have a superb medley of immodesty AND ‘masculinity’ all gift-wrapped nicely for today´s modern career woman!
How teaching sisters shaped Catholic culture
When I went to a convent school in England in the late 1950s, the Headmistress would give each year group fortnightly tutorials designed to prepare Catholic girls for the temptations and dangers to the life of the soul that they would face in the modern world. Among the warnings and admonitions, the following three items were candidates for the greatest condemnation by the teaching sisters: television, pop music and women’s trousers. All three were treated from the perspective of Original Sin and its effect of Concupiscence (a word, I recall, that almost stretched from one side of the blackboard to the other, and was the devil’s own job to spell) which leaves human nature vulnerable to the assaults of the devil. We were admonished to discipline our senses, sanctify our souls with the graces that make us pleasing to Our Lord and Our Lady and avoid the ‘broad path’ of modern fashions influenced by pop psychology and television culture which threaten our souls with spiritual dangers.
As so little has been written in appreciation of teaching orders of nuns, it is easy to underestimate the tremendous impact that women religious had on the development of Catholicism before the Council and the strength of the Catholic Church in the British Isles as in other countries of the world. The very cohesiveness of a large congregation of women religious in every area allowed them far more influence over the minds of their pupils than any group of lay women could have exerted in the same period. Their presence was a major force for moral rectitude and stability in every neighbourhood where they taught the faith and helped young girls to conduct their lives according to Catholic principles. In the 1950s, convent schools were so prevalent that it was impossible for them not to influence the outlook of Catholic girls with regard to modesty in dress.
The Church’s interpretation of what constitutes modesty in dress was hugely influential in Catholic countries principally because it was preached and defended by popes, bishops, clergy and religious and echoed by lay teachers in charge of young people in their formative years. It is not exaggerating to say that if the adoption of a Catholic dress code for girls is attributable to any sector of the Church more than others, that sector was the congregations of teaching sisters from which it received its most powerful impetus and orientation. In the days before the Council, good Catholic girls and women dressed decently because they had learned repeatedly from their earliest years to subordinate their own opinions and desires to the standards that were required of them. I know for a fact that even in Irish Primary Schools the teaching sisters operated a strict dress code: mothers who had sent their girls to school in too short dresses would find their daughters returned to them at the end of the day with a strip of paper pinned to the end of the dress to show the required length!
In Ireland, women teachers were trained in Catholic colleges such as the Mary Immaculate Teacher Training College in Limerick, run by the Sisters of Mercy. The nuns taught their students the moral principles governing feminine modesty which they, in turn, were to pass on to their future pupils. We can gather some insights into what this entailed from a journal produced in 1927 by the trainee teachers. Echoing the Irish Bishops’ concern about the spread of what they termed “indecent fashions”, they launched “the Mary Immaculate Modest Dress and Deportment Crusade” with the intention of rescuing “Irish maidenhood from the grip of the pagan world”. Among the articles of attire to be reprobated were trousers, referred to as “mannish and immodest” dress.
In promoting modesty in dress for those under their charge, teaching sisters were complying with Rome’s decrees. In 1930 Pope Pius XI had directed the Sacred Congregation of the Council to issue a strongly-worded Letter on Christian Modesty to the whole world (as had Pope Benedict XV before him):
“Nuns, in compliance with the Letter dated August 23, 1928, by the Sacred Congregation of Religious, must not receive in their colleges, schools, oratories or recreation grounds, or, if once admitted, tolerate girls who are not dressed with Christian modesty; said Nuns, in addition, should do their utmost so that love for holy chastity and Christian modesty may become deeply rooted in the hearts of their pupils.”
The same message was reinforced in all Catholic schools, colleges and universities before the Council. The only concession made for gymnastics and sports in convent schools was shorts of the culotte type with boxed pleats reaching almost to the knee, and then only in an all-girl setting.
Once a Convent Girl…
There’s something about a convent girl who received her education before Vatican II that marks her out from other girls of her generation: she has had her conscience formed by the teaching sisters in the basic moral principles of obedience and chastity, with the word MODESTY branded in letters of fire on her subconscious mind. True modesty, they taught, begins in the soul which must be protected from being laid open to dangers. Girls were admonished never to lose their innocence, always to avoid anything that might rob them of it, such as immodest fashions, and to fight like heroines to preserve it at all costs. Their role model was St Maria Goretti, the Italian girl canonised in 1950 who died in 1902 heroically defending her purity. Modesty was therefore taught as an inner virtue – one of the twelve fruits of the Holy Ghost – and the true cause and ground for outer modesty as expressed in one’s attire. Whether or not the convent educated girl always adhered to a Catholic dress code outside school life, an inescapable sense of ‘shamefacedness’ remained long after she has left school, and she carried this principle in her innermost mind even if she could not always articulate it with reasoned arguments.
