ZIMBABWE
The Standard

Sunday, 15 July 2012

Spending most of our teenage years at a Catholic secondary school, we never really believed that priests and nuns were celibate. It was impossible for us adolescent African boys, born and bred in rural areas, where we received our sex education as soon as we realised we were boys and not girls, to agree to the lie that a real man could live without a woman for all his life.

Our highly patriarchal sex education inculcated into us that boys should have girlfriends, marry them at the appropriate time and have children. The real man loved women and had several at his beck and call. It was, with the benefit of hindsight, the wrong kind of education, hence the now entrenched “small house” phenomenon. It seems our priests also went through the same education.

At the mission school we always paired certain…