When Culture Clashes with Ethics

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 14, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

I saw the news report but did not think too much about it. The report decried the fact of Cape Coast, Ghana’s first colonial capital, having become the foremost center of teenage prostitution in the country. I did not pay much attention to it because I did not really believe that such social vice was unique to Cape Coast. Nearly all urban areas in Third World countries, and even in most industrially advanced cities like New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Sydney, Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo, to name just a handful, have problems with child and/or teenage prostitution. The prostitution of minors and very young adults is obviously, for the most part, caused by inadequate provision of parental supervision, parental economic privation and lack of any meaningful or livable employment opportunities for the parents and guardians of these minors and young adults.

As already observed in the preceding paragraph, child prostitution, defined as the involvement of children below the age of eighteen (properly speaking twenty-one years old) in the sex trade, may not only be caused by poor parenting skills; it may also be caused by the bad examples of parents who were themselves child prostitutes, and have inculcated this prime social vice into their children and wards. And then, of course, there are those who may be genetically or naturally wired up for sexual promiscuity and the professional practice of this most ancient of trades. Well, I wasn’t too much worried about it because not being a career politician, or a politician in any shape or form, for that matter, I did not think it necessary or even healthy to assume the paid responsibilities of other people. I trained as an educator, and that is what I choose to primarily concern myself with. Let everybody do their bit and then leave the rest to Divine Providence. Life is difficult as it is, and I don’t ever remember contracting with anybody to have myself thrown into such chaotic and decidedly irrational scheme of affairs.

Still, I found myself strongly attracted to the subject of this news story. Interestingly, though, the kind of news story that brought me to the present subject/topic is quite fascinating. It is fascinating because not too far from Cape Coast, at Komenda, where there was once a sugar factory, the local traditional rulers have discovered that teenage pregnancy and child prostitution may have been compounded by the temporally immemorial cultural practice of holding overnight vigils or wakes as part of funeral ceremonies. It appears that most of the teenage girls getting prematurely pregnant attend some of these funerals to get laid or, properly speaking, seduced by adult-male attendants who ought to know better. Now this is no novel occurrence whatsoever. What follows next is what I deem to be quite an innovative approach to cultural praxis.

The paramount chief of Komenda believes that a significant part of the solution to rampant and riotous teen pregnancy lies in banning overnight funerals altogether. He may soon, however, realize that his is a patently porous band aid approach to a problem in need of a more comprehensive and sustained tack. A curative program of sorts. Nana Kojo Kru, the Komenda paramount chief, may soon discover to his chagrin that he may also need to ban nightly movie attendance, that is, if there happen to be any movie theaters in Komenda Township. Then also, Nana Kojo Kru may equally need to ban Christmas Eve and New Year festivities. For teenage girls are far more likely to be massively impregnated by their teen-male classmates and partners on 24th Night than at any time during the entire year. But for my strict maternal grandparents, I would have gotten a handful of teenage women, largely my class and schoolmates, pregnant while growing up at Akyem-Asiakwa. My Presbyterian cleric grandfather forbade any of his grandchildren from participating in the tent-building activities that came with the celebration of Watch Night, as 24th December was popularly known. Very likely, I would have ended up fathering somebody else’s child, for 24th Night was characterized by what these days is called “Gang-Banging,” whereby several boys copulated with a single girl on a single night.

I would have likely fathered another guy’s child because in those days DNA technology was the stuff of fairy tales. In those days, a girl who got pregnant via sexual promiscuity would often scapegoat the boy or young man who appeared to her to come from a relatively well-off family. It was just a question of common sense. In my case, we were not wealthy but we had good education, most of us, and were quite well-respected in my village. Well, in the Cape Coast-Komenda situation, we learn that UNICEF – the United Nations’ Children’s Education Fund – is collaborating with some local institutions to teach child prostitutes some viable vocational skills as a means of helping these young women eke a decent existence for themselves.

In theory, this is perfectly the right thing to do on the part of policymakers and civil and human rights activists. Still, I am not holding my breath because the concept of “gainful employment” is relative. Relative to what? Relative to what the prime targets of such vocational enskillment conclude such training may be worth, compared to what a fetching and smashing teen prostitute could make on a good night of turning tricks; and then one week, if the teen involved is not very pretty and a versatile or superior trick-turner.