{UAH} The ‘Incest Barrier’ And What Africa’s Growing Army Of Fake Uncles, Aunties Means

The 'Incest Barrier' And What Africa's Growing Army Of Fake Uncles, Aunties Means

British comedian Lenny Henry does Comic Relief in Africa: He probably has thousands of children calling him "uncle" – with good reason, though it might perplex him.

SAY YOU ARE COMEDIAN LENNY HENRY, and you visit a primary school in Endaramatishorike near Narok in Kenya to do charity work for Comic Relief. It is your first visit, and you are attending a performance of the school choir. The children will greet you loudly; "Welcome uncle Lenny".

You go on to Uganda, to another primary school in Nakapiripirit, northern Uganda. As you arrive, the assembled children greet you in unison, "Welcome uncle Lenny".

Why do total strangers all of a sudden find themselves becoming aunts and uncles in Africa?

Well, it is part of what some people consider a bizarre phenomenon and has been happening in societies like Kenya, Uganda and, indeed, most of Africa over the last 30 years.

Young people now find they have to refer to men and women who are not blood relatives, and are only family friends, as "uncle" and "auntie". Newspaper columnists and talking heads on TV and FM radios have had a feast making fun of these seemingly senseless habits, and we have all joined in a good laugh.

Auntie Funke of the TV drama "Meet The Adebanjos": There are aunties and there are aunties in Africa today.

We have been too busy laughing to ask that simplest of questions: "Why are people doing it?"

The people who consider themselves "authentic" Africans like to boast about how one of the most valuable things we still have is our culture. These good people condemn "westernisation" and "cultural imperialism", which covers anything from wearing mini skirts, make-up, dancing to hip hop, and even wearing business suits.

In that authentic Africa your favourite aunt will spend 10 minutes explaining how the elderly man sitting across from you at the next table is your uncle, because he is the nephew of an uncle's second wife; that uncle who is an uncle because he is the cousin of the second child of the aunt who is the cousin of your uncle's cousin's third wife.

Where real blood relationships are taken so seriously, it is surprising that we didn't ask why someone who is otherwise a stranger could so easily become an aunt or uncle.

However, this uncle and auntie business is actually serious stuff. It suggests an important social evolution happening right under our noses. I am no social anthropologist, but I have noticed a few things that might help us understand the emergence of this new breed of aunts and uncles.

First, at least in Uganda (and also Kenya) where I have paid a little more attention and documented it, the evidence suggests that it started happening in the late 1970s, grew through the 1980s, and became normalised and widely accepted in the 2000s.

There was a good reason why. The 1970s was when Africa plunged in its first big post-independence crisis. The optimism of independence started to die out. Nearly everywhere on the continent single party dictatorships were rising as opposition politics was banned.

Refugee camps in Africa have been altering the concept of family and friendship (NMG photo)

The continent was also swept by a wave of military coups. The price of oil was skyrocketing, and that of commodities like copper, coffee, cotton, cocoa, from which most African countries earned the bulk of their revenues, were collapsing.

These political and economic difficulties set off Africa's first wave of exiles and economic refugees. They left behind jails that were filling up with political prisoners.

In the wider East African region, Uganda (under Idi Amin) and Ethiopia (under Mengistu Hailemariam), fell under particularly brutal military regimes that went on to all but destroy the middle classes in these countries.

Bankrupt governments could no longer provide subsidies, and public services like hospitals started to fall apart. In Uganda, the families led by mothers rose sharply as the men were killed or fled into exile.

For the first time since colonialism and independence, in most African countries families that were in trouble (with the male bread winner in prison or exile, and women still not participating in the formal economy the way they do today) found that the support and social safety nets provided by relatives and clan weren't enough.

These families needed to call on a resource that had never been tapped — family friends.

The Christian churches were the biggest charities, and the NGOs as we know them today — the Bill and Melinda Gates foundations of this world — were not in the picture then. The only other charities were foundations set up by rich Asian-African families like the sugar giants Madhivani in Uganda, who gave hundreds of scholarships to the "natives".

The experience of getting help from fellow Africans who weren't relatives was probably a strange one for us, and it seems the only way we could reconcile ourselves to it was to treat these people as family. And the only way we could make it work, beyond the occasional good act of kindness and without guilt, was to impose on them the obligation of relatives — hence aunts or uncles.

