Focus: Retrogressive practices impeding socio-economic development

Light skinned and healthy, a lady stands in a queue at Kigali Central hospital. Her face reads impatience and confusion. It is obvious that she is in dire for an immediate solution to her predicament. It doesn’t take much prodding for Florence Mukabutera to confess her problem. Unknown to her, she is one of many victims of a retrogressive culture still prevalent in modern Rwanda. Florence is a victim of ‘Ibyabaramu’. Loosely translated, ‘Ibyabaramu’ refers to the ‘share’ or right a male family member believes they have over a woman married into the family and her relatives. The woman and any relatives she happens to live with in her marital home are obligated to accept any sexual advances made by any of the male members of the family. Five years ago, Florence, having been raised as a ‘proper, culture upholding’ girl had sexual relations with her brother in law. Something within her ached anytime it happened but she couldn’t for the life of her dare complain. She was silence by the fear of breaking culture, and being deemed an outcast. Now at 31 year and HIV positive, she wishes she had refused to take part in the practice that has now sealed her fate and seemingly determined her destiny. As she cues at the hospital for her monthly anti retroviral drugs, the memories of her sister’s death still linger vividly on her mind. Both her sister and her husband (with whom she had slept) had succumbed to Aids. It was just a matter of time before she did too. Mukabutera did these things not because she loved the sister’s husband, but because she respected her culture and the elders who were always by her side in making decisions. “I always took it a taboo to reject my culture, I wish I had known earlier that I would get exposed to HIV,” she lamented. “Cultural practices have been neglected by almost all organisations concerned with public awareness and sensitisation against HIV/Aids in Rwanda,” complained Grace Mukankuranga, HIV/Aids specialist with Oxfam GB. This has unfortunately posed a threat of the HIV epidemic which is spreading rapidly. Culture is often defined as ‘the learned and shared attitudes, values and ways of behaving’. As the State of the World Report 2008 aptly stated, ‘culture is created by people’, and therefore only they can change it. It continues to state that, ‘only they can decide whether cultural practices impede or promote the realisation of human rights’. Ibyabaramu is one of many cultural practices that impede the realisation of human rights and at the same time, spread HIV and other sexually transmitted infections. Unless this and all other retrogressive practices are stamped out, Rwanda and Africa as a whole will continue to lag behind in its socioeconomic development. Contact: lillianean@yahoo.com