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.
What happens to women in “villagization”? Don’t ask the news media
January 18, 2012 By Leave a Comment
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 2 Comments
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.
The Assault on Patriarchy in Tunisia
October 25, 2011 By 1 Comment
By Dan Moshenberg
Tunisians went to the polls on Sunday, October 23, 2011. Remember the date, because it’s historic. It’s the first free elections of the Arab Spring, which is, in large part, an African Spring. Tunisia. Egypt. Libya. Maybe Algeria next, maybe Morocco. Who knows? Maybe Zimbabwe. If the Prime Minister of Zimbabwe can declare that gay rights should be included in the new Constitution … anything can happen. Anything can happen, that is, when people organize and push.
When Mubarak left office, in February, the Western press described the event as Mubarak stepping down. Mubarak didn’t step down. He was pushed … by Egyptian women in league with many others. When Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and his crew fled the country, again, it was women who pushed … and have kept on pushing.
The Jasmine Revolution, from its inception, was more than “just” the eviction of a dictator. It was an assault on patriarchy, one that emerged from and as part of a decades long process of women and youth organizing. Women like Munira Thibia, a young homeless activist who mobilized and organized. Women like Saida Garrachi of the Association of Democratic Women, women who have made a democracy by acting democratically. Women writers and bloggers like Amira Yahyaoui and Imen Braham, both candidates for office in Sunday’s elections, young women who sought more than an end to censorship, more than freedom of expression. They sought and seek freedom itself, in action. Or Lina Ben Mhenni, another young woman blogger, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, who boycotted the election rather than endorse the illusion of democracy. The struggle, and the work of re-invention, continues.
You need Nicholas Kristof
October 15, 2011 By 6 Comments
By Dan Moshenberg
O my friends, there is no friend! If you’re an African girl in trouble, there are only two things you can rely on. Your courage … and Nicholas Kristof. At least, that’s what Kristof would have us believe.
The story Kristof tells is the story he’s told before. This time he’s in Sierra Leone. A 15-year-old girl named Fulamatu is raped by her neighbor. This happens repeatedly, and Fulamatu remains in terrified and terrorized silence. She loses weight, becomes sick. Finally, when two girls report that the pastor had tried to rape them, Fulamatu’s parents put two and two together, and asked their daughter, who reports the whole series of events. They take her to the doctor, where she is found to have gonorrhea. Fulamatu lays charges against the pastor, who flees.
That’s where Kristof comes in.
