Rarely does news of any kind flow to the street in its purest form. No matter the topic of interest there is bound to be some distortion both by the optimists and pessimists. Facts are often thrown to the bin and pedestrian thinking embraced. But it’s the simple thinking that projects our wishes, fears and all.
Most of us own television sets and are not as 100% ignorant as some clients think. There are girls who will be late for work watching soap operas. And some nights are killed casually discussing politics.
So it was when the mayor said he will look into the possibility of legalising prostitution in the city. That evening word on the street was that prostitution was already legalised. There was no entertaining thought of possibility. None of us seemed to have an idea who our representatives were. The champions who had convinced the mayor to make such a wonderful decision. In my corner of the street, we didn’t dwell on them; our focus was in practicing the sarcastic laughter and statements that we would throw at the askari when they came over. Because we think them as the thickest of all beings, we were sure they had missed the legalisation communication.
Like I wrote before, there has always existed a cold war between the council askari and us. And it gives us so much pleasure whenever we have one up against them. Legalisation was our equivalent of the
collapse of the Soviet Union. And almost as Gorbachev did, the mayor seemed to have pulled the carpet from under the feet of his own officers. Victory has never felt much more ecstatic.
Here on the street, we don’t view our work as illegal. We don’t consider the arrests by the policemen and askari as a way of implementing the law. To us, it’s more like them taking advantage of a weaker and despised class of society to make an extra coin. The rudimentary manner in which the police and askari act in such situations erases the hallowed of the law. There is something about the city council
enforcers with their tattered uniforms or plain clothes, the old vans that lean on one side, and the way they sneak and handle us that make them look like gangsters rather than custodians of the law. Perhaps only one in ten girls arrested by the askari ends up in court. We know the drill. The bribe we are to give depends on the time of the night, day of the week, and so forth. It’s like an exercise of power.
But of course the askari have the law on their side. I know there are city by-laws that make our trade illegal. And that part of the constitution quoted by the judges when sentencing us to three months.
I remember during the campaigns to pass the new constitution, some people came and told us that the new constitution would allow us to operate freely. As usual, assuming our ignorance, they talked in
generalities and with no specifics of the particular clauses that would make that possible. When the constitution was passed, the city council continued with its old ways, and when the same people came and told us about the Bill of Rights, we dismissed them.
Our victory dance blinded us from the full implications of legalisation. And only after we had tired of imagining how we would literary show the askari our asses did some of us start asking questions. The most disturbing issue was our being allowed to operate only in certain areas. By default, every girl on the street has a particular area where she works. No one does the allocation, but we rely on
some unwritten rules of distribution and convenience. No one wants the crowded sections, and so are the very lonely parts. Then, if you have a regular customer, you want to make it easy for him to find you. Why let them go from one end of the street to the other and possibly fall for competition?
The possibility of disrupting that equilibrium was unsettling. The mayor, it was said, had suggested the area around the Holy Family basilica. All of the city centre street girls are leaning on the church’s fence. We wouldn’t fit not to mention how the church might fall to temptation.
That night I was picked before the city council could come. But they came. As we were tapping our asses ready to shake them to the askari one final time, they must have been in a meeting of their own. “There
is no way prostitution is ever going to be legalised in this city,” one of them must have said, not from a moral point of view but an economic one. And then something like, “Let’s go tell them that.”
The mayor, as you know, back tracked sooner than later under pressure from politicians. I don’t think the politicians have the moral right to criticise prostitution, not the least because some of those with loud
Mouths are johns but also because of the relatively worse sins of corruption and incitement that they commit. But then those are politicians; they will say anything to please a congregation of
possible voters. But what about the larger society?
Crime, it has been said, is not a finite problem. That arresting all prostitutes in the trade at the moment won’t eradicate the vice as others view it. Validating prostitution may not be a solution but will
not make it worse. It might even make it manageable and directly productive to the government. See what happened after the live and let live HIV campaign? When people openly confronted the disease and the stigma associated with it. The truth of the matter is, as illegal as it is, any man wishing to pay for sex will do it very easily. However, it is preferable to bury the head in the tits rather than ask why
girls get into prostitution, and why men create the demand.
Of late, I have observed younger and more educated girls are getting into the trade. People, perhaps like me, who, with some effort, could get better opportunities elsewhere. Some with day jobs already. So why choose the Street? For a moment, forget the often quoted reasons of poverty and think laziness, freedom, the good life, class pressure, protest, and political role models. Think greed and the unflattering character of our society.
