How Dany's Playlist Covers the Ups and Downs of Feminism

By Beth
 
It is my third day in Sao Tome e Principe and already I feel like I have a family. I am very lucky to be able to say this. Dany decides to take me to explore the north coast today. He loves driving Ned's pick-up truck, cruising through the city streets at nearly 80km per hour. Without speed limits, we are free to ride the wind as we plunge from the city center to forests thick with banana trees, to shantytowns up in the mountains, to dry, vast meadows overlooking the disturbingly blue ocean.

We roll the windows down and drive, bounding over potholes and puddles, seatbelts off, free to live, free to die (on my first day I was made fun of so much for wearing a seatbelt that I promptly stopped. Apparently it's just not the Santomense way). The CD Dany plays is usually some mix of Sao Tome radio's best- mainly thick Kizomba beats from Cape Verde and Brazil. The first song is titled “I Need a Girlfriend”. For the past three days I have listened to this song with zeal, as the verses are sung with in densely African Portuguese but the phrases repeat in English. It's a cute song: “I need a girlfriend, a freakin' girlfriend, I need a girlfriend” and then something about how that girlfriend should be the woman that this man is singing to, I believe. I listen to it and smile at the vulnerability that this man presents to his future girlfriend. The urgent need for someone that he can love and protect. A need that isn't necessarily communicated, as I have seen, from African men. So it's nice to hear something of this flavor.

Until I come to today, that is, when I finally really listen to the bridge, which goes something like, “One girl, two girls, all these shorties ain't enough for me." Then we're back to square one.
Everywhere we drive there are beautiful painted murals with phrases above them. They are, for the most part, socially

A condom-filled tree reminds teens to use protection in order to prevent the spread of HIV and AIDS

conscious publicity tactics: promoting healthy living in hopes that the community will follow suit. A happy couple in bed is surrounded by mosquito nets, condoms dance and smile, babies doddle with syringes next to them (to encourage vaccination) and, my favorite, a cheerful, carefree family of four holds hands, above which it reads something along the lines of, “wouldn't you be happy to be able to give attention to all of your children?”, thus encouraging manageable family sizes. A few minutes down Dany's playlist comes a song  about these two people that send furtive text messages to each other. But the man isn't swayed by these flirtatious messages he receives. “Eu tenho lar, eu tenho filho, eu tenho ma mulher comigo,” he sings. “I have a home, I have a child, I have my wife with me.” There it is. Satisfaction in the nuclear family. The song breathes the spirit of the murals around town.

I bring these two songs up because, as Dany cautiously explained to me over lunch, polygamy is extremely common among Santomense men, and nearly extinct among the women. To each woman, her one man. But to each man, two or three women. And through this a thicket of jealousy grows. And rightly so, I might add. I can't help but ask where the women are when these two male singers indirectly debate the right of women to be treated as treasures, as monogamic entities. Apparently their voices have been taken from them. In these two songs at least.

Yet the irony rocks me. It seems wherever one goes, there are signs pressing the importance of condom use, of monogamy, and of other subject matter. But the numerous children that run through the streets are evidence enough that the murals and the real world here are entire opposites. They could quite possibly encompass entirely different worlds. In fact, the closest I think they have ever really gotten to each other is somewhere around the distance sound covers in four minutes; the length of the song that comes between them on Dany's ever-popular cruising playlist.