Maiduguri
January 4, 2003
Alvin Toffler provided one of the most penetrating insights into the future of modern society some thirty years ago in his thought-provoking book Future Shock (1970).
Toffler, writing in his characteristic witty style, attempted to forecast various dimensions of the social pathology of our age, particularly that of modern Western society. His graphic description of ‘the throw away society’, ‘the demise of geography’, ‘Monday-to-Friday- friends’ and ‘the fractured family’, among others, all sculptured, in some rudimentary ways, the shape of things to come.
Though his examples were mainly drawn from the United States, most of his observations have compelling universality especially in today’s globalised world.
Focusing on the family, Toffler described it as “the giant shock absorber of society-the place to which the bruised and battered individual returns after doing battle with the world, the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment”(p.219).
That the family has always played an indispensable role in human society is hardly debatable but whether it will continue to play such a role in societies of the future has been opened to a diversity of view- points. As neatly woven together by the futurist Toffler, there are basically three divergent groups speculating about what will happen to the family.
The first group regarded by Toffler as “pessimists” contends that the family is doomed to extinction though they will not say with any degree of certainty what will take its place.
A second group consists of “family optimists” who argue rather convincingly that the family will continue to exist as it has existed throughout human history. Rather than race towards oblivion, they predict that the family will enter a ‘Golden Age’.
A third group classified by Toffler as holding ‘a more sophisticated view’ is of the opinion that people will be driven deeper into their families by social turbulence. As human society faces the formidable storm of social change, this group tells us that it is only the family that can act as an anchor.
Concluding this rather intricate debate, Toffler argues that “it may be that both sides in this debate are wrong. For the future is more open than it might appear.
The family may -and this is far more likely- break up, shatter, only to come together again in weird and novel ways”. It may thus be surmised that there will be no society without the family. Indeed, one can argue that all creatures live in one form of family or the other.
Yet, as universal and enduring in time and space as it is, the family appears to be under some intense stress and strain and one wonders whether it will ever survive to enter a ‘Golden Age’.
The very basis of human relationships is being directly undermined by the vicissitudes of modern society, the triumph of individualism and the meteoric pace of advances in science and technology. Modern man is a working machine and “work” has encroached into the secret chambers of his bedroom and other personal spaces, such that he lives to work rather than works to live. Work is the end and no longer the means to an end.
Other forces negatively impinging on us include the never ending struggle for material success, the birth of commercial parenting and in some cases, even the complete death of parenting as a social activity.
According to America’s ‘Children Defense Fund’, for example, ‘half of all-American children will live in a single-parent family at some point in their childhood. One in three is born to unmarried parents, and one in four lives in a single-parent home. One in 24 lives with neither parents, as increasing numbers live with grandparents or in foster care’ (The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2002:69).
Early in 2002, a baby of 4 months was raped in South Africa. Raped or ripped open? No simple moulding of words can describe the despicable act of the rapists or convey the trauma of our collective humanity. But the family that left such a baby exposed in a country with one of the highest rape rates in the world was equally, if not more, culpable.
As the year 2002 was coming to a close, the sad news came in from Niger Republic of the marriage of a 9 year- old girl to a 47- year old man. A baby doll married to a shameless graying grand father, by even a more shameless and callous father.
I took a comparative look at my innocent, book -loving, nine- year old daughter Maryam. I felt sad for her age mate in Niger and I could not control pouring torrents of bloody tears.
The little doll in Niger and children in similar circumstances all over the world should be learning to read and write and not being forced to learn love-making.
They should be happily playing with dolls, enjoying their fleeting moments of childhood, and not being converted into human dolls, toyed and tormented by sexually rapacious men.
In technologically developed, success -driven Japan, at least a million teenagers are estimated to have withdrawn from society and turned into what the BBC correspondent series calls ‘modern day hermits, never living their rooms’. The causes of this baffling phenomenon known as “hikikomori”, according to the BBC, include ‘pressure from cram schools and an inability to talk to their families’. The pioneer western psychologist ‘to study it is baffled about why the parents don’t just make the boys come out’ (bbcworld.com: ‘Japan: The missing million’).
How could the parents ‘make the boys come out’ of their self imposed prison when they (the parents) were largely responsible for losing contact with their children by dedicating more time to career than children?
In the second half of 2002, a 40-year old man named Bappah Adamu Musa Maidoya chopped off his wife’s leg for an alleged act of adultery by the wife in Darazo, Bauchi State Nigeria.
Maidoya committed the ignominious crime presumably behind close doors, within the family, which is supposed to be a safe haven for his wife and children. Maidoya’s crime got the widest publicity possible because of the politically charged Sharia climate in Northern Nigeria. However, there are thousands of Maidoyas all over the country, all over the world, across the barriers of culture, class, region and religion.
The Maidoyas of this world have transformed the family into a modern torture chamber where women and children are tormented and murdered, chopping off legs and breasts here, dowry and honour killings there, gun and acid attacks, rapes and sexual abuse of innocent children here and there…
The family, which is the most basic of all human institutions, is thus obviously the front-line victim of a civilization which, despite, and some may argue, because of, its glaring material success unsurpassed in human history, is descending the slippery slope towards social abyss.
Many people today spend more time with machines than with men; many see and talk with their work colleagues more than with their wives or husbands; and many parents spend more time talking with computers than with their children. This is particularly true of advanced industrial societies, but increasingly, not so advanced societies as well.
