Editor,

RE: "Akiwacu’s bikini controversy” (The New Times, December 2).

I am no fan of beauty pageants, even though my position on the matter has nothing to do with prudery or any false claims that it is un-African or immoral.

The fact is, however, that almost all beauty pageants involve very skimpily dressed young girls strutting on the catwalk. If Rwandans don’t want their girls having to show their almost naked bodies on stage, then they should close down those pageants and not put into them all that heavy effort and give them the kind of attention we see year in year out.

But what business is it of anyone else to tell young, but adult girls (or young men, if it comes to that), what they can dress in and what they cannot?

Mwene Kalinda

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I have a feeling that part or our society is still ultra-conservative. You can even feel that when you hear parliamentarians, especially ladies, commenting on how our young ladies should live. We Rwandans should know in which century we are in today.

Older generation should not expect the younger ones to embrace some of the values they learned when they were young in the 1930s or even try to force them to grow the way they grew up in those days. They are growing up in a totally different era with different realities and trying to force them to live another lifestyle is futile because culture is dynamic.

1930s norms and values are not only unknown to them but they also find them to be strange, too restrictive, unattractive and obsolete.

Coming back to the beauty pageant event, why should we send Miss Rwanda to compete in a modern world and expect her to take with her a baggage full of Rwandan norms and values of the 1930s and tell the judges as follows? "You know guys, I come from the country of thousand hills called Rwanda, you are not going to rate me based on your criteria. Here are the values and norms you have to rate me on: in Rwanda, bikinis are a taboo and, therefore, please exempt me from wearing them during this contest”.

I am not very young myself but even if I was an ultra-conservative Rwandan, I would at least remember the following local (Kinyarwanda) proverb: "When you go to the land where they eat flies, you eat them raw”.

We should instead congratulate Miss Akiwacu for representing Rwanda at the international scene instead of criticising her.

Seth