Oppressive Traditions Must Be Challenged in the Home First

By Kumari Kimendhri Pillay

Most children simply are not empowered enough to make others around them—especially their parents and other adults—aware of their innermost feelings. This is often due to fear of being hit or shouted at with ugly words that tend to leave lasting negative impres-sions, such that these children know not to speak of their emotions to these adults (and others) ever again.

Poststructural theorist Michael Foucault claims that we are never without power. We may be able to apply this theory to women who could lobby for their own rights but with children this theory appears steadily unsteady. As a little girl (and even now) for some reason I loved the colour blue and was disgusted at the colour pink. I did not feel comfortable but was afraid to tell my mother. I thus had to endure years of having a room with a pink colour scheme. Did she decide this colour scheme on her own just to annoy me or show me who is boss? Absolutely not; Mum was merely adhering to a “timeless” tradition that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. Thus the first step towards alternative parenting or a feminist way of raising children is to avoid decision-making based on traditionalist thought that denies children the right to object to such decisions and in turn leaves them feeling disempowered.

The above example of colour preference requires further unpacking. Another reason why Mother did not ask me for my colour preference was also probably due to my being female; had I been male she would have to some extent consulted me about the colour scheme of my room. In fact, she admitted that had I been a boy, she would have been so happy (perhaps happy enough to let me choose my own colour scheme?). For his part, my dad reinforced this by welcoming my “boyish” habits and taking great interest in my karate and sporting activities that eventually faded as I grew up and suddenly sought to be more “feminine”. He also once remarked that I would have had a good excuse not to be domestically inclined had I been a boy.

According to Marxist theory, as soon as a thesis is created an antithesis already exists even without it being articulated. True enough, I soon began to feel discomfort over this gender inequity issue at home. My parents may not have realised it at that time but I started to dislike my circumstances, and in my misery I attempted to find an alternative view of the gender issue. This led me to hope and believe that gender equity was obtainable but still I was uncertain about how to make it a reality.

I think that gender equity should begin in the private space of the home. Attempting to initiate gender equity in the public sphere such as the work place is a mission that could encounter many difficulties, as existing mindsets may be unchangeable.

One could argue that gender equity in the home should be the equally shared responsibility of both parents. In a patriarchal society (like most societies) it is often the women who are chiefly responsible for child rearing. While insisting that their husbands play a more active role in child rearing, and even forcing them to do it, women should also consider that being principally responsible for child care could be an opportunity for them to inculcate gender equity right at the start. Maybe the problem is that women often unwittingly succumb to traditional methods of rearing their children, which includes instilling in them gender inequity belief systems. Women thus need to begin such a process of positively transforming their families by questioning their own belief systems and the amount of gender inequity it contains. They should then attempt to rectify any gender inequity at home by a slow and deliberate process making the family understand why there is change as well as the need for it.

As an alternative to what some children would call boring lectures from their parents, the parent or mother could merely make subtle changes in the home as well as in the manner in which the family is governed politically. These might include the recognition that sons and daughters enjoy equal status and rights, bearing in mind however that age groups should be differentiated (for instance, a 13-year-old boy should definitely not have all the same rights as his 5-year-old sister and vice versa).

Another situation that definitely poses a problem is when the mother accords the father a higher status than the children (and herself) and treats him accordingly. This immediately sets the pattern of gender inequity in the family, encouraging the children to believe that the male position in a household is higher and more rewarding than a female position. Sometimes it is the mother who punishes or shouts at her children when they question statements or actions by their father that have to do with gender imbalances (or balances).

Unfortunately, growing up in apartheid South Africa did not encourage one to acknowledge similarities and equity amongst people. Instead, apartheid promoted differences and inequity. Apartheid was premised on the belief that we are different from the others (due to the various racial groups in the country) and should thus acknowledge these differences ourselves, no doubt with the government’s assistance. This celebration of difference also emphasised other differences such as that between genders. These social structures undoubtedly supported the status quo like most social structures in the world and are often promoted by their own governments.

