Your front-page story on the AkiDwA report findings on domestic violence as a culturally accepted form of discipline (African wives’ ‘witch-craft’ fears, 18 December) is dangerously misleading. The fact that domestic violence does occur in African societies does not mean that it is an accepted form of discipline. While we are not sure how the report defines domestic violence, we imagine that it may have focused on intimidation and physical abuse, which are the universally recognised forms of domestic violence. We dare say that there would be very few African communities that condone physical abuse of a spouse and this is the most compelling aspect of the report.
While such screaming headlines do no favours to existing prejudice about African societies, it might be useful to critically re-evaluate the findings of that report.
In rural African settings where traditional laws (as with most domestic matters) do not have a clear-cut redress procedure, abusive partners earn reprimands from elders within the family unit. In cosmopolitan settings, the police would usually treat domestic violence as a matter to be resolved by the family unit mainly because of the dual operation of ‘civil’ and traditional laws, particularly in west Africa.
We run the risk of compounding the way our diverse culture is misunderstood when we apply a bazaar-canteen approach in analysing culturally specific contexts. Such simplistic deductions trivialise the huge tensions that confront the changing dynamics occurring in traditional African societies – a process the English, the Irish and even highly diverse American societies have traversed.
If, however, the report seeks to project domestic violence as a phenomenon sustained by an immigration regime that undermines human dignity, alongside other value-based conflicts as gender-role tensions among African diaspora communities, then this needs to be analysed in its own context.
Son & Theresa Gyoh
Galway
Contrary to the assertion in your recent front-page story, there is nothing like an “African culture”, seeing as it is that Africa is a continent composed of many countries which in turn are composed of many ethnic groups with their own different cultures. Such a statement is an absurd over-generalisation.
Secondly, being a Nigerian I do know that domestic violence is not “acceptable discipline” anywhere in Nigeria – the only difference between Ireland and Nigeria being the approach to tackling it, as most of our people believe in the sanctity of marriage, and are not hasty to consider legal options such as divorce and restraining orders as the only options.
Rather, we choose to explore solutions to such problems within the extended family and community leadership, whose decisions carry as much weight as legal pronouncements by judges.
This is one of the reasons for our low divorce rates and relatively stable family units compared to the developed world, a statistic that should be of interest for further study.
Babatunde Faluyi
Clonsilla, Dublin 15
