Simply Philile

I currently see no value in encouraging girls to preserve their virginity or ‘delaying sexual debut’ unless we are admitting to be a society that values abuse, inequality, discrimination and patriarchy.  There are just too many things that are wrong about encouraging girls (and not boys) about holding on to their virginity. I can only discuss a few of them within this limited space. Marriage? Firstly, remember Nqobile the 24 year old Masters graduate I spoke about a few weeks ago? Well, she ‘got saved’ at 14 years old and so decided it was a given that as a Christian, she would not have sex until she got married.  That’s the first problem for me – marriage. This speaks directly to attaching a female’s worth to sex; a sex object that should be guarded for sweet devouring by a man. This raises another problem, what are we saying to the lesbian girls who will not marry not because they are not interested in marrying a man but because they live in countries whe...

Earlier this week I woke up at 4a.m. and travelled over 600km to listen to young women speak about their struggles, victories, hopes and dreams for their future.  These young women aged between 13- 21 years shared important insights on shaping their futures; speaking about how they currently and in future should fit into community development, leadership, policy making and various other key areas of societal progress. However, at times it was quite difficult to listen to and digest what they were saying, not because I was too busy framing and re-framing English sentences to text a request for an extended column submission deadline to the editor of this newspaper, but because English is not our Africa mother.  Most of the girls, although confident in expressing their thoughts, struggled to do so effectively in English which they spoke in order to accommodate English speaking colleagues.  So maybe the girls’ messages were lost in translation at times. In ...