Another concern of alternative parenting is to know and if possible watch the television programmes that your child watches. I was not really a fan of the soap series Loving, but I remember watching it ardently as that was the programme that was watched in almost every home, including ours, when I was a little girl. I eventually began to hate soap operas after I questioned myself about the type of programmes I really wanted to watch. Children could be viewing unhealthy programmes that promote gender inequity thus allowing it into your home even without your help. Sometimes the television role models the children look up to are sexist characters, whether domineering men or submissive women. Rather than prevent the children from watching these programmes, parents should initiate informal discussions about these characters and promote a critical attitude in the children when viewing television.

By all means steer your children away from beauty pageants or baby competitions. Many mothers like to enter their daughters into these pageants, which can have negative effects on the latter. The children could become competitive first about their looks, later advancing to other aspects and levels of competitiveness. They soon become excessively self-conscious and always looking for approval about their looks from others.

Being of Indian origin also proved to be somewhat of a traumatising experience for me. Traditional Indian culture holds that a woman’s beauty lies in her hair that was to be preferably long and straight. As a young girl I felt so inferior due to my curly, frizzy hair and our mother’s insistence that my sister and I keep our hair very short. My only option at that time was to begin to grow my hair as soon as I could maintain it myself. I grew my hair long and even learned how to straighten it with a hair dryer during my early teens. Years later I realised that I really prefer short hair as it is more manageable and better suited to my lifestyle and features even though my tradition states otherwise. It is the parent’s duty to unpack these restrictive traditions, as it could result in greater spiritual freedom for their children.

Children thus need to be freed from such traditions that promote gender inequity. There is hope, and no doubt an absolute need, not only for feminist parents but all parents world-wide to initiate a process of alternative parenting that will create adults who will in turn practice healthy alternative parenting without much effort.

Kumari Kimendhri Pillay was born in 1979 in Durban, South Africa and grew up “in the heat of the oppressive apartheid system.” Of Indian origin, she is a gra-duate of Indian classical dance, Bharata Natyam, hence the title “Kumari.” She obtained her BA Music degree as well as her Honours in Contemporary Dance and Choreography at the University of Natal-Durban. While working as a researcher, she is currently studying for a masteral degree in Education and Community Development also at the same university.

Women Have to Cope as AIDS, Economic Woes Afflict Zambia

By Jack Zimba and Benedict Tembo

The HIV/AIDS pandemic is taking its toll; unemployment is soaring. Husbands are fleeing from home, and women have to fend for their children. This is the glum scenario taking place in many African countries south of the Sahara.

When Chuckie Kasoka married her husband 11 years ago, it was a time of joy. She never imagined that one day she would have to stand up to the challenges of life alone as a single parent, with five children to raise.

“When you get married, it is a time of joy and you don’t have time to think about any negatives; you don’t think about separation or divorce. I never thought that he would die and leave me, I thought that we would die together in a car crash someday... or something,” Chuckie says.

“It wasn’t even on my mind,” says Towela Banda, who is separated from her husband. “When you enter marriage you think everything will be just okay.” Towela was married to her husband for two years and is now raising their two-year-old son.

For Edna Lungu, 70, having brought up 12 children—eight boys and four girls—appeared to be a big blessing because she looked forward to being looked after by her children some day. Her husband, a truck driver, died when she was 60.

And then all her 12 children were wiped out by the dreaded HIV/AIDS. Today, Edna is all by herself, a sad grandmother of 20 grandchildren—whom she has to look after by meeting their school needs and other basic necessities. She has to pay rent for the one-bedroom house she occupies in a sprawling compound in Lundazi, a town almost 700 kilometres from Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.

After being forced out of school by a man who promised to marry her, Veronica Nsama has sampled the harsh reality of life. Her husband, an accountant with one of the international banks in Lusaka, just abandoned her with three children to live with a girlfriend in one of the townships. He does not support her at all.

Chuckie, Towela, Edna and Veronica are not alone in this situation. Many women have found themselves saddled with the unenviable task of being the family’s sole breadwinner following the demise of either their husband or children, or just the abandonment by somebody else of the responsibility of looking after their own children.

For most women, being a single parent is not something they dreamed of or planned to be. They were forced into it by circumstances over which they had little or no control. Although there are various reasons that lead to single-parenthood, such as separation, divorce, death or indeed just the absence of marriage—nowadays more young women are having children by men they never get married to—the challenges that these women face are the same.

Still, in Zambian society, you are better off having a child than not having any because people think there could be something seriously wrong with you. Being single is even worse because married women are always suspicious of single women.

