The Guardian reports: “Cash payments help cut HIV infection rate in young women, study finds: Research in Malawi finds girls who receive regular payments are able to resist attentions of older men and avoid infection.” The headline pretty much says it all … or does it?
Pay young women in Malawi to prevent HIV infection?
February 16, 2012 By 2 Comments
What’s wrong with abortion?
February 9, 2012 By 7 Comments
Oprah Winfrey’s expensive South African education
January 28, 2012 By 10 Comments
The ‘world’ cares about South African education! OK, that’s not really true. But it did pay attention recently to one school … sort of. Earlier this month the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, or OWLAG, held its first graduation. 72 of the original 75 girls walked down the aisle, to much applause and with good reason. The young women worked hard, and now they’re off to University and hopefully to all that a very high-priced education can offer. One can hope.
What happens to women in “villagization”? Don’t ask the news media
January 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment
On Monday, Human Rights Watch released a major report: ‘Waiting Here for Death’: Forced Displacement and ‘Villagization’ in Ethiopia’s Gambella Region. Villagization is “the clustering of agropastoral and/or shifting cultivator populations into more permanent, sedentary settlements.” It’s rural gentrification, in which vulnerable populations are forcibly relocated, often at gunpoint and never with any consultation, so that the land might become ‘more productive.’ Gambella is the westernmost part of Ethiopia, the part that juts into South Sudan. It’s just finishing the first of a three year villagization program that, ‘if all goes well’, will forcibly remove whole swaths of semi-nomadic, indigenous Nuer and Anuak people and communities.
You remember Caster Semenya
January 16, 2012 By 2 Comments
There was a big birthday party a week or so ago, in South Africa. No, not that one, not the ANC centenary, although, amazingly, people are still debating that blowout a whole week later, including how some of the VIPs got to experience what ordinary people endure everyday. This was a party of now, of today and tomorrow and then some. On January 7, Caster Semenya turned 21, and she celebrated in style, in her home village of GaMasehlong in Moletjie near Polokwane. She partied with her new coach, Maria Mutola, with the “People’s Poet” and mbaqanga singer Mzwakhe Mbuli, her family and friends, including sister athlete Ashleigh Trotter. Semenya is beaming. The pictures and reports indicate a truly joyous event.
2011: The Year of the Woman
December 21, 2011 By 11 Comments
It was a great year, maybe one of the best ever, for direct action in-the-streets in-your-face pro-democracy movements, and they were largely pushed and pulled by women. Starting with Tunisia, food uprisings spread quickly to Egypt, Algeria, and elsewhere across the continent. Sometimes, big men were pushed out.
Dances with Samburu
December 17, 2011 By 1 Comment
The Samburu of northern Kenya are pastoralists, and they are under attack. According to Survival International, two US-based charities — the Nature Conservancy and the Africa Wildlife Foundation — bought lots of land, from Daniel arap Moi. How did he get the land? Good question.
The new sheriff
December 9, 2011 By 11 Comments
About a week ago, the International Criminal Court announced that Fatou Bensouda would succeed Luis Moreno Ocampo as Chief Prosecutor. This could be big news, but you wouldn’t know it from The New York Times, who barely reported the announcement.
Fatou Bensouda is from Gambia. And she means business. Some people think she may be exactly what is needed to set things right.
Angolan Independence
November 16, 2011 By 1 Comment
By Dan Moshenberg
On Friday, November 10, 2011, Angola marked its 36th Independence Day since the proclamation of independence, November 10, 1975. It’s a few days later but better way to acknowledge the day than to focus on … Angola asylum seekers? By and large, the Western media paid no attention to Angola on Friday, but then again what else is new.
The great exception was Radio Netherlands Worldwide, which sported a piece entitled, “The `Mauros’ who could not stay.” `Mauro’ is Mauro Manuel, an 18 year-old Angolan lad who was recently informed he could stay in the Netherlands, where he’s lived, with a foster family, for the last eight years. Mauro wasn’t given asylum, but, on Tuesday last week, he was allowed a reprieve. The Dutch Parliament gave him a student visa. What happens next is up in the air.
The “other `Mauros’” are women.
Amalia is 17, Tucha is 19. Their father was killed, for political activities, and the older sister was raped. That’s when they fled Angola. They lived in the Netherlands for five years. Then, they were denied asylum and, after five years, shipped back to Angola. No matter that Amalia was 16 at the time, a minor. No matter that no one knows where their relatives are or even if they are. A year on, they still don’t know if their mother is dead or alive.
“At the other end of the scale”, according to RNI, is Engracia. 33 years old. Completed her education in the Netherlands, where she lived for 14 years. No political violence. Supported by middle class kin in Angola and the Dutch Refugee Council, who paid for her ticket back and gave her 2000 euros.
So that’s the RNI Angola Scale: weeping, terrorized, impoverished failed asylum seeking girl, on one end; successful, entrepreneurial woman, on the other. On one end, desperately poor and with no apparent means of securing income; on the other, `gifted’ handsomely, as a `returning refugee’, by the largesse of Europe.
Really? That’s the scale?
What about all those other women in Angola? What about the ones who organize, struggle, and keep on keeping on?
Uganda’s Guantánamo
October 31, 2011 By 7 Comments
By Dan Moshenberg
Last week Ingrid Turinawe, the leader of the Forum for Democratic Change (FDC) Women’s League, in Uganda, was sent to the infamous Luzira Prison.
Everywhere one looks, there are “infamous” prisons. For the United States, for example, Guantánamo, with its regime of torture and its regimen of violence, is but the tip of a national iceberg. Every country has at least one. In Uganda, it’s Luzira Prison.
