When I moved to Kigali in 2014, my worst nightmare was trying to find decent accommodation. Basically, the choice was between beautiful apartments for which I would have had to sell my kidney to afford a month’s rent, and inexpensive houses for which I’d have had to jump over ditches, slide down a hill on my back and fight an army of well-fed mosquitoes to get home. It finally dawned on me that I wouldn’t prosper if I didn’t have a housemate. My dream housemate was ideally a fellow young adult also at the start of her career. We’d be two strong and independent women conquering the world and going home to tell each other about our spoils. And so, I searched and I searched for a housemate until I finally realized that finding a single young woman living or able to live on her own in Kigali was harder than finding a needle in haystack. Why? Because though Rwanda isrenowned for its drive towards gender equality at national level, many people are paradoxically still holding onto very patriarchal values in daily life. A parent will practically force their young adult son out of the home, but hold on for dear life to their unmarried female thirty-year-old “child”. And the reason why parents won’t let their unmarried daughters leave home is “what will people think?” And by that, they mean that single women who do not live with their parents are deemed to be rebellious and of loose morals ergo unworthy of marriage. A good Rwandan girl waits at home until a suitor comes to ask for her hand in marriage. While I respect the strongly-held belief that a girl should remain under her parent’s roof till marriage, I have to point out that there are several flaws with that. The first being that keeping a child under your thumb does not guarantee their observation of traditional values. Even in the olden days where children didn’t go to school and practically spent ninety percent of their time with their families, girls still got pregnant out of wedlock. Then there is the fact that a twenty-five-year-old is a fully-grown human being. She should be trusted to make good decisions if parenting was done right in her formative years. Furthermore, keeping a young woman at home so that she is marriage material, is just counterproductive. If she has a curfew so that she has to go straight home from work, how and when is she supposed to socialize long enough to date and potentially find a husband? But perhaps my biggest problem with the tradition is that the focus is on getting girls to stay well behaved so that men will deem them worthy of marriage. No one thinks too much about the behavior of said men. No one thinks too much about the fact that a woman cannot have “loose morals” without the active participation of men. So, in the end, keeping young women at home until marriage is just another patriarchal tradition aimed at keeping women under the control of men.