The advent of non-governmental organisations headed by women has seen society changing its perception of single women, because some successful women in society are single and are role models.

Even then, single women are still generally distrusted. They get little respect from their colleagues while their children are scorned in school. In Zambian society it is quite difficult for a single mother to get married.

If being a mother is a great and challenging responsibility, then being a single mother is an even greater and more challenging responsibility.

“It is like carrying two buckets of water on your head, with no one to help you,” says Towela under a deep thoughtful sigh when asked about her experience as a single mother. Towela has trained to be a secretary but she just cannot get employed anywhere because there are no jobs. And so because she cannot support herself and her son, she moved in to stay with her brother.

In a country like Zambia where the un-employment rate is soaring, especially among women, and where 85 percent of the population live in abject poverty—surviving on a meagre US$1 a day—single mothers face an uphill battle in raising their children.

“It’s difficult to manage. You need two people who are working to lighten the burden for each other,” says Chuckie, who is also unemployed.

But even then, Zambia’s number of households headed by females is rising steadily due to factors such as HIV/AIDS and poverty. Currently, such households account for about 24 percent of a total 1.9 million households—the figure was 16 percent in 1996 and 22 percent in 1998.

The number of divorced or widowed females is at 15 percent.

Since being widowed, Chuckie says, “I had to be a father and mother at the same time...it is very difficult being what you are not.” The positive aspect is that “women have now learnt to stand on their own, unlike in the past when they had to depend on their husbands for virtually everything, so they would rather be on their own than with an abusive husband.”

With the spread of HIV/AIDS in the mid-1980s, there has been a sharp increase in the number of single-parented households, most of them run by women (widows) whose husbands have died of the disease.

The AIDS pandemic has had a huge impact on the Zambian family and social set-up. With one in every five persons infected with the deadly virus and about 300 people being decimated daily—mostly breadwinners of house-holds—the women have been left with the responsibility of taking over as the family head. They face an even greater challenge in looking after a dying child, as is the common trend.

Melina Zulu, in the Eastern Province of Zambia lost her husband to AIDS a couple of years ago. Herself battling the disease, she also has to fend for her two sickly, malnourished children aged two and four. But with the current acute food shortages, life is unbearable for her.

“Life is easier for a single person than for a single mother...because if you are single, you only think about yourself but as a single mother, you have other people to think of as well,” she says.

In a society that still upholds its traditional values, single parenthood is still something frowned upon by many. Women, especially those who bear children outside marriage, are still victims of old stereotypes. “They all think that I was a naughty girl. But I was gone from home on business, and only for three months, when he decided to leave me,” Towela says.

What exactly goes on the mind of a single mother?

“There is so much asking of the ‘--why’ question; why did it have to happen to me, why at that time...sometimes I wish I had never gotten married,” says Chuckie.

Asked whether she wanted to get married again, Towela just chuckled, as if the whole suggestion was completely absurd and laughable. “No,” she says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to go through what I went through again, I would rather remain the way I am...it’s better.”

There is yet another women’s sector whose interests have not been addressed. Although a lot has been discussed at seminars and conferences and written in popular and academic literature on the problems and roles of women, very little attention has been given to the challenges and roles of older women as heads of household.

The older women are a fast growing population group in Zambia as well as in other parts of Africa In 1990 there were 93,120 women aged 65 years and older and 123,076 older men in Zambia. Demographic projections show that this number is expected to increase to 152,221 in the year 2010. In 1990 about 37 percent of the older women or 32,605 were heads of the country’s households.

The majority of these women had low educational levels, no employment, little or no income and were living below the poverty line.

On the other hand, the extended family—comprising the adult children, spouse and other relatives, which is the primary social unit for looking after older people—is weakening because of industrialisation, urbanisation, mass education, social and economic pressures.

Some of the older women are complaining that their adult children have abandoned them and are not giving them the respect, love, affection, and support that they expect.

Some adult children, on the other hand, complain of the economic pressures they are experiencing and that some requests for help are beyond what they can afford.

“Research tells us that while the majority of the older women may be very poor, they still have to play several different roles,” says Dr Martin Kamwengo, a lecturer in Gerontology at the University of Zambia.

They provide care to the sick in the household and the community. They mind the children and act as surrogate mothers to orphans. They settle conflicts and disputes. They are reservoirs of knowledge about family and community history, childbearing and childcare, herbal medicine.