Whereas other girls have no reliable standards by which to judge modest dress (some fundamentalist Protestant sects use biblical references to preach feminine modesty, but do so using their own interpretation), the convent girl has been gradually educated in responsibility towards the moral well being of herself and others. As Pope Pius XII put it:
“without the faith, without Christian education, deprived of the help of the Church, where can bewildered woman find the courage to face unfalteringly moral demands surpassing purely human strength? “
The Seduction of Vatican II
Adapting Catholic morals to the modern world, as Vatican II did, had disastrous effects. When the Council called for an adaptation of the Church to the Modern World, what it was saying is that the Church needed to end the separation between the religious life and worldly life and conform herself to the values of the world. Belief in the supernatural was assimilated into faith in naturalism, and the distinction between the two was lost. This change is of paramount importance to what happened next: religious orders of nuns were among the first to embrace the Vatican II reforms both in their own communities and in the wider world. Caught up in the current of the New Thinking, the sisters were like sitting ducks: the best they could do was to take a defensive stand in a situation that was indefensible, and they were an easy target with no chance of escaping the hunter. Most took to the reforms like ducks to water. Whether they were progressives or conservatives in their outlook, all were obliged to adopt a more indulgent, admiring view of the modern world and its fashions and stop regarding it as a spiritual enemy. No longer shocked at the sight of women in trousers, they got into them themselves and mounted the sanctuary steps where they continue to challenge the supremacy of the all-male priesthood.
With the disappearance of an authoritative guide from our religious leaders on a Catholic dress code, the New Thinking affected the Church in its membership and social and cultural environment. It is well known that when the practice of modesty, like any other moral principle, has simply become a matter left to the individual’s sense of responsibility, it is gradually forgotten. Unfortunately, modern Popes have not given specific advice on women and trousers, priests have failed in their duty to give the traditional moral guidance, and women have been left unprotected by their pastors. If they are not guided in this matter by Popes, women will be guided by the bad example of their peers, by fashion designers and retailers who have a financial interest in promoting trends, and by feminists with an ideological agenda to tear down the conventions that Christian civilisation has established as safeguards of the virtue of purity.
The implications for women’s fashions are clear: we now have a relativisation of standards of decency and loss of a sense of decorum. Nobody blushes any more – or hardly. This relativism has slowly weakened in consciences the notions of good and evil, sin and grace, vice and virtue, and, by analogy, the standards of modesty in dress. It has led to a curious irony – the modernist clergy, brazen in defending the freedom of women to wear trousers even in church, are bashful when it comes to preaching about modesty! What a shocking indictment on the blindness produced by too much exposure to the world: they do not see a violation of modesty in women wearing trousers or a profanation of holy places by such attire. Instead of exhorting their flocks to transcend the pressures of fashion, modernist clergy have laughingly adopted the “New Morality” including a “New Modesty” (they regard the ‘old modesty’ as a joke!) which allows immodest styles of clothing to be worn in church. The silence of the clergy, indeed their laxist complicity with immodest clothing, provides the means for women to pursue their own pleasure, comfort and convenience with the Church assisting them. It is one thing to tolerate wrongdoing by being silent when God’s laws are mocked. It is something else to contribute to it by not working to eradicate it as best as one can.
Certainly the Society of St Pius X cannot be accused of turning a blind eye to the problem. By speaking out against immodest fashions, traditional priests are fulfilling Pope Pius XI’s exhortation:
“Let parish priests and preachers, according to the recommendation of Saint Paul, and as the occasion presents itself, “insist, explain, reprove and exhort”, to the end that women should dress in such a way as to radiate modesty, and their clothing enhance and protect virtue. Let them, also, admonish parents not to allow their daughters to wear immodest outfits.”
Bishop Williamson was right in line with traditional Catholic morality when he said: “Let not wild horses drag you into shorts or trousers.” and “Let the wife then sacrifice her own will, her emancipation, her trousers, her money and pseudo-career in order to attain the glorious freedom of motherhood to bring into the world and raise whatever children God sends.” He was only fulfilling his duty as envisioned by Pope Pius XI:
“Nothing is more reasonable or more necessary than that the Bishops – as is fitting for ministers of Christ – should, with one voice, raise a barrier against these bold and licentious fashions, bearing with serenity and courage the insults and mockery which they will receive, because of their unyielding position…”
“You’ve forgotten your skirt!”
