Why I am ashamed for gawking at the Miss Rwanda contestants

Everyone loves this year’s Miss Rwanda. Pictures and videos of the 15 final contestants are being shared on social media and WhatsApp by the hundreds, nay, thousands of people; even in this very newspaper, any story to do with the pageant is guaranteed to be the most read article online. I won’t lie and say I haven’t been caught up in all the excitement. I’ve shared pictures and videos, but truth be told, I regret doing so. Let us think about it for a minute. We are cheering on a contest that is inherently sexist, ageist, discriminates against those who have children or a spouse and teaches girls how to cry ‘gracefully’. We are cheering on a contest that tells girls that if they are slightly too short or above a certain weight they aren’t eligible. We are getting enthusiastic about a contest that is, despite all the rhetoric about it being about traditional and contemporary Rwandan values, is simply about entertainment. These girls are simply there to be gawked at; who is ‘hotter’, who has a better figure, who walks ‘funny’, who doesn’t speak English well, who answers questions the best. These girls are not ‘Nyampinga’. Not in the proper sense. They are our toys. And I must ask, when did it become okay to treat people like sources of entertainment? When did it become okay to “ooh and ahh” women because of their looks? Haven’t we become better than that? I know that I’ll be labeled a hypocrite for saying this, especially because I too participated in this silliness. So, what changed? Well, as with my many mental U-turns before, it all started with a conversation with a highly intelligent female friend of mine. She was aghast with a Rwanda Television interview with one Miss Rwanda contestant; when asked about women and cooking, the young lady said, and I quote, “if you cannot cook, what kind of woman are you”? Not a big deal right? Wrong. We always talk about the improved lot of women in this country; they run homes, businesses and ministries. They make laws, enforce laws and judge those who break laws. And that’s all great. But we can’t sit back and think we are anywhere we need to be. We still live in a country, where gender roles are still extremely rigid. Nothing opens your eyes like asking a young female civil servant these questions; “how many times has a man made you uncomfortable this week?” “How many inappropriate things were you told?” “How many times were you sexualised?” I asked, and trust me, the answers I got made me fear for our women. What really scared me was that the person I had asked had gotten used to it. What amuses me is that in all this misogyny, we still act like our girls are so precious. We demand cattle for them and we keep them home until they are wed in case, god forbid, society thinks we are bad parents. The worst part of all this is, even those who should be angered about this Miss Rwanda issue (i.e. women) are probably the ones who support the contest the most. But that isn’t surprising to me. The patriarchal system that women have found themselves in brainwashes them to think that beauty is the most important thing; that strongly arguing a point isn’t proper; that cooking is a female responsibility and that walking around in shoes that destroy their knees is the height of fashion. Too many of our women suffer from a Stockholm Syndrome-like malaise; they find the misogynistic ‘prison’ they’re in comfortable. And that is tragic. I cannot control the actions of others but I can control mine, in the fight against the prevailing gender narrative I’ve been found wanting when it comes to the Miss Rwanda contest. That has come to an end. I will no longer participate in an exercise that I find embarrassing and fundamentally flawed. The author is an editor at The New Times.

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Why I am ashamed for gawking at the Miss Rwanda contestants