Hunger is one of the challenges facing older women in the southern African region, says Dr Kamwengo. According to the latest statistics, over half of the districts in Zambia are reported to be facing starvation. The worst hit households are those headed by older women.

Another serious problem for them is HIV/AIDS.

“As more and more adult children fall sick or die from AIDS, aged parents take on new roles, responsibilities, and relationships,” Dr Kamwengo points out. “They become income earners, guardians, and caregivers especially of their adult children who are ill. AIDS-related deaths are increasing rapidly: there were 25,000 in 1990, and are expected to reach 211,000 in the year 2010.”

The disease is affecting the elderly women as mothers, grandmothers, care-givers and as sexually active individuals. They provide care to the sick adult children, spouses and other relatives in the house and in the community. They look after the orphans whose parents have died. During the time they care for the sick, no economic activities take place in the household and as a result families become poorer. “Further-more, most of the household resources are spent on medical bills and, later, funerals,” explains Dr. Kamwengo.

While looking after the sick they get exposed to opportunistic infections and body fluids of the infected people. In this way they risk contracting HIV. As they see their children and those around them die, they become lonely and isolated.

Explanations can be many for the current scheme of things in many Third World countries, but the more plausible reason for single-parent households, disease, and unemployment is that governments have not invested in people. Many leaders in these countries have amassed tremendous wealth at the expense of their people.

For instance, it has been difficult to contain HIV/AIDS because of mass poverty. Young girls are forced into prostitution because their parents cannot feed and dress them well enough. On the other hand, many men have taken advantage of the situation by leaving their homes to cohabit with single women who are either unemployed or are underpaid.

Proposed solutions include enacting legislation that would ban streetism and meting out harsh jail sentences to people who infect their lovers with HIV/AIDS. The solutions have been put forward but the people’s leaders are half the time corrupt and unwilling to act on the situation.

Benedict Tembo is deputy production editor, and Jack Zimba is a sub-editor, at the Zambia Daily Mail.

At Home with the Struggle

By Sarah Raymundo

It is a humid Wednesday afternoon. After welcoming me, Ka Nere suggests moving next door to a day-care centre packed with kids reciting Filipino nursery rhymes. At the back, a spiral staircase leads to a room with two computers and an excellent view of the neighbourhood’s galvanised-iron roofs. Ka Nere, a plump, good-natured woman of fifty wearing an oversized shirt and an unusually disarming smile, calls this place her office. It has also been her home in more ways than one.

The Faces of Women
Nere Guerrero is the national chairperson of Samahan ng Malayang Kababaihang Nagkakaisa (SAMAKANA), a militant organisation of urban poor women in the Philippines. Since it was formed in 1986, the organisation has taken the lead in articulating the situation of the poor in the slums of Metro Manila, and in fighting for their rights and gaining access to affordable housing, jobs, health services, etc. As part of the national democratic movement for social justice, SAMAKANA situates gender and class issues within a concrete historical context (i.e., the Philippine semifeudal mode of production as the social base of monopoly capitalism). It is necessary, Ka Nere explains, to understand the specificity of women’s experience in a Third World society.

“In particular, rural women suffer from a heightened militarisation programme in the countrysides. On account of our role in keeping the family intact, state violence of this kind has had a heavier impact on wives and mothers who lose their husbands or children along with their homes. In the same vein, urban poor women agonise when their homes are violently demolished by city authorities. Nowadays, we don’t only take charge of the household budget and childcare. We are forced to earn a living too—washing clothes, giving manicures, peddling, care-giving, dressmaking, mat-weaving.”

Ka Nere stresses the importance of comprehending patriarchy as a historical phenomenon that articulates itself in different historical periods. Rather than taking women’s work as an indication of their improved social status, she sees it as a corollary of an amplified sexual division of labour that serves to alleviate the severe crisis of global capitalism. More women are finding jobs primarily because mass lay-offs have created a huge reserve army of cheap and docile labour.

The Making of a Mass Leader
With pride and passion, and yet with a certain casualness, Ka Nere traces the interplay of history and society in her own development as a worker, mother and activist.

“I had not always been a part of the women’s movement. I used to work in a tire factory. It was there that I first became aware of being exploited, as a worker.” As a union official, she realised the decisive role of the working class in constructing a society released from the violence of hunger, among other things.