Some Catholic girls and women can be incredibly naive about the effects of immodesty; they sincerely want to lead a Christian life, but seem to be unaware of the link between a chaste heart and a chaste appearance, and of their potential for leading others astray. Pope Pius XII warned:
Numbers of believing and pious women…in accepting to follow certain bold fashions, break down, by their example, the resistance of many other women to such fashions, which may become for them the cause of spiritual ruin. As long as these provocative styles remain identified with women of doubtful virtue, good women do not dare to follow them; but once these styles have been accepted by women of good reputation, decent women soon follow their example, and are carried along by the tide into possible disaster.
Pope Pius XII did not mention any particular article of clothing by name – modesty and discretion would prevent him from doing so – but it is obvious that shorts and slacks come under his censure as being “bold” and “provocative”. In contrast to modern Popes who praise women’s participation in sports that require such clothing, Pope Pius XII warned against them. It is reasonable to assume that if he condemned athletic outfits for women on the sports field and in the gym, he would have been even more critical of their adoption for everyday life.
No such thing as modest trousers on women
If women are “dressing to kill” these days, there is no doubt that they have succeeded in killing the morals of men and endangering their souls by wearing provocative styles, particularly midriff-baring tops and how-low-can-you-go jeans. Some women appear to have been melted down and poured into their garments. A good question to ask oneself by way of analogy is: “Which outlines the form of the hand more – a mitten or a glove?” and then apply the question to a skirt and a pair of trousers, both of which provide adequate coverage. It is obvious that there can be varying degrees of immodesty depending on the cut of the trousers, but that there is no such thing as ‘modest’ trousers – they may look modest on the clothes rack, but they behave like any other trousers when you put them on. The ‘crux’ of the matter, (if you get my meaning), is that even if trouser legs are of generous width and not particularly clinging, the fitted area is bound to offset the female form to a greater or lesser extent, and its very visibility is what causes an immodest impression to be fixed in the mind. Any woman who does not agree should take a long, hard look in the mirror and try to see herself as others (especially men) see her! Perhaps then she will agree that trousers reveal much more than gender.
Let’s talk modesty – and honesty
Women often say they wear slacks because they are more comfortable or convenient for getting in and out of cars, warmer in winter etc., and shorts because the weather is hot (but it is even hotter in Purgatory!). But with a little of the ingenuity and resourcefulness for which women are famed, a judicious combination of articles of apparel can be chosen from among the contents of a woman’s wardrobe to enable her to wear skirts for many occasions – windy days and sub-zero temperatures, cycling, hiking and riding side-saddle, for instance – all without the need to wear trousers. There are some sporting activities which cannot be done in a skirt and so must be out of bounds for women. Sacrificing convenience and freedom is not easily done, but if a more restricted life-style for the sake of modesty and propriety is the path of greater holiness, it is also potentially one of greater sacrifice and will bring its rewards in increased graces.
Let us be perfectly honest: even if an individual does not comply with the surrounding a-moral culture, it is giving the wrong message for a Catholic woman to don trousers which align her with the outward appearance of those who wish to detach themselves from a Christian way of life. After all, what would people think if you walked into a room wearing a tee-shirt with a large swastika emblazoned on it? If you are not a Nazi sympathiser, why give the impression of being one? Yet there are Catholic women even in traditionalist circles who, while not fitting the strict definition of “feminist”, nevertheless reflect that ethos to some degree, not least in their vehement protest against anyone declaring trousers as unsuitable attire for women. Feminism is so pervasive in our society that traces of the feminist mindset can be found even among those Catholics who would disavow the feminist label.
Conclusion
The key to the whole issue is for women to dress in a feminine manner so as to communicate the language of submission and acceptance of womanhood rather than the language of rebellion and rejection of God’s design. As Christian women, we have a biblical obligation to dress modestly and reflect holiness, and so we should dress in a feminine manner, to show that we accept the place God has given us in the Church, in the family and in society,. God’s message about modesty may seem embarrassingly old-fashioned in our culture, but God’s word does not change. There are no general circumstances either in the past or present which mitigate or set aside this teaching. While it is acceptable to have feminised forms of coats, hats, shoes etc., trousers are in a category of their own because of the area of the body on which they are worn and their inherent “suggestiveness”. It will never be right for women to overshadow or displace traditional Catholic teaching by claiming the right to wear trousers.
If we judge the question in the light of the virtual collapse of the Catholic Church in society after more than forty years of religiously neutral teaching, it would suggest that the trouser culture, insofar as its basic premises have now become enshrined in society, has indeed served to injure Catholicism and the overall social good. It has the effect of undermining the priority, both in public and then in private life, of supernatural or spiritual reality.
