Female Segregation during Menstruation. Do we have all the answers?

On Friday The Guardian reported on Nepal's bleeding shame - where Nepalese women are shockingly banished to cowsheds during their menstruation to live in utter squalor.  The process, known locally as 'Chhaupadi,' or 'untouchable being,' has been legislatively banned since 2005 but is apparently still a widely held belief that can often lead to the hapless victim becoming horribly sick, possibly even leading to death in extreme cases.  In Nepal the supposed 'uncleanliness' and 'sins' of women during the time of their menstruation is an ancient tradition that has been observed for millenia as part of Hindu religious practises and reportedly continues today in areas rife with poor (or low) economic development and education leading to these huge infringements on the human rights of the young girls and women concerned.

In the West we are rightly abhorred by such seemingly barbaric and medieval attitudes.  But Hinduism is not alone in this.  The 'sins' of women are a commonly held held belief across other religions (for example, in Islam) and the monthly segregation of women can often be considered normal practice.  In 2009 I was lucky enough to travel to Mali, passing from Bamako, the capital, all the way across this beautiful country to Timbuktu and beyond, into the dunes of the Sahara for the Essekine Music Festival; a celebration of sub-Saharan music that was a privilege to see.

Our guide for this amazing trip was Mohammed (*), a Tuareg elder and family leader, who was a man caught between two worlds.  On the one hand his lifelong belief in the teachings, traditions and religious upbringing that his late, departed father had imparted and that had instilled in him his own sense of family in which he took immense pride as the new head of the family.  But, on the other hand, he was a man striving for his place in 21st Century Africa where the pace of change dwarfs even that which we see around us on a daily basis in the West.  During the course of our conversations it became clear that Mohammed was fully aware of how Westerners viewed his ancient Tuareg ways.  He was a lovely man; open, engaging and intelligent but also completely intractable in some of his attitudes.  After his father had died Mohammed had become head of the family, a concept that is easy to say but hard to relate to when you have grown up in Western society.  Not only was it a huge honour (for him) but it was also a huge weight around his neck.  Overnight he became responsible for his aging mother, all his younger brothers as well as his 14 year old (at the time) divorced sister.  It was down to him to pay all the bills, put food on the table and to organise and arrange the lives of his younger siblings.

This is Mohammed.  He used to say to me, "Peter, I am a bad man! A very bad man!" and then he would squint, screw up his face and start to laugh!  When I snapped this picture I asked him to show me the 'bad man' and he duly obliged.

Of course, when he mentioned his divorced younger sister being only 14 we were understandably shocked.  "What's the problem?" he would say.  "You don't understand how we live!"  His sister had been married off (by the his late father) at 12 to a man who had beaten her repeatedly.  Mohammed tried to explain how the wealth and prosperity of the family unit was dependent upon the men; the women were there to bear children, to cook and to clean.  When he told me how he was relatively forward thinking, in that he allowed his sister to get a divorce rather than giving her a further beating and sending her back to her husband, I found it hard to take.  Divorced at 14, she was one one of the lucky ones, because Mohammed still offered her his support and was actively searching for a new husband for her but his task was made all the more difficult simply because of her marital status.  He couldn't understand why we give our women in the West so much freedom.  "This is why you have so many broken marriages and so much unhappiness!  Why are you not more like us?"

During the course of our travels we passed through the Dogon highlands on the fringes of the Sahara, bypassing many ancient, mud built villages, some with mosques many hundreds of years old.  The way of life in these regions had changed little over the centuries and the segregation of women during their menstruation was a universally held practice.

Low slung buildings like this, often contained within a rough built compound, were
home to the women for the week of their menstruation.  As a point of note, the village elders (all male) held their debates on village policy in similarly, low slung buildings where the men would sit cross-legged under the shelter to decide the future direction of the village.  Mohammed explained they were built so low to the ground so that if any one man got angry during the discussions and tried to stand up quickly he would bang his head hard which always led to laughter and not the violence that might otherwise ensue!  

In Nepal the practice of Chhaupadi appears to be a uniquely extreme version of this type of segregation, whereas in Mali it did seem to have a slightly more favourable aspect to the whole process (in that the health of the women didn't, on the face of it, appear to be threatened) but remains nonetheless, an oppressive and backward idea that I found hard to understand.  Didn't they know that if women do not menstruate then they cannot become pregnant?  

But are such attitudes merely just a result of poor education or is it an indication of something much darker; a deliberate and premeditated plan to keep women in their place?

I don't know.  Perhaps it's a bit of both, much as it has been in the Christian West where women have been second class citizens for the vast majority of our history.  Most Westerners would consider themselves to be part of an enlightened, more forward thinking society who can look at the long-held beliefs of other, so-called lesser (or more primitive) societies and take the moral high ground, abhorring what we deem to be such medieval attitudes.  But we have to be careful in this and always remember that it wasn't that long ago that we in the West burned free-thinking women at the stake for being witches!

Things are changing and it is important that we highlight, discuss and debate openly things that are so plainly oppressive and radical, such as the practice of Chhaupadi in Nepal, but it is also just as important to have these discussions within a framework that fits the particular society under discussion and does not merely replace one form of oppression with another that might be more palatable to Westerners.  There are places in this world where Western ideas and ideals do not fit and will never fit no matter how much we would like them to.  Not everyone in the world wants what we want, and not everyone in the world holds the same set of values as we do, but that doesn't necessarily make them wrong or evil merely because they believe differently from us.

Mohammed was a man trying to breach the gulf between the past and the present, and I could feel the love and huge weight of responsibility he felt for his family.  He was a man on the cusp and I could sense he was a good man who was willing to listen, who would try to understand and who would strive to change if he felt change were needed.  

In the I Ching we learn that the only thing that never changes is that everything is always changing.  I think Mohammed was aware of this and I could feel from my talks with him and others that positive change was coming.  One friend said to me, 'don't make the mistake of thinking that all Africans want BMW's and plasma TV's because we don't.  Look at the pollution and disease you have and I think, you can keep it.  All we want are the same chances you have in the West and we will change for the better, but in our way.  We will learn from your mistakes and make Africa a better place to live than Europe!'

Change is coming, but change takes time.  We need to be able to give the people's of the world's poorer nations the time needed to change, but more importantly we need to allow them access to their own resources and allow them to change and to grow as they would wish to change and not how we would wish them to.

*  Since I left Mali has fallen into chaos and civil war and the last thing I heard Mohammed had lost everything he owned and was interned in a refugee camp in Mauritania with his brothers and sisters, his mother not having survived the journey.  For a very proud man like Mohammed I can imagine this is a very hard situation to take and I can only hope that wherever he is he retains some sense of self and what is truly right and wrong and that he and his brothers have not fallen victim to the extremist ideals that were already apparent in some corners of Mali when I was there.

Interestingly on the day I flew home Air France decided to change the flight time of my plane without bothering to tell any of the people booked on it!  Welcome to Africa!  I arrived at the airport in good time to see the plane taxi-ing down the runway and leaving without me.   After some consternation on my part, I was eventually put up for the night in the Radisson Blue hotel that was attacked earlier this year by Al-Queada rebels!