New York Times bjuder idag på en lika intressant som tragisk artikel om den afrikanska kulturen. Det handlar om den omfattande epedemin av kvinnomisshandel som plågar Afrika. Detta utdrag talar för sig själv:

Women suffer from violence in every society. In few places, however, is the abuse more entrenched, and accepted, than in sub-Saharan Africa. One in three Nigerian women reported having been physically abused by a male partner, according to the latest study, conducted in 1993. The wife of the deputy governor of a northern Nigerian province told reporters last year that her husband beat her incessantly, in part because she watched television movies. One of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s appointees to a national anticorruption commission was allegedly killed by her husband in 2000, two days after she asked the state police commissioner to protect her.

”It is like it is a normal thing for women to be treated by their husbands as punching bags,” Obong Rita Akpan, until last month Nigeria’s minister for women’s affairs, said in an interview here. ”The Nigerian man thinks that a woman is his inferior. Right from childhood, right from infancy, the boy is preferred to the girl. Even when they marry out of love, they still think the woman is below them and they do whatever they want.”

In Zambia, nearly half of women surveyed said a male partner had beaten them, according to a 2004 study financed by the United States – the highest percentage of nine developing nations surveyed on three continents.

In South Africa, researchers for the Medical Research Council estimated last year that a male partner kills a girlfriend or spouse every six hours – the highest mortality rate from domestic violence ever reported, they say. In Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, domestic violence accounts for more than 6 in 10 murder cases in court, a United Nations report concluded last year.

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Help is typically not easy to find. Nigeria, Africa’s largest nation with nearly 130 million people, has only two shelters for battered women, both opened in the last four years. The United States, by contrast, has about 1,200 such havens. Moreover, many women say wifely transgression justify beatings. About half of women interviewed in Zambia in 2001 and 2002 said husbands had a right to beat wives who argue with them, burn the dinner, go out without the husband’s permission, neglect the children or refuse sex.

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Nigeria’s penal code, in force in the Muslim-dominated north, specifically allows husbands to discipline their wives – just as it allows parents and teachers to discipline children – as long as they do not inflict grievous harm. Assault laws could apply, but the police typically see wife-beating as an exception.