Charles Onyango-Obbo

We have had a full plate of drama over the last two to three months. 

There are the charged campaigns in Kenya for and against the draft constitution that is being voted on in a referendum on August 4.

 

Then there was the big one, the World Cup. On the day the great tournament ended – in fact as fans were watching the final game between the Netherlands and Spain - the Somali militant Islamist group Al Shabaab set off terrorists bombs in Kampala, killing nearly 80 people. They said it was punishment for the presence of Ugandan troops in Somalia as part of the African Union peacekeeping. 

 

So, as you can imagine, it has been difficult to find much room for the other things in life. One of the things that struck me is how difficult it must be to be a Muslim woman.

 

In Somalia, Al Shabaab banned Muslim women from wearing bras. However, if these Somali women ended up in France, they would be free to wear bras, but not the burqa (Islamic veil) that they were required to in Somalia.

That is because France recently banned the wearing of the burqa in public. 

 

I used to be appalled at the burqa, until a woman who wasn’t even a Muslim changed my views. Many years ago I was a student at the American University in Cairo, Egypt. The most feminist woman in our class was Coptic.

One day she showed up for class in full burqa. The majority of the students in the class were non-Egyptian and non-Muslim, and so were quite taken aback. 

 

However, she explained that on that day she had taken public transport to university, and not driven in her car. Egyptian men have happy fingers, she explained, so if you didn’t want them to pinch your bottom on the bus, you wore a burqa. So I learnt, first, that not all women in burqa are Muslims. Secondly, that some wore it because they didn’t want to be sexually harassed, not because they were very religious. It taught me not to be too judgemental about how women dressed.

 

Indeed, a statistic in TIME magazine suggested that French politicians had overreacted. Of the estimated 5 million Muslims in France, TIME reported, only about 2,000 wear full-face veils. 

In other words the hysteria over the burqa in France is because a miserly 0.04 per cent of the Muslim population wear it!

 

However, what truly blew me away was an opinion article in the popular technology magazine WIRED. 

According to the article, scientists are working towards what is called “cultured meat”, “invitro meat” and “artificial meat”. When the meat has grown, it tastes every bit like regular beef or fish, whatever your fancy is.

The big difference is that no animal will have been slaughtered.  Now the writer, Warren Ellis, observed that in medieval times cannibalism was common. Also that human meat is the most delicious of all, but we don’t eat it because it would involve murder.

 

So if you can culture human meat, what moral problem is there in eating a “manburger”?  Good question.

We end in France, again. The Sunday Times of London reports that recently an international conference on, wait for it, yawning was held in Paris. 

 

Apparently, contrary to the view we have that if someone yawns at you he or she is being disrespectful, the opposite is true.

 

The conference heard that if people yawn at you, it means they fancy you. That is because a yawn can indicate a wide range of emotions and states: interest, stress, the desire for sex.

We owe this precious knowledge to respected Dutch academic Wolter Seuntjens. Seuntjens came up with the theory of the “erotic yawn” after noticing that sexologists were often consulted by people whose partners yawned when they were in bed.

 

If all this tells us anything, it’s that we should not be too certain of our knowledge. We are still quite ignorant about our world.