Meanwhile, finding herself jobless after the factory closed down, Ka Nere had to spend most of her time at home, immersed in the daily routine of an urban poor community. Then came another realisation: “When I finally settled as a full-time housewife, I found out that one cannot dissociate the problems of the community from those that have to do with the factory. These two are connected because at the end of the day, workers are the inhabitants of the community’s impoverished urban spaces.”

The urban poor community in this light ceases to be in the realm of the private sphere. Rather, it is a symptom of uneven development that results in the lack, if not the eradication, of secure jobs and permanent settlement areas. Space in this context is not fixed but contested; it is not passive but a potent terrain where impoverished men and women fight with stakes in the class struggle.

Blurring the Line Between ‘Private’ and ‘Public’
A proud mother of five adults, Ka Nere recalls how she was able to manage the home while at the height of her involvement in union organising.

“My husband and I would leave home for work in the morning. But before leaving, I would make a list of reminders. Notes like ‘Here’s your allowance for the day’, ‘Your food is ready, you just have to cook the rice’ were prominently posted on the toilet door. I would ask my sister who lives nearby to look after the kids while I was at work.”

Ka Nere’s daily routine continued even when the factory workers eventually decided to go on strike. This time, she would leave home to take her place at the picket line. The strike ended after two years and three months, but Ka Nere lost her job.

“At a young age, my children already understood what unemployment meant for them. They would tell me: ‘Nanay (Mother), please go back to work since we hardly drink milk any more.’ They missed the nice food that I used to be able to afford from time to time. My husband’s wages as a family driver were not enough to pay for our daily expenses.”

Apart from the financial difficulty, Ka Nere also felt restless at home after having done all her chores. It was the political work she missed the most. So when she got the chance, she joined the Concerned Women’s League (which later became SAMAKANA).

“At the start, I would sneak out just so I could attend those seminars together with the other women in our community. I would leave soon after my husband left for work. As usual, I’d ask my sister to look after the children. I told the seminar facilitator that I would have to leave at four o’ clock, in order to get home ahead of my husband. But at times, he would arrive earlier than me, so eventually I had to let him know about my involvement. From then on he would nag me, saying: ‘You are never around. Aren’t you supposed to take care of the children? You were at the picket line for two years, haven’t you learned your lesson yet?”

In her seminal work The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir wrote that in a patriarchal culture, “the colonisation of women by men is veiled by ideology. Women see themselves as the ‘other’ to men who are the ‘one.’ In order to attract the attention of, and endear themselves to, the ‘one,’ women disempower themselves unknowingly.”

Ka Nere, however, refuses to be disempowered. Many times, she would stop her husband’s reproaches with an unyielding rebuttal: “I have to be involved in the women’s movement because as a woman, I need to know my rights.”

This statement demonstrates how inseparable political causes are from personal aspirations. For activists like Ka Nere, the point is not to strike a balance between personal fulfilment and social commitment. The bifurcation is a consequence of the division of labour under capitalism that has given rise to the cult of the autonomous individual conferred with the freedom of choice. But social conditions reveal that the cult of the individual is nothing more than the brotherhood of the male bourgeoisie. The exclusion of women is expressed by the cult of domesticity that requires all classes of women to be mothers and wives in order to realise their essence. Moreover, women of the working class and of the Third World confront both racism and class exploitation. This is why a feminist like Delia Aguilar insists on “the urgency of attending to the relations of production on the home front with parallel revolutionary zeal and commitment.”

Empowered by this revolutionary ideal, Ka Nere deemed it necessary to reconcile her family life with the political work in the women’ s movement.

“After losing my job in the factory, I had to make my children understand that employment is not a matter of choice. I lost my job because the times are harder. And even if I didn’t, we would have been in dire financial straits just the same.”

Like a lot of women, Ka Nere also went through a trying episode in her life that made her question her capacity as mother and activist.

“My son got into drugs when he was in high school. I started blaming myself, thinking that I hadn’t been a good mother to my children. Something like this happened because I was always away doing political work.”