Part of the problem is that what was taught before the Council as Catholic morality is now viewed as a threat to the liberal values of tolerance, individual freedom and egalitarianism – all of which have become the orthodoxy of the age. This means that, in practice, the pre-Conciliar condemnation of trousers comes into conflict with the self-serving tendency in (wo)man. It is seen as being contrary to the freedom of the individual and likely to frustrate her self-fulfilment and/or happiness. But St Thomas shows that the punishment for Original Sin was not only the subordination of woman to man but its unpleasantness, and that woman would not always be readily obedient.
Has the trouser culture really elevated our uniqueness as women? Has it contributed to an increase in chivalry from men? On the contrary, the fashion has become counter-productive for women:
• their dignity has been lowered both in the eyes of society and of their own children
• as fashions have become bolder, their innate sensitivity to immodesty has been blunted by sensual overload
• their minds have been ideologically corrupted by feminist thinking so that they have generally rejected God’s design for the family
• there is widespread confusion in society about what constitutes femininity and masculinity
• the de-feminising effect of trousers on the younger generation is unedifying. Young girls of today have, for the most part, worn trousers most of their life, and as a result they tend to behave like boys. It is little wonder that they feel uncomfortable in dresses and that, as Pope Pius XII noted, they have lost the instinct for modesty. Our age has witnessed a general coarsening of conversation and manners among young girls at a time of their life when they should be learning Mary-like standards of modesty and deportment.
The women’s trouser culture is one of the most insidious by-products of modern liberalism, and it is therefore not surprising that all it has promoted is moral frivolity and exhibitionism, confusion, the debasement of women, a coarsening of attitudes among women themselves and a lowering of moral tone in society.
We need to rescue the Christian concept of womanhood from modern society’s confusion over marital duties and family life. In order to maintain standards of decency in dress, women need the graces that come from frequent prayer. They also need the moral support of their menfolk: in the first place of the Holy Father, then of the hierarchy, clergy and religious and also of their husbands. But women have been spiritually short-changed and woefully let down by the silence of the Magisterium after the Council. However, there is the other side of the coin: the problem of the unruly wife and the passion with which some women pursue the ‘right’ to wear trousers. Instead of having a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Pet. 3:4), they frustrate their husband’s attempts to counsel them by continually usurping his authority in the home. The Magisterium may be silent, but women are vocal!
The plague of legs is a just punishment.
“God allows us to be punished by the silence of the Magisterium today for the sins of not obeying the Magisterium when it spoke up: just as God, as punishment, did not send more prophets to the people of the Old Testament after the people had killed and rejected many of the prophets He had already sent to them.”
For those who are new to Catholic morality, or who are unaware of what the Church has taught before the Council, it would be good to cultivate the habit of thinking that if the Church has preached against women wearing trousers, then somewhere there is a good case for believing it drawn from Revelation, Tradition or natural reason. They would do well to heed the teachings of the past as they strive to inculcate a spirit of purity and awaken a sense of the angelic virtue among the young. The result would be perfectly Catholic: modern ‘Bloomerites’ who still cling doggedly on to the trouser-leg of feminist culture should stay at home to look after their children and cut their trousers into strips to make mops.
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Abstract: There is no denying the fact that Africa has a bank of rich cultural heritages with diverse aesthetic values that are flexible and highly adaptable with imbued ancient wisdom yet undiscovered for today uses and purposes. The culture has a lot of educating and reformative values which can impact positively on re-regulating today’s and future societal norms and morals. The enslavement to western value orientations and culture has produced the conflict of values. We therefore need a re-orientation of the cultural values if we must benefit from the past and utilize it to make the today and tomorrow. But if a return to the exact glorious past is impossible, how can we re-validate viable values, contextualise and consolidate them for today, obviate the mistakes of the past and confront today and tomorrow with such lasting eternal values that can make the today active in a world where values are no longer constant. These questions we try to answer through secondary research sources, to anchor on the need to educate the African mind through a progressive cultivation of generative thinking capacity.
