Intwali ya Murangira

I have been reflecting on the debate around how some of our young people dress, and I wonder whether we are asking ourselves the deeper questions. When concerns are raised about increasingly revealing fashion trends, the conversation quickly becomes: “Why does the State want to police our bodies?” But perhaps we should also ask: who is shaping these trends in the first place, and why? Parents in different parts of the world have pointed out something interesting: clothes marketed to little girls are often shorter, tighter or more appearance-conscious than equivalent clothes for little boys of the same age. Why? Why are girls introduced so early to the idea that femininity is connected to displaying the body? And why, as they grow older, is that message reinforced through fashion, advertising, music, dance, films, music videos and social media, where the female body is so often presented through the lens of sexual desirability? This is not an argument that the female body is inherently provocative. It is not. Nor should women and girls be made responsible for managing other people’s sexuality by simply being told to cover themselves. The question is not what is wrong with the female body. The question is why our culture and commercial industries so persistently commodify it. And there is another dimension to this conversation that matters to me: cultural identity. For many years, much of what we wore was imported—not only the clothes themselves, but increasingly the ideas of what was fashionable, modern, attractive or desirable. But modernity does not have to mean cultural erasure. Across our continent, we can see powerful examples of societies that have made their cultural identity part of contemporary fashion. Nigeria, among others, has demonstrated how local fabrics, patterns, craftsmanship and aesthetics can be worn with pride and continuously reimagined for modern lifestyles. That should challenge us too. What does contemporary Rwandan fashion look like when it is confident enough to draw from who we are, while remaining creative, youthful and open to the world? This is not about freezing culture in the past, prescribing one acceptable way of dressing, or rejecting influences from elsewhere. Culture has always evolved. The question is whether we are participating in that evolution as creators, or simply consuming what others create for us. Industries manufacture aspiration. Algorithms amplify it. Celebrities normalize it. Markets profit from it. And when we do not produce enough of our own cultural references, other people’s definitions of beauty, desirability and modernity can very easily become our own. So before reducing every conversation about these trends to “the State wants to control our bodies,” perhaps we should encourage our young people—girls and boys alike—to exercise something even more important than the freedom to choose: the critical thinking to interrogate the choices being presented to them. Who benefits from this trend? Who defined this as desirable? Why is sexual visibility so disproportionately expected of the female body? What parts of ourselves are we losing when we imitate without questioning? And what could we create if we looked at our own culture not as something belonging to the past, but as material for the future? Freedom is not only the ability to choose. It is also the ability to understand what is shaping our choices—and the confidence to create alternatives of our own.