The ideology of the family as internalised by women causes them to feel responsible for every crisis that besets the family. As an activist, Ka Nere does not claim to have easily exorcised herself of the “lived experience of motherhood”—an ideology that feminises childcare and household work. She had to go through the difficult process of understanding the many factors that could have led to her son’s drug addiction. After all, substance abuse is less a result of dysfunctional households or a practice of adventurous youth (according to psychologism that normalises it and precludes political and economic factors) than of the highly profitable criminal activities of drug syndicates conniving with state agencies.

At this crucial point in her life, Ka Nere relates how the women’s movement gave full support to her family by providing counselling and rehabilitation. This was how she eventually gained a more comprehensive view of family life and the women’s movement.

Unleashing Women’s Power Through the Dialectic of Gender and Class
Tempered by the hardships of domestic responsibilities, gendered proletarian experiences and an unwavering commitment to the women’s movement for national liberation, Ka Nere reflects upon her struggles with a sober yet forthright dignity.

“My children did not pay attention to my political activities when they were younger. Now that they are older, they tend to display their concern and subtle disapproval. They worry about the hazards of marching in the streets. But I assure them that it is fairly safe and that comrades do take care of each other during rallies. Now that most of them have families of their own, I can attend seminars that last for days! After all these years, I can sense that my husband must have finally recognised the urgency of my cause. We no longer argue over the meetings and conferences I have to attend. Now he merely asks how long I’m going to be away.”

Not even arthritis could stop her from being at the forefront in mass mobilisations: “All I need is an acupuncture treatment, and I’m on my way!”

For Ka Nere, political commitment is not just an act of good citizenship. Neither does she romanticise political involvement as a selfless act on the part of the activist. She deems it as no less than women’s work that is an extension of her role in the family. As Flaudette May Datuin puts it, “The home necessarily extends to many sites—the house, and its interiors, the household and its everyday rituals of self-maintenance, the factories, offices, churches, picket lines, schools, halls of Congress, the theatre, stages, the streets.”

This position challenges the liberal-feminist notion that work liberates women. As bell hooks argues, this belief alienates working-class women because “they know from their experiences that work was neither personally fulfilling nor liberatory—that it was for the most part exploitative and dehumanising.”

The same line of reasoning is amplified in Ka Nere’s own experience.

“To my husband’s surprise, I managed to secure a job in a garments factory after a few years without work. He would joke that because I was known to be assertive and a ‘subversive,’ no employer would take me in. He was wrong. But then again, I stayed on the job for only four months because of the terrible working conditions and the horrible repression of worker’s rights. My coworkers, mostly women, were resigned to the idea that nothing was worse than not having a job. I really wanted to fight but most of us were newly-hired contractuals, so that any form of opposition would get us fired. So I left my job.”

But doing so did not deprive her of valuable and productive work. Since then, she has worked full time in the women’s movement.

Ka Nere’s home is where the struggle is. It is not a piece of appropriated territory enclosed by makeshift walls. Home is where she finds herself fighting for all mothers, husbands, sons, daughters and grandchildren rendered homeless by a system that accepts oppression as “natural” but, as well, breeds unyielding resistance to it.

Sarah Raymundo teaches at the Department of Sociology, College of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of the Philippines (UP), Diliman. She is also the Secretary-General of the UP chapter of the Congress of Teachers and Educators for Nationalism and Democracy.

Works Cited:
Delia Aguilar. 1991. “Politics of Family Life.” In Marjorie Evasco (ed.), Filipino Housewives Speak. Manila: Institute of Women’s Studies, St. Scholastica’s College.
Simone de Beauvoir. 1953. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf.
Flaudette May Datuin. 2002. Home, Body, Memory: Filipina Artists in the Visual Arts, 19th Century to the Present. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.
bell hooks. 1984. Feminist Theory From Margins to Center. Boston: South End
Press.

Extended Families Wane as Group Parenting Vanishes in Zambia

By Benedict Tembo

The proliferation of orphanages and the unprecedented increase of street kids demonstrate how Zambian society has broken up due to the harsh economic climate and “westernisation” which has seen most citizens lose social responsibility and abandon group parenting.

Iwake Masialeti, a lecturer in Geography at the University of Zambia, remembers how he was brought up as a child in the country’s Western Province.

He recalls that in his childhood, group or communal parenting was very strong. Typically, all village elders were responsible for looking after all the children. For instance, an elder was free to assign chores to any child without having to consult the latter’s biological parents.

