There is an old black-and-white picture of my dad (then in his youth) holding a lit stick of cigarette in his hand while puffing some smokes from his mouth. In the picture, my dad wears a crossed-belt on a well ironed packet shirt and a bongo-styled pair of trousers – that type that tightens around the knee/shin/calf region and widens at the ankle. With fully grown Afro-hair, he poses for the picture, his back and one of his legs resting on the wall of a building that looks like an old clubhouse.
Curiously, my dad was not a smoker neither was he a night-clubber; what then was the motivation for that posturing in the photograph?
Unfortunately, I didn’t remember to pose the above question to him before his passing (which meant that the motivation behind that idea of photography remained unknown to me for many years). It was not until I grew up to read more about the corrosive impacts of colonialism on the lifestyles of the African men that I was able to wrap my head around the inspiration behind that concept of photography by my dad.
Smoking – an unhealthy habit of inhaling and exhaling tobacco – became a fashionable thing in Africa only after the invasion of the continent by European colonial officials and merchants. It was white colonial workers or merchants who made people believe that it was a gentlemanly posture to stand by one corner of the streets (probably with legs crossed) to smoke and puff cigarettes. It was from watching these white colonial workers and merchants smoke cigars with a sense of pride that young impressionable Africans like my dad (back then) assumed that it was a stylish thing to pose with cigarettes in hand.
Because I understand the above fact – the damage done to Africa’s culture and values as a result of her colonial experience – I have been very hesitant in joining the bandwagon of accusers (majorly from Francophone Africa) who claim that former French/Spanish colonies in Africa have a culture of promiscuity or licentiousness.
The narrative that Francophone/ Hispanophone Africa have a promiscuous culture has been in existence for some decades but it was recently reignited by the saga involving one Baltasar Ebang Engonga from Equatorial Guinea whose illicit affairs with different women (video-recorded in tapes) were exposed in November. Coming from a former-Spanish colony, the embarrassing actions of Ebang reawakened the narrative about promiscuity being an acceptable way of life in former French/Spanish colonies like Benin, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Togo, Equatorial Guinea, etc. For instance, a popular hotelier in Port Harcourt by name Azubuike Ihemeje while reacting to the leaked sex-tapes wrote the following words on Facebook:
‘What happened in Equatorial Guinea is purely cultural. Panya people are known for their hedonistic promiscuity, they are not even bothered about those videos.’
Another Facebook User with the name: Christy Dimma Doris Ajuru, similarly posted in reaction to the same saga that ‘many Francophone Countries in Africa and Promiscuity are like 5 & 6’.
Commenting under Christy’s post, another user by name Joseph Nwachukwu added ‘Na today you just dey know? Spanish and French speaking country (sic) no send you for morality.’
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Also corroborating the above claims is Verydarkman – a popular Nigerian activist/critic – who while reacting to one of the leaked sex-tapes allegedly involving Ebang’s wife and another man said:
‘as a matter of fact, I am even hearing that it is a way of life in that place (referring to Equatorial Guinea). Maybe it is surprising to us Nigerians because all these things are like taboos to us.’
While the above allegation continues to spread across Africa, I am worried that most of us have not bothered to find out why such culture (if at all it exists) is peculiar to former French/Spanish colonies in Africa. I mean: it is only fair that before concluding that promiscuity is a norm in French/Spanish-speaking Africa, we should first ask whether such promiscuous culture is indigenous to our brothers from French/Spanish colonies or whether it was introduced to them during the disruptive period of colonialism in Africa.
The answer to the above poser isn’t far-fetched; there are an avalanche of studies showing how European colonists in Africa like France introduced ‘sex markets’ within their colonies in Africa where young African women were recruited and registered in brothels to attend to the libido of white expatriates. One of such studies which is published by the Digital Encyclopedia of European History claims as follows:
‘it (prostitution) was developed during the conquests of colonial territories, particularly near military barracks, in which colonized women were “made available” to soldiers. From 1831, in the newly-conquered territory of Algeria, prostitution was regulated with the creation of a distinct status for prostitutes, who were registered by the police, in addition to the establishing of dedicated locations, such as military campaign brothels (BMCs).’
Another study – ‘Colonialism and Sex Work in French North Africa’ – conducted by Catherine Phipps (a PhD student at the Oxford University) shares the story of Germaine Aziz, a woman who was sold to a brothel at the age of 17, registered as a sex worker by the French authorities and sexually exploited for many years by her Spanish madams at the brothels with the support of the French colonial police who made it impossible for her to escape from the brothel.
There are a thousand of such works which expose the role played by African colonisers in polluting Africa’s moral values, including the books: The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi by Luise White, and Nwando Achebe’s Female King of Colonial Nigeria: Ahebi Ugbabe.
When legendary Writer, Chinua Achebe, asserted that the white man ‘has put a knife on the things that held us together’, this was part of what he wanted to expose – the displacement of the African original value system by colonial intrusion.
To the best of my knowledge, the original/unadulterated African culture abhors sexual immorality. The untainted African culture preaches sexual purity for the unmarried (virginity) and condemns adultery among the married (particularly sleeping with people’s wives).
Forget the licentious lifestyle that the likes of Awilo Longomba and Dr. Sakis (musicians from Congo – a French-speaking African state) portrayed in their musical videos in the 90s and early 2000s. It does not represent the indigenous African way of life; it rather represents Africa’s attempt to replicate the mainstream pop culture introduced to her through colonialism (of course, the disco urban nightlife culture is one of the vestiges of colonial intrusion of Africa).
If there is a culture that the recent embarrassing sex scandal involving Ebang Baltasar portrays, it is a manifestation of a loose moral culture that was planted many years ago in Africa by colonisers like Spain and France.