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| INTRODUCTION
A major advocate of the cultural paradigm in development, the renowned Kenyan International Scholar, Professor Ali Mazrui has observed that cultural forces drive national behaviors, international politics and affairs, international relationships and hegemonies. It is his anchor then that since the world is racially specific in distribution, Africans would loose out in patterns of trade and investments and for a long time to come, if we cannot assert the own control and assert the micro-cultural identity, the own form of cultural identification. To further buttress his point, his book, Cultural Engineering in East Africa, Ali Mazrui, outlined the four challenges facing the African namely:
Another erudite author worth citing in this aspect of cultural challenges is the innovative Theory of the Kulturizatio System Power Structuring of Post-Colonial Africa Philosophy, professor Obioma Atuloma. He sees the need for a new system for imaging a post-colonial Africa in dealing with its ethnic and developmental challenges though a three tiered sequencing of:
Atuloma’s Kzio theory is all more the more interesting as it is based on a conceptualization whose cumulative effects would work through the innovation of a common national kultural base. For him, the existence of a common Kultural base is the pre-requisite for the possibility of skillfully welding the fixed (human and non-human) factors of socio-political nature. For Harrison and Hutington, culture defines as a set of values which when used as a strategic block for a-priori and posteriori constructs bring about societal progress. This was their thesis in culture matters; how values shape human progress, a view shared by Sylvester Oladapo Williams who contends that:
This must be the activeness that Professor Atuloma speaks of in his 1975 Kizio theory-an active ingredient in remarking Africa. This seems to be like the modern day perspectives on culture in terms of concept, role and praxis which Atuloma defines as the totality of thoughts, feelings and activities bearing on the society. In the light of the foregoing, we state a more elaborate definition of culture, as the way of a life of a people. Culture is then a people’s everything: not just their dances but also their language, their history, their arts and crafts, their commerce and industry, their laws and customs, their medical theory and practice, their games, their celebrations (joyful and mournful) their ruling ideas, their weltanshaung (world view) including prejudices, their folklore and mythology, their proverbs, their philosophy. All these and more make up a people’s culture. Culture means a people’s way of life. Considered globally and at another level, culture denotes an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions, expressed in symbolic forms, by means of which men communicate, perpetuate and develop their knowledge about and attitude towards life. Culture then is a people’s mirror, a people’s version of reality. The German ethnologist, Leo Frobenius (1873-1935), whose seminar research is a magnum opus in the origins of African culture was more scientific and philosophical in his definition and perspectives of culture, in general and African culture in particular. It was he who evolved the expression culture morphology or the Gestalt doctrine of culture which culminated in the philosophical principle of PAIDEUMA-the soul or spirit of a culture which uses people as a means for taking shape. It takes possession of man and man becomes emotionally involved or ergriffen (possessed) and becomes active. For Frobenius, individual cultures is more than just the conglomeration of various elements but as living organisms or PAIDEUMA, it must be seen in its entirely as an organic whole from its earliest origins and it has its youth, its zenith, its decay and death. And like in all begetting Leo Frobenius does not see African culture as an isolated phenomenon. His study revealed a close and fruitful contact with old cultures of the Mediterranean and Near East. It was from these it derived its distinctive African high culture which to him is different, in a different category and of equal value with other cultures of the earth. Given this white acclamation, why then do we go on denigrating and degrading ourselves. The colonial educational heritage imposed on us a low esteem assessments and have a large part to do with it. But then, as a former slave named Afro-American Michele Paul now named YeYe Funua Olade would say:
If fashion populist, 69 years old Giorgio Armani would find influences in his creativity from the design simplicity of the Far East instead of his Italian Baroque and Avant Guade artist, Picasso would find influence in Congolese art, to develop his Picasso’s Cubism, then we are not looking deep enough into the cultural roots for solutions and creative ideas. It therefore means that culture is imperative for development today even in the face of globalization. As Chief Ojo Maduekwe states it:
Nothing could reveal better the lack of seeing the nexus and the urgency for change in our defective behaviour than when Nigerian’s World Bank’s Country Director, Mark Tomlinson at a wotclef Seminar, drew the attention of the populace to our neglect of a vital, ingredient in addressing our myriad problems of violence, civil unrest and poverty. Recognizing the cultural dimensions of development, from a broad anthropological perspective, Tomlinson decried the illiterate cultural approach to development, which has been the bane of developing countries and responsible in the main for countless cases of wastes and tragedy. His cited examples make the points too glaring-well meaning educational programmes that failed to achieve their objectives because local traditions were ignored; water wells sited near villages remaining unused because the sponsors failed to recognize the friendship and kinship bonds between women which long walks to collect water built and settlement relocations from ancestral villages which have spelt psychological, social and economic set backs stemming from a loss of identity and culture. There is no denying the fact Nigeria has a bank of rich cultural heritages with diverse aesthetic values that are flexible and highly adaptable with imbued ancient wisdom is yet undiscovered and remains untapped for today uses and purposes. The culture has a lot of educating and reformative values which can impact positively on re-regulating today’s societal norms and morals. The enslavement to western value orientations and culture has produced the conflict of values. We therefore need