“If you had a child, you were not the only one responsible for instilling moral values in that child,” Masialeti says. All adults were aware of their obligation to teach the children of their relatives to become good members of the community.

Only the father and mother lived in the house with their youngest child. Boys and girls older than six lived with their peers until they got married.

Men hunted, brought firewood, herded cattle and performed jobs that were considered to be tough while women drew water from the wells for drinking and bathing for their children and husbands. Women also did the cooking for all the men, girls, boys and everybody else in the village. People were encouraged to eat together, sharing whatever food they had.

Boys were encouraged to be with their fathers to learn life skills such as hunting and carpentry. Every evening, after the day’s work, the male folk met at the insaka—a traditional rendezvous—where they shared knowledge in herding animals, hunting, fishing, agriculture and carpentry. Young men preparing to get married were also taught family values during the insaka sessions.

Meanwhile, the women had their own ichibwanse (a traditional gathering of women where they meet to discuss various issues)—where they shared wisdom and skills and prepared young girls for womanhood through initiation ceremonies.

When a child was born, naming it was not a monopoly of the mother and father only. Uncles and grandparents were also expected to participate in giving the child an appropriate name.

Traditionally, all children born in an extended family were treated equally. A father’s brother would be called Father, too; a mother’s sister was also considered Mother. Orphans were looked after by the extended family.

In the village of Vava, the entire community contributed in cash or in kind to help send Mark Banda to secondary school. Mark was the first boy from the village to be admitted to secondary school, and his success was considered a victory for all. Everybody was sure that if he did well and got a good job as a result, he would inspire others and be able to help the community.

Thus, in the past, streetchildren were unheard of in Zambia. So were orphanages, which dot the country today.

“Group parenting is not widely practised anymore nowadays,” observed Joseph Mwenya, a lecturer in Agri-culture at the University Of Zambia. The society has become much more cash-oriented, he said, pointing to the harsh economic climate which has forced people to run away from close family relationships and become independent.

Formal education also had a role to play in decimating the traditional family. Educated individuals abandoned the extended family arrangement, reducing their families to father, mother and children. Furthermore, it is no longer common, as it was in the past, for people to renew family ties by visiting their home villages. “Now this tendency has almost stopped. Basically, what has happened is that people want to have a nuclear family, limiting their concern to that,” according to Mwenya.

Ignatius Bwalya, a teacher, noted that the nuclear-family concept has spread even to villages whose populations have shrunk significantly.

Masialeti agreed with Bwalya that most villages today are not as strong as they were. “They are not as cohesive as they used to be simply because people who had that knowledge are dead,” he declared. The skills which young people were taught in the past have now become irrelevant because of westernisation.

Many children now live on the streets, Masialeti said, because people are poor and no longer willing to feed extra mouths. “They have lost social responsibility,” he remarked.

Asher Phiri, an artist, thinks that street kids are a result of the lack of group parenting, recalling that in the past, when a father died, an uncle would take over the obligation of raising his children. “Today, the tendency is to be responsible only for one’s nuclear family,” he said.

With society seemingly going western, some concerned Zambians have formed institutions to revive the idea of group parenting. For example, Phiri is a committee member of the International Association of Theatre for Children and Young People, which seeks to contribute to group parenting by creating a vibrant national theatre movement for children and young people. The group acknowledges social responsibility towards vulnerable children and youth.

Another such group is Alangizi, whose task is to educate would-be brides about marriage. Members of Alangizi have been going around the country to sensitise people on the need to restore their rich cultural traditions. When they started, there was resistance but people have begun appreciating the existence of the organisation.

The success of Alangizi stimulated the emergence of Boy Power, with basically the same objectives. For a start, Boy Power has just launched some radio programmes to attract listeners before embarking on tours in secondary schools and colleges where they hope to establish a constituency.

But all this is not enough when one considers the lost family values which could in fact have been the best solution to the problem of orphanages and street children resulting from the high death rate that has been accelerated by the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

With the HIV/AIDS epidemic almost un-stoppable and the economy getting harsher by the day, Zambians will do well to re-embrace group and community parenting to reduce the number of orphanages and street children. Prevention being better than cure, group parenting should be considered as one effective shield against the HIV/AIDS menace.

Benedict Tembo is Deputy Production Editor at the Zambia Daily Mail, one of the country’s mass circulation dailies.