A few dozen Moroccans staged a symbolic “kiss-in” Saturday in support of three teenagers arrested for posting pictures on Facebook of two of them smooching.
Only around a dozen couples actually locked lips in the gathering outside Parliament, but the demonstrators insisted they had defended the right to public displays of affection in Morocco’s conservative society.
Participants take part in a “kiss-in” outside the Parliament in the Moroccan capital Rabat on October 12 2013. (Pic: AFP)
The kissing case has sparked uproar online, with netizens protesting against what they see as creeping conservatism in the Muslim country long known for being relatively liberal and tolerant.
More than 2 000 people had indicated they would take part in Saturday’s “kiss-in” but the vast majority failed to show, indicating a gulf between online activism and actual on-the-street protests.
The demonstrators gathered outside Parliament for “a symbolic kiss of love”, one participant, Nizar Benamate, told AFP after the display before a group of onlookers and reporters.
“For us, the message got through. It was a success. There were couples and single people, and the couples were not embarrassed in public,” said Ibtissam Lachgar, one of the organisers.
“Our message is that they are defending love, the freedom to love and kiss freely,” she said.
A small group of counter-protesters shoved some of the couples and threw chairs.
“We are an Islamic country and kissing in public is forbidden. A simple kiss can lead to other things. These are atheists who are acting against Islam,” one of them said.
After the brief scuffle the two groups dispersed peacefully.
The couple at the heart of the case, a boy and a girl aged 15 and 14, and their 15-year-old male friend who took the photos outside their school in the northern town of Nador, were arrested last week, charged with “violating public decency” and held in a juvenile centre.
The case lit up social media, with several young people posting similar kissing pictures on Facebook and Twitter and calling for “kiss-ins” in an online rebellion against conservatives.
Amid mounting pressure, the judge ordered that the teens be released on bail three days later, and their trial Friday was adjourned until November 22 to allow “an inquiry into the social circumstances of the teenagers,” their lawyer said.
“Money is the root of all evil” is a common saying around the world; but it is much more than a saying in Africa. It is the badge of honour accorded to poverty. This is not an argument about the truth behind the root of all evil though, it is a peek into the realities behind the root of money itself. How do genuinely rich people come about their money? How is money created and what is the cause of poverty? Is there even a cause for poverty? Nothing is set in stone but some realities are glaring. We only ignore them at our own peril. Africa must understand the root of money to deal with its age-long challenges with poverty.
There is no cause for poverty. Poverty happens naturally. If you do not produce you are poor. To survive, you are forced to depend on the benevolence of those who have money. You are forced to subject your dignity to the whims of those you beg from. Money on the other hand requires a cause; to make money, whether as a country or as an individual, there are things you need to do. Money is an effect of the process of creating value. The richest countries in the world are countries that are either adding value to products or countries that are creating value through services. Countries that solely depend on exporting mineral resources without adding value get to make some money from their natural endowments, but countries that add value to such products even get to make more off such endowments. This is the secret of poverty and prosperity and hating on these principles doesn’t change the cause and effect nature of their realities.
(Pic: Flickr / Tax Credits)
Like every human phenomenon, the process of making money can be abused. People cheat their way through, people steal, and there are indeed countless ways to abuse the principle of creating wealth but those who want to make money the right way must understand the cause and effect reality behind money. If many Africans are poor, it means many Africans are not creating value. Value creation does not have to come through jobs alone, value creation could come through work. Like it has been said, there may be a shortage of jobs; there is no shortage of work. Working without pay may not result in earning cash right away but it does result in gaining useful experience that would come useful when the paid jobs come. Money, it must be said, is only one of the byproducts of creating value. You learn new, better ways to do or not to do things, you engage your mind productively, you advance yourself and you enjoy the fulfillment of adding your quota to making society a better place.
As a people, we need to face the truths that stare us in the face everyday. How long are we going to continue excusing our collective poverty on things that are beyond us when as a matter of fact, we have