A Rwandan writer thinks about the Steubing case in Germany, and what it signals for Rwanda's future.
Last week I read about a case
in Germany that turned my stomach. On Wednesday, the German Ethics
Council, a government-backed committee, recommended that the government
abolish laws criminalising incest between siblings, arguing that such
bans impinge upon citizens' rights to sexual self-determination.
This
was after a man named Patrick Stuebing had four children with
his
sister, Susan Karolewski. The two did not grow up together and met when
Stuebing was 24 and Karolewski was 16, and had been romantic partners
for several years. Stuebing was convicted of incest in 2008 and
attempted to appeal his case to the European Court of Human Rights, to
no avail. German Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union
(CDU) party isn't having it; a CDU spokesperson is quoted saying
"abolishing criminal punishment against incestuous actions within a
family would go completely against protecting the undisturbed
development of children".
My first instinct was to dismiss the
entire affair as a strange example of Western über liberalism; kind of
like the Ontario law that allows women to walk around bare- chested if
they so wish, without fear of arrest for public indecency. But the
longer I thought about the Council's decision, the more I realized that
very little of my disgust or discomfort was based on any actual
reasoning; or rather my instinctual 'yuck' wasn't based on biological or
ethical reasons. I just found it weird, disgusting and vomit inducing.
The strength of my gut reaction took me aback, it made me realise that I
wasn't as culturally liberal as I had thought.
I'm proud of my
laissez-faire attitude to most things. I believe that laws shouldn't
govern what adults do to make themselves happy, especially when it comes
to acts carried out in the privacy of their own homes. As long as there
is mutual consent. But that begs the question, how far can individual
freedoms go before they run counter to societal norms and rules? And
further, who defines what societal norms and rules are?
While some
might call this simply an academic discussion without bearing to 'real
life', I would beg to disagree. Here in Rwanda I feel like we are going
through monumental changes in the fabric of our society. For example,
lets look at how gender roles are changing. What defined a
'munyarwandakazi' (Rwandan woman) only three decades ago would be
sneered at today. Women were supposed to be demure, virginal and soft
spoken. They were certainly not supposed to be leaders, either in their
homes or in the workplace. And the law of the day mirrored that reality;
married women were not allowed to start businesses without their
husband's explicit permission.
That was the culture of the day and
I'm sure that if someone told the lawmakers of the day that Rwanda
would sweep their attitudes and laws into the dustbin of history, they'd
have laughed them out of the room. What constitutes Rwandan culture and
norms is constantly changing in my opinion and two factors, the
country's younger generation and Rwanda's embrace of the global
community, are leading that. Perhaps its one and the same thing. What I
wonder is whether those who institute our laws and govern our cultural
life (I call them the 'moral police', you can identify them by their
overuse of the word 'umuco'-culture) know just how fluid culture is
today. What is 'yucky' today isn't necessarily what will be 'yucky'
tomorrow.
Perhaps that's what we should take from the German case.
And I'm not talking about the legality or otherwise of incest. We must
constantly question our cultural beliefs and norms. We must always ask
ourselves the question, 'why do we believe what we believe? Are those
beliefs relevant in today's world? Should we not challenge our own
prejudices more?
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