In Kenya, a different version of this kind of adaptation can be seen in what happened in the face of the increase of crime, insecurity, corruption and the proliferation of security guards. Security guards had, traditionally, been known as "askaris".

But there was something belittling in the name "askari" because it connoted a third rate lowly guard who didn't have the prestige of a real police officer. However, soon, to enter most offices, to be allowed into gated communities so you can beg for a favour from a relative, or to pass safely along deserted streets, Kenyans had to negotiate with askaris, not the police.

That shift in the balance of power meant that the askari needed to be treated with greater respect and made to feel important. Kenyans started by referring to them by a more flattering designation — "soldier".

But if the need for such coping strategies had stopped there, perhaps the aunt-uncle phenomenon would have eventually withered. However, the political and economic crisis, and social dislocation, soon overturned many aspects of culture that governed our societies.

In Uganda where the military regime targeted men, most men could not sit in the shop. They could not, in some cases, even sit in the front office of businesses they owned. Their wives or daughters took these positions.

But Ugandan women's greater visibility created by the need for men to hide didn't come with greater empowerment. It made them vulnerable prey to the new crop of marauding army officers and amoral businessmen who were growing very rich through their connections to the military.

In addition, in the extreme economic deprivation of that period, families were forced to make some "unAfrican" decisions. Thus to get a tender to supply something to a ministry, desperate parents were forced to let their daughters, and their wives, sleep with the major general who had the final say on the tender.

Kenyan soldiers in South Somalia; When the lowly security guards proliferated in Kenya and begun to hold sway, Kenyans bribed them so they can be nice – they called them "soldiers" (NMG photo)

Sometimes it was the only way to ensure that death squads controlled by powerful generals didn't come round to the house and murder them.

Similar developments have been reported from several African countries during that difficult period. With society turned upside down, soon the predatory sugar daddy and sugar mummy who were not bound by traditional moral codes, emerged.

The sugar daddy's and mummy's favourite hunting ground was (and remains) the universities. But some branched off into high and secondary schools. If you were tuned into the grapevine in Kampala, for example, you would hear stories of a rich friend going to a high school and sneaking off with a family's 16-year-old boy or girl for a holiday in the Seychelles.

If in the past families needed to see friends as relatives to justify seeking support from them and to subtly place on them an obligation to help; now there was a new need. They needed to see them as uncles and aunt in order to erect an "incest barrier" between them and the children.

If your little girl had to ask for help to get a job from a male family friend who is otherwise not related to her by blood, then perhaps he might be ashamed of sexually exploiting her if he was also an "uncle".

A billboard in Uganda warns of the evils and dangers of cross-generational sex: Everything to shame predatory men.

The ravage of AIDS of the last three decades also did its bit. In latter years it led to rampant cross-generational sex driven partly by the insane calculation that girls are a safer bet because they are less likely to be HIV positive. Maybe as a survival trick, our societies again saw the need to create a use of language that forced predatory men with money in their pockets to view small girls who weren't family with compassion. Thus in Uganda, we saw the use of uncle or aunt stretched further as a form of respectful address.

In addition to AIDS, the many conflicts in Africa left many people refugees and displaced, and here again it was not their families who came to their rescue. It was relief agencies. My sense is that in countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, South Sudan, most people's experience of "kindness" is from strangers in the form of humanitarian workers and the Red Cross, not real family. It is easy for transference to occur in such circumstances, in which the family that is there for you, the aunt who matters most, is the blonde Nordic woman who runs the UNHCR feeding station at your refugee camp.

So, something quite important has been going on here. It seems like what appears like a loose play with the meanings of aunt and uncle, is an attempt to negotiate new norms and cultures that will rebalance our lives in the towns, cities, and camps, where the good old traditional ways that held African societies together for centuries, no longer apply.

Of course, it will take a while longer before we all stop the jokes, and begin to appreciate that these fake uncles and aunts are not just another piece of modern African urban nonsense; they could very well be the Real Thing.

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http://nakedchiefs.com/2013/08/05/the-incest-barrier-and-what-africas-growing-army-of-fake-uncles-aunties-means/
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Gook
"What you are we once were, what we are  now you shall be!"
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