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Africa: Italian Court Gives Mistresses the Right to Lie Under Oath
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The Nation (Nairobi)
OPINION
27 March 2008
Posted to the web 26 March 2008
Charles Onyango-Obbo
ALL TOO OFTEN, WHEN WE in Africa are battling hunger, war, corrupt politicians and disputed elections, and look at the parts of the globe that are settled and concerned with lifestyle issues, like the cost of plastic surgery, we tend to think the world is very different.
Well, yes and no. Take the results of a recent survey in the UK reported in The Independent. It found that two thirds of the population is not getting the recommended hours of sleep at night, with many people lying awake worrying about . . . you guessed right, money!
Money was the main factor keeping people up at night, with more than half of insomniacs citing worries over finances as their biggest nocturnal concern. I can't imagine a bigger cause of lack of sleep all over the world than money, proving yet again our common brotherhood and sisterhood.
Interestingly, loneliness and troubled relationships don't make a showing. Presumably, it is because the world is getting better at fixing these kinds of problems.
For example, according to The Times, another study, this time in the USA, has found that if men really want to rekindle the marital flame and win even more affection from their partners, it is not flowers or candlelit dinners that will do it for them.
Apparently, nothing works more miracles with women than a man who does housework - you know; dusting, taking out the rubbish, doing the dishes, and so on. The rewards for the men who do housework, the study found, are almost immeasurable (better not to go into the details).
Unfortunately, housework is the one thing that men are, generally, hopeless at. Still, the figures showed that the amount of women's time devoted to housework has decreased considerably over the years (who doesn't know someone whose wife only steps into the kitchen when she is passing through to the garage?)
On the bright side too, the amount of paid work for women has increased considerably. Men's paid work, on the other hand, has decreased. It is a reverse of fortunes because, in the West at least, the amount of time men spend on family work of all kinds has increased.
Men, for instance, have tripled the amount of time they spend on childcare since the 1960s. I guess one can argue that these statistics don't tell us much, because if men were initially doing nothing around the house, it is easy to notch up a 300 per cent increase.
All said, we should have seen it coming. In the good old days, to use the words of The Independent, "a real man was expected to bring the bacon home".
NOW THAT THE LADIES CAN BUY their own bacon, it only stands to reason that they would expect men to cook it and bring it to them.
These improvements in the lives of women are breaking out everywhere you look. Consider what happened in Italy barely two weeks ago. The Court of Cessation, the highest appeal court in the country, cleared a woman who was convicted previously of giving false testimony to police.
The woman, known as Carla under Italian privacy laws, had denied lending her mobile phone to her lover, Giovanni. The chap was convicted of abusive behaviour after he used the phone to make threatening calls to Carla's estranged husband.
The appeals court ruled that a mistress may lie under oath without committing perjury to protect her honour. The judges said Carla had lied, not only to protect her honour, but also because the revelation that she had a lover could have affected her legal battle with her husband over their separation.
It is not clear whether the ruling also applies to men with mistresses.
Before you hail Italy's Court of Cessation as progressive, remember that it was the same one that some years ago ruled that a woman could not be raped if she was wearing tight jeans because such trousers could only be removed with her consent.
The ruling was reversed after the feminists of the world united against it. In my own dusty town at the Equator, the feminists - all in jeans and black T-shirts - mobilised a huge rally and presented a petition to the Italian embassy.
The world continues to change in more ways than getting women out of the kitchen and men in. In the last few weeks, demographers have been mulling what kind of world this shall be when, as is about to happen, the majority of its citizens take to living in cities.
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In 1900, The Observer reminds us, only 16 cities in the world had a population of more than one million. Today, that figure is up to more than 400.
The population of Shanghai in China has increased by 800 per cent since the 1920s. Residents in the city use nine million bicycles.
58 new residents arrive in Lagos every day. In 1950, Lagos had 300,000 people. Today, it has more than 10 million! On the other hand, though, 51 per cent of homes in Berlin are one-person households. Boy!
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