Girls - Gulf Jobs and All - Will be Just Fine; But Where Have all the African Boys Gone?

SUNDAY AUGUST 27 2023

A cartoon illustration. PHOTO | NMG

By Charles Onyango-Obbo

In Nairobi last Monday, there was a story about Kenyan women at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport who were very “excited” to run into President William Ruto.

Ruto was making an impromptu inspection of the airport. He asked the group of young women where they were going, and they said they were going to Lebanon to work. He agreed to join them for a photograph.

This scene, sometimes of young women numbering over 50, going to work in the Gulf States, mostly as domestic helps and cleaners, has been a common sight at African airports for some years now. Most notably in East Africa, perhaps at Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport.

They tend to gather at Ethiopia’s Bole airport for the onward flights to the Gulf, and even the hardened observer will be gobsmacked by just how many they are.

The most common story on these African women is about the abuses they endure at the hands of their employers in the Gulf, and the exploitative middleman agencies that take them there.

French-Thai photographer Aline Deschamps has dedicated some powerful series to the harrowing stories of these women.

Several have been killed.

That might be the most emotive and attention-grabbing part of their stories, but it isn’t the only one. Some have slaved, saved, and gone on to make a good life for themselves in the Gulf or upon return.

Not too long ago, I got an X (formerly Twitter) direct message (DM) from a proud African who was angry at how we journalists cover these women.

We were focusing on the wrong things. The real problem, he said, was that with so many healthy young women of child-bearing age leaving Africa to work in the Gulf, the continent was running short of potential wives. He claimed there was already a shortage of “wife material” in some countries like Ethiopia and Uganda because of this exodus to the Gulf.

The African family, and the survival of the African, was at risk, he declared alarmingly. Young restless men left behind, unable to find wives, would burn Africa down.

There is no study or data I have seen that backs his claim about a wife shortage anywhere in the African countries from which these women come from, least of all Ethiopia and Uganda.

On the contrary, what one reads more often in African media, social media, and blogs are comments from outspoken women about a “shortage of eligible bachelors”.

In Kenya, when you listen to FM stations, there are strong women bemoaning the decline of the male: how most of the young men today are hopeless, and not serious like their fathers and grandfathers, who were “real men”.

On Kenya’s Mashujaa (Heroes) Day last year, I listened to a gruff-voiced woman unleash a long list of tough men who had fought British colonialism, and for democracy during the rule of the one-party era of Daniel arap Moi. She declared that there were no men equal to them. The ones of today were “bure”. Mashujaa Day was wasted on them.

The complexity of what’s happening, and the lack of good data, are some of the reasons I didn’t pursue the DM seriously, beyond a polite acknowledgement. Maybe I should have.

There is no evidence of “wife shortage” from the worker migration to the Gulf. On the contrary, there could be a “men shortage”.

Nearly 500,000 people emigrate from Africa a year. The majority of them are men.

Nearly 145,000 migrants travel in dangerous boats across the Mediterranean and Gulf of Aden to get to Europe and the Gulf. North of 2,000 of them will drown. Nearly 80 per cent of those migrants are men. Overall, despite what we see at airports, women constitute barely 20 per cent of the Gulf’s migrant worker population.

The carnage at home hits men harder too. Globally, 80 per cent of murder victims are men. In virtually every African country for which there is data, the overwhelming number of victims of violent crime are men. Men are also killed in far higher numbers in traffic accidents than women. Most of the children wasted away by drugs and addictions to cough syrups on Africa’s streets are boys.

Armed conflicts also take a higher toll on them, because they are the majority of the combatants. And even when they aren’t, from time immemorial in Africa, as elsewhere in the world, when an army arrives in the village of its enemy, it will finish off more boys than girls. Their idea being that sparing a one-year-old is bad strategy, because he could grow up into a fierce fighter in the future and seek revenge.

Some years back, a Nairobi organisation that studies adolescents did a poll to find out what their hopes and biggest fears were. The overwhelming fear by male adolescents was being killed in a violent crime (robbery, street mugging, a lynch mob, a knife fight at a club) or by rogue police (the girls most feared they would be raped).

At the same time, an obscure story in a Kenyan paper reported that there were orphanages in the country where up to 90 per cent were boys. People adopted the girls. They didn’t want the boys.

It isn’t that there are no eligible young African men on the marriage market. They are simply not there. Or are invisible. If the long queue of young African women at airports going to labour in the Gulf is a tragedy, the darker part of the story is about the boys they didn’t leave behind.

Charles Onyango-Obbo is a journalist, writer, and curator of the “Wall of Great Africans”. Twitter@cobbo3