ma-ture sex. Adolescents may be permitted to engage in all forms of sexual pleasure except penetrative sex. In many cultures, penetrative sex is be-lieved to be harmful mainly because the girl will get pregnant out of wed-lock, something that is considered a severe disgrace to her family status.
Usually brothers and cousins monitor their sisters or cousins to make sure no sexual intercourse takes place and also to make sure no young man tries to force them into doing anything against their will. The more re-spected and feared a girl’s brothers and cousins are, the more respectful young men are towards her.
Parents and elders as a whole do not interfere with the flirtations of their children. Some parents may sit at a distance and watch for socially unac-ceptable behaviour. A boy or girl who disrespects the family name with unacceptable behaviour is heavily punished. Depending on the gravity of the crime, punishment can be anything from scolding, to spanking with a leather whip.
Enabling the sexes to meet on neutral ground, openly and respectably, tends to remove some of the secrecy and unhealthy curiosity that is part of the mental transition from the self-contained experience of early youth to the new awareness of the new polarity of the sexes. Teen competitiveness, constant body contact, and purported romantic liaisons all provide indi-vidual and interactive challenges, and contribute to personal maturation, social development, and spiritual enrichment. They provide an individual a level of confidence and exuberance that comes from a healthy sexual at-titude and a healthy sexual life.
These mating dances are often fruitful arenas for initiating relationships—
traditional dating agencies as it were—supervised by elderly persons ex-perienced in such affairs.
Unfortunately, traditional systems of sexual education are quickly disap-pearing and many young people today get little or no meaningful sexual induction. Contemporary or “modern” African societies mostly concen-trated in urban centers and townships have adopted the culture of “pass-ing the buck” with reference to the social institutions that ought to take care of children and undertake sexual education in the early years of
de-appendix: seduction and ritual courtship (african style)
velopment. The family passes the responsibility to the school, the school to the church, while the church, in turn, passes it back to the family. In the end, the child gets no proper instruction. Most of what many African chil-dren raised in urban and sub-urban Africa know about sex is from the lit-tle sexual information they come across in books, on television, and from their peers. This serves as a means by which they define their sexual iden-tities and behaviours.As Africa becomes more “modernized,” adolescence to adulthood passage rites are being replaced with getting a driver’s license, getting drunk, or getting laid. Many modern Africans have discarded the slow, subtle arts of flirtation and charm that our ancestors have used successfully for thou-sands of years, and replaced them with the “modern” quick, direct strikes—punching his or her number into the cell phone, grinding and bumping with him or her on the dance floor, rubbing his shoulders or her feet, and bonking each other senseless—all within an hour.
Young people are growing up uneasy and uncomfortable about their bod-ies and most are out of touch with their sexual thoughts, feelings, and bodily responses. Many are sexually confused, anxious, and insecure.
Formal schools and universities in modern Africa are often centres of even greater sexual recklessness and promiscuity on the one hand, and igno-rance and repressed sexual uptightness on the other.
Similar cultural stories are being written in other parts of the world, all over the globe. This is a call for all of us, people all over the world, to wake up, reflect, see where we’ve fallen away, and to begin to heal our-selves towards a healthy sexuality.
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