When I was a fresher at Igbinedion University back in 2007, I was informed that the male private hostel where I lived was off-limits to female visitors after 7PM, and vice-versa for the female hostel. As far as I could tell, the only purpose of this rule was to stop students from having sex with each other. Exactly why this was so important was never satisfactorily explained.
A year later as a fresher at Hull University, I witnessed a completely different experience. Fresher’s Week included seminars about issues like safe sex and consent, and free condoms were even distributed. The students even had a cheeky alternative name for Fresher’s Week – “Shag Week” – which encapsulated the heady, libertine energy that characterised that and most of my subsequent university experience.
Incidentally, using myself as a rough and unscientific polling sample, a year at Igbinedion on average probably featured significantly more sexual activity than a year at Hull University. Turning a normal and natural human function into the proverbial forbidden fruit can have only one outcome after all, but I digress.
The vast gulf in quality between both institutions would normally be attributed only to funding and personnel. As I came to find out however, there is a third and equally important factor that explains the difference in learning outcomes and quality of character coming out of both institutions.
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This x-factor is a somewhat pathologic obsession with policing and controlling sex on Nigerian university campuses.
Puritanism is the opposite of enlightenment
I read a lot of Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe and other notable independence-era Nigerian writers while growing up. Their books gave me an insight into the ways and thoughts of Nigeria’s earliest university students and graduates. A central theme running through their work was a passion for enlightenment, an irreverent attitude toward authority and a total absence of the sexual puritanism that Nigeria likes to think of as its culture.
These books made several references to casual sex in university dorms, sexual tension between students and lecturers and a general air of sex-positive permissiveness on campus. By the time I started at Igbinedion in 2007, I could not see any evidence of this. What I saw instead was a plethora of campus religious fellowships and barely-disguised sexual repression and frustration that regularly found its way out in several seedy locations around campus.
It was at Hull University that I recognised the Nigerian campus experience described by Soyinka and his peers. I also noticed that alongside the sex-positive atmosphere came a certain intellectual curiosity, a willingness to interrogate authority and a desire to explore and discover new things. These things – which are central to the intellectual experience a university is supposed to provide – are not coincidental to the absence of anti-sex puritanism.
They are inextricably linked.
When the university experience is characterised by young people finding themselves, learning about the world in all its ramifications, and understanding the ebb and flow of human relationships, you are likely to have a positive learning and behavioural outcome. You don’t get an automaton coming out of such an environment – you get Wole Soyinka and his peers.
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When the univeristy experience is defined primarily by young people trying or pretending not to have sex with each other, you only end up with perverted, sexually repressed, childish and unprepared graduates who are good at reading and regurgitating information, but useless at being creative or thinking at depth. In other words, you get SSCE candidates with a rolled up piece of paper pronouncing them as “university graduates.”
Sex is absolutely central to human society – humanity itself exists because of sex, and it is folly to try to minimise the role of sex in individual development. The age group of 16 to 21 is when most people are discovering who they are and creating an identity. It is utterly irresponsible, hair-brained and anti-reason to take one of the most important aspects of individual identity and force it into the shadows during this period. Doing so can only create repressed and unconfident people on the one hand, or pretenders and perverts on the other.
This is the exact opposite of what a university should do. A university is supposed to encourage thinking and growth at all levels. It is not supposed to repress young people and stifle their emotional development. If a society’s highest institutions of learning encourage hypocrisy, pretense, repression and arrested development, then this will reflect in the quality of people in that society.
Sexual hypocrisy is not a bug, a central animating feature of third world societies around the world. Is there anywhere more third-world than Nigeria? Does this description of hypocritical, immature, emotionally stunted, attention, judgmental people fit with Nigeria’s population?
Answer than question to yourself truthfully.
Rules are made for humans, not humans for rules
The discourse surrounding infringement on sexual agency of consenting adults often has a counter argument to the effect of “These are the rules. If they cannot live by those rules, then why go there?”
Apart from the basic incongruity of wanting a better country and at the same time defending the very things that make it worse, it must be pointed out that even legally, there are contracts that cannot be enforced. For example a legal contract stating that a person cannot leave a geographical area on the pain of physical harm cannot be enforced because it contravenes the person’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom of movement.
Can a university really enforce a rule stating that its students must not be caught having sex on its premises or elsewhere? How does this stack up against every Nigerian’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom of association? What if having sex is part of a student’s religious identity? (Such religions do exist by the way.) Can any institution enforce an anti-sex rule which would violate the person’s freedom of association?
It would be interesting to see these issues tested in court because as with so many other things, people with power in third world societies always overreach until they are stopped from doing so by regulatory action.
More importantly, we need to realise as a society that policing sexual activity between consenting adults is not just a hypocritical fool’s errand and a waste of time, but also a direct contributor to Nigeria’s severe social dysfunction. A culture should be judged on its outcomes and clearly, the culture of sexual hypocrisy is not working. It’s time to try something new.
For the benefit of those who fail to understand the basic concept of inalieanable universal human rights, I will close this with a popular quote by Douye Alfred: “Apartheid was legal. Colonialism was legal. Slavery was legal. Legality is a construct of power, not of justice.”