the activeness of the cultural values if we must benefit from the past and utilize it to make the today and tomorrow. But if a return to the exact glorious past is impossible can we re-validate old and viable values, contextualise and confront today and tomorrow with such lasting values that can make today active in a world where values are no longer constant. HOW VALUES CREATE CULTURE The role of elites in fact, the ruling elite or what Wright Mills calls the power elites in any society, tends to create the acceptable norms and societal values. It is based on those normative values that society some how directs its own internal organization in furtherance of a preconceived goal, namely survival. Individuals merely take a cue from the societal menu of what Tallcott Parsons describes as elements of a shared symbolic system which serve as a criterion or standard for selection among the alternatives of orientation which are intrinsically open in a value system. What binds them in, a society is dependent on the internalization of the standards, the conformity to which tends to be of personal, expressive and or instrumental significance to ego. The conformity, based on need-dispositions is the condition for eliciting the favourable (and avoiding the unfavourable reactions) of the others. With a plurality of actors, the conformity is in accordance with the value-orientations which are always institutionalized. The set standards of behaviour of the actor ego, evokes expectations-role expectations-in relation to a particular inter-action context. And hence the institutionalization of a set of role-expectations and of the corresponding sanction is clearly a matter of degree. The polar antithesis of full institutionalization is anomie and there are of course degrees of anomie. Anomie of course refers to the absence of a structured complementarily of the interaction process or the complete breakdown of normative order in a concrete social system or structure, when standards and sanctions no longer grip men. What then sets the values, according to Talcott Parsons is that motivationally considered, there are attachment to common values…the actors have common sentiments in support of the value patterns which may be defined as meaning that conformity with the relevant expectations is treated as a good thing. In a world Values Survey research project conducted by Professor Ronald Inglehart, the evidence today is:
The above observations are noticed amongst both young and old, worldwide. What could be said as reasons for these observable shifts could be the speeding up of social change as the consequence of the disturbance of accepted standard of values. Societies are changing in phenomenal ways and with it, material and moral values. As M.V.C, Jeffreys would note:
The impact of the contemporary world on ordinary people and their response to it has produced contradictory tendencies. The contradictions no doubt stem from an increasing need for intelligently responsible behaviour in a world that makes responsible behaviour increasingly difficult. Herein lies the difficulty of making out personal values or meaning in a mass-cultured world. In the days of Roberspiere in the Reign of Terror there was the fundamental principle of the Sovereignty of the general will, stemming from the doctrine of the absolute right of especially illuminate group, to determine general values. It must be realized that while no one has found a more workable practical device than majority rule majority rule, however is at best a very crude way of trying to find out what is for the common good and what the personal values ought to be. THE DYNAMICS OF VALUES AND SOCIAL CHANGE The days of mass culture is gone and in the influence of a technological age, we have moved into a world of extreme transience and we now live in a world Suspicious of history and cultural relativity. We are in an age shaking off philosophical, religious and artistic faith in the absolute meaning of truth, good and beauty. We are moving out of a transcendent foundation of eternal values in an unchanging heaven and receiving them in once and for all unquestionable revelation into a twilight of eternal values. The certainties of society, history and man ended in the last millennium. The great traditional moral frameworks attached to inherited denominations have been taken over by Science, Progress, Emancipation of peoples’ Solidarity and Humanistic Ideals. We are arriving at what Fukuyama would admirably describe as Post history or what jerome binde would call post-humanity and post-materialist. In this age of stock market values-a set of standard of values, stable, absolute values, fluctuate in a vast market. In an age of radical innovation and unprecedented breaks, the human species, geopolitical balances, the continuity of history and maintenance of a desirable utopia of a better life for the greatest number is being affected. In this all powerful context, we are living in a world of frivolity of values, marked by the emotional and intellectual influence of ephemeral images. In the emergence of a society based on knowledge, on going, life long education for all would produce the growth of a new tendency of long term new values that are both cognitive and prospective, less inherited than invented, less reproduced than created, less received than passed. Jerome Binde a specialist in Anticipation and Prospective studies and Jean-Joseph Goux put the new experience in this perspective:
African like the rest of the third world is at a cusp of history with a fractured experience which it must use to distill its past and look at the prospects of tomorrow. How have its cherished values played out in the aftermath of culture contact of colonialism and neo-colonialism? Where will we be tomorrow when institutional absolutism is gone. VALUES AND PROGRESS-A DEVELOPMENT TRAJECTORY AND PARADIGM A society is no more than the values it espouses. Therefore, in order to move, men must modify the world in order to be more. For men as beings of praxis to transform the world is to humanize it. The humanization creates a social structure with its dialectics of super and infrastructures. In the history, we cannot but look at the relationship between a metropolitan society and the dependent societies which has been the source of our respective ways of being, thinking and expression in the economic, historical, cultural and political context of our lives. As observed by Paulo Freire, the action of the metropolitan society upon the dependent society has a directive character whereas the object society’s action, whether in response or initiative has a dependent character.