Thus the family is no longer ‘the one stable point in an increasingly flux-filled environment’, because contemporary evidence points to the family as perhaps one of the most unstable of all social formations. Many of the instability and flux in the wider society may actually have their origins in the family.
Consider, for example, the fact that in many societies, cases of domestic violence especially against women and children but also against men is daily witnessed in a tidal wave of endemic proportions. Contrary to its time- honoured, noble status as a safe haven for individuals bruised and battered by the outside world, statistics from many parts of the world overwhelmingly point to the family as a modern dungeon where many people (especially women and children) are haunted, taunted and tormented.
In the past, individuals return to the family to nurse their wounds ‘after doing battle with the world’. In the contemporary period, individuals, especially women and children, escape from the family after being bruised and battered by dangerous enemies within and often, there are no safe havens to escape to.
Women and children can neither feel safe in the hands of husbands and fathers nor in those of politicians, nor even in the ‘blessed’ hands of the anointed holy men (and women) of God. They are neither safe within the precincts of the family established by man to procreate and orient children nor in the premises built and dedicated by man to the worship of God.
In the United States, for example, the Winter 2001 edition of the Dallas-Forth Worth Healthcare and Human Resource Association (DFWHRA) documents that:
- 47% of men who beat their wives do so at least three times a year
- In 70% of rapes and sexual assaults, the offender is an intimate relative or friend
- 43% of critical injuries and child fatalities occur in homes where there is spousal abuse
- 40% to 60% of men who abuse women also abuse their children
While we may resort to a brisk dismissal of such grim statistics as ‘Western statistics’ that have no bearing on us, empirical evidence suggests that as far as the pattern of women and child abuse is concerned, it is a problem afflicting the whole world.
The difference between the ‘West’ and the rest of ‘non-Western’ societies, if any, is a difference in degree and not in kind.
In Nigeria, for example, the World Organisation Against Torture (2001) reports that child trafficking has become ‘an industry’, such that ‘professional placement agents-hired by families who cover their fees, the price paid to the parents and bribes to officials if necessary-comb the countryside and bring children to the cities’.
Such children end up as no better than slaves and are subjected to sexual, physical and psychological abuses.
Across the whole of West Africa and many other parts of the developing world including Nepal and Thailand, child and women trafficking has assumed the status of a new, gruesome slave trade. Family members, including husbands and other close relatives sell or mortgage women and children to merchants who make bloody profit from the horrendous flesh trade.
It is estimated that in Italy alone, 10,000 Nigerians, mainly from the south of the country, work as prostitutes- many of them willing or gullible victims of human traffickers. A similar (but less documented) sacrilegious trafficking in women and professional ‘disabled’ beggars has also been going on for a very long time from Nigeria (mainly from the north of the country) to the holy-land of Saudi Arabia.
On reaching Saudi Arabia (courtesy of an unholy alliance of human traffickers made up of ‘agents’ and rented ‘husbands’), some of the women end up as illegal domestic workers with little or no labour rights but most of them end up as underground prostitutes. Being illegal immigrants and surviving on an illegal trade, such Nigerians are very likely to suffer all forms of social, psychological and medical problems including reproductive health problems for which they may groan and die in silence.
Many parents and family members will summon poverty as a cover to justify their evil merchandise. Poverty is indeed a serious problem in many parts of the world and it often pushes people to such levels of unimaginable desperation bordering on cannibalism. But it is still difficult to understand the type of poverty that will necessitate a husband selling his wife in the flesh trade or a parent giving out his or her daughter to sex merchants as a debt bondage. Could this be as a result of poverty or a serious symptom of a world that has lost its humanity, a civilization that has submitted to an unbridled quest for materialism over man’s inalienable quest for spirituality, a world diseased and ready to die?
This civilization has fractured human relationships and the wounds are visibly gushing. The family may not have passed into oblivion in the manner predicted by the ‘family pessimists’ but certainly it appears to be clinically dead. In the contemporary world, children, the seeds of social life, are orphaned twice- first by the dead of their parents and second, (and more fundamentally), by the dead of the family.
Fred Rogers, writing in The World Almanac and Book of Facts (2002:68), argued quite aptly that ‘It is only through our relationships that we come to know that we are loved.
Children inevitably become aware of events in the outside world that may be upsetting, even frightening. Every child needs a place-a home, a room, a lap-where, in the company of a caring adult; he or she can feel safe. In this sanctuary, a child’s sense of being a valuable person and the feeling that life is worth the effort to live, can begin to take shape. Hope and trust that the world is, on the whole, a good place starts here. That’s the foundation for all learning and healthy growing’.
A civilisation standing on a fractured family where women and children are tormented and exiled into the wilderness is built on a quicksand. In the words of Gulzar Haider ‘no great society can happen and no civilization emerge if childhood is ignored. In fact an efficient way to commit societal murder or suicide is would be to deprive its children of spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physiological nourishment’.
A wise parent once admonished fellow parents that in life, the most important gifts they could give their children was a sense of roots and wings. Family and community roots to help sustain children (and adults) in times of adversity. Wings of curiosity and self-reliance to enhance their individual capacities for discovery and achievement. There has always been a problem of finding the right balance between the two.
Since roots can only wither properly as wings grow more powerful, it is only logical to develop the sense of roots before the sense of wings because only the rooted can fly. This is the contemporary challenge facing the family.
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