The traditional African societies had, without a modern day concept of philosophizing, arrived at fundamental truths and philosophic conceptions abundant in the many traditional sayings. These values formed the traditions. These intelligence propounded ideas and provided insights that swayed the rules and traditions of the land. Indeed no sphere of life or existence escaped the indigenes. They evolved ideas and beliefs that had internal coherence. All that world got challenged at the end of the 18th century when Western capitalism emerged in firstly, mercantilism, then latter in the slave trade and finally in colonialism. The gale could not be withstood in the superior gunboat and aggressive pulling down of all institutions in Africa in the context of a global economy which has persisted in today’s globalization. There have been various agitations for a roll back to the past which is now impossible as the institutions and structures that produced the then values can no longer be reformulated, more so when in the new nation states, the metropolitan societies have imposed new structures which are now global and beyond the ethnic boundaries of yesterday. Others have called for a synthesis of traditionalism and modernism or a gradual syncretism or gradual change. Yet others seem committed to a total modernism. In all of these what seems possible and even inescapable is a modernization of African and Third World societies but these require a deeper understanding of the institutions and values inherent in the older environment. The approach that best lends itself is that advocated by Dr.T. Uzodinma Nwala in his book, Igbo Philosophy:
I have underlined continuously-the african mind as the area to discover the ingenuity of the past and the key to remaking the future. However in it, the mind lies the discovery of where the disaster occurred a psychological damage in the resultant culture contact with the west, the disorientation and chaos of the African mind which has not been able to regain the capacity to objectify the crisis it is on, in order to create the values that can make for progress. To simply say we are in a crisis of values is merely an understatement. We must situate the crisis contextually, from the history and in the manner African societies saw and challenged progress. Values are in disarray and in the continued servitude in the colonial years and afterwards, even today, there has been no crystallization of ideology to remake the African societies more so with the breakdown of historical cultural ties. Individual ideas are in ascendancy and consensus has been destroyed. The ethnic nations that could cohere values and organization no longer exists and the structures left now for nation building lack legitimacy and in the struggle for existence there are no consensual ideas and values for integration and national strength. Clientelism and prebendalism is in the ascendancy with a political class that assumes leadership without a nation-state ethos and core leadership values; we cannot but recede further. Progress cannot but elude us still. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist, captured the mood correctly when he said:
That is only one end of the story. The other end is situated in how the values in African cultures stunt progress in an inherent manner. In a typical society, contingent situations and new problems do call for new solutions which may influence the existing order and ideas, through a societal internal dynamics of ensuring progress and change. But then there is always a proviso -the solutions must not be radical and revolutionary. Such ideas were always opposed. Upstarts, except where they prove exceptional in intelligence and wisdom or have proven themselves successful in farming, trading, war or oratory had little chance of acceptance. In fact, they would be regarded as deviants and social misfits. The societies still lie dormant in conservatism as if we still live in a stone age. Little wonder we can’t see how far back we are, in the old vehicles which can’t carry us into a modern age much as we cry for modernization. Change seems unsettling and uncomfortable. Old paradigms of a stable, unscientific world cannot do in an age so full of changes and where societal norms change so rapidly and societal bulwarks and historical ties have all given way. The minds are fixed on the past, as move forward in space and time. But yet more dangerous in the lack of transforming values to remake the society is the near irreparable damage to the African mind which is the tropical disease of underdevelopment caused by the fatal effects on the mental facilities through its dependent capitalism and structures, the final blow of colonialism. We must discover the african mind that build the empires, the great moats and ramparts and the pyramids. That mind atrophied alright but it can be resuscitated to its earlier heights and enervated from its decline through a carefully crafted programme of research into African’s philosophical thoughts and its underpinnings and evolving training in creative thinking and more importantly in lateral and generative thinking so critical in patterning, freedom, abstractions ability to conceptualise, to re-examine ideas, to restructure old ideas, to reject ideas intelligently or reshape new ideas-ideas that could create modern day visions and values to remake and generate Africa and enable her contribute her comparative share for human development and create those eternal values that shape human progress, mindful that we live in a world of cultural relativity and impermanence of values; in a world of stock-market values as civilizations and cultures meet and impact negatively or positively. CONCLUSION The study concludes that the key to recovering the African is by deconstructing his colonial experience, re-imbuing him with the strengths of yesterday’s myths and urging him to now use his culture as the matrix of constructing his future.
The copyright owners of this article is www.medwelljournals.net lambert Uyi Edigin This blog has the right to edit any foreign article for it to meet our ethics. |
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Sironka on stage |
Girl interrupted………..Justisfied?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Singer Maureen Nkhenya Milanai Sironka (formerly Maurysha) has been through slime but has come out smelling like a rose. She spoke to CAROLINE NYANGA about her music, romance, teenage and future plans
They say life is what you make it. And for the fast rising musician Sironka, it is about making it big as she heals from her emotional wounds.
Dressed in a short designer dress with matching shoes, beautiful Sironka opens up and confronts the ghosts that have been haunting her, including the rape ghost. The bubbling musician says she went through the rape ordeal when she was a teenager.
“I was abused by a close family member when I was 15,” she says, slowly. “I came home from school and went straight to the refrigerator to get a soda. Unknown to me, someone had adulterated it. As I took the soda, the relative, who was the only person in the house, gave me a wide smile. Little did I know that he was up to something.” She pauses as tears fill her eyes. She doesn’t wipe them as they roll down her cheeks. After a while, she continues.
Sironka passed out and upon waking up two hours later, she found herself in great pain and blood oozing from her private parts.
“It was pain, discomfort and blood. At that moment, it dawned on me that I had lost my virginity — to a close relative.”
Sironka says she was too scared to confront the relative, neither could she tell her mother what happened. For seven years, she managed to keep the dark secret to herself and only informed her mother a few weeks ago — long after the rapist left.
“The only two people I confided in were my grandmother (now deceased) and my first boyfriend when I turned 18,” she adds. Although Sironka managed to rise above the trauma, she despised men for a long time, especially during her teenage.
Relationship with Kenzo
In July 2008, Sironka met Kenzo. She was 19 and known as Maurysha while he was 26.
A few weeks down the line Kenzo introduced her to Ogopa Deejays where she recorded five songs which are yet to be released.
“I had just completed high school and looking forward to recording music.”
But with time, what started out as friendship slowly culminated into a relationship that attracted media attention.
The celebrity couple soon made headlines with their public show of love that left many pointing accusing fingers at Maurysha.
One article published in the press insinuated that Maurysha had a one-night stand with Kenzo’s friend-cum-label mate Trapee which saw the two separate for sometime.
But Sironka denies the rumours. “I never slept with Trapee. We were just close friends. At the time my affair with Kenzo was over although he did not admit it. Truth is, for the past many months we had nothing going on between us except putting up a show for the media.”
“One of my aunties called me early one morning morning accusing me of embarrassing the whole family. For months, I felt hopeless.”
But Sironka does not stop at that. She also apportions blame on Ogopa Deejays for not following up on the matter.
Life as Kenzo’s girlfriend
Sironka says that her relationship with Kenzo was full of ups and downs. Initially, she says, Kenzo could do everything for her. But he soon became possessive.
“He neither wanted me to walk alone nor socialise with fellow musicians. It was at that point that I realised I may have confused infatuation for love.”
Sironka reveals that at some point Kenzo ended up punching her oblivious of her health condition — she claims to be both asthmatic and epileptic. The beating resulted into me losing a three-week pregnancy at a local hospital. A gynaecologist confirmed it through an ultrasound.”
His words were: ” You must have hit yourself hard on the head and stomach which made you lose the foetus.”
Performing semi nude
The Ni Wewe singer once again found herself surrounded with controversy after a section of fans and critics present at her concert accused her of performing in a semi nude outfit.
Sironka had a short dress with only transparent black stockings underneath.
“I had worn black gipsy and stockings but the problem was a section of paparazzi who opted to concentrated on taking pictures of my body, more so from underneath focusing on my goodies as I danced on stage.”
Latest project
Apart from changing her name to Sironka – which she describes as a true African identity — she is currently working on a 12-track debut album The Black Rose. “I believe, despite all that I have been through, I have always been and will remain a rose.”
She has worked with Ogopa and R Kay.
Humble background
Sironka hailed from a humble family background where her mother Christina Katua, a teacher at IGCC was the sole breadwinner.
Sironka says although her real father is alive she doesn’t consider him her father.
Sironka who is also concentrating on her campaign against female circumcision says she hopes to be an inspiration to the girl-child.
The copyright owners of this article is www.standardmedia.co.k e caroline njenga
NB/. The author of this blog though not from Maasai community grew up in maasailand(NAROK)
This blog has the right to edit any foreign article for it to meet our ethics.
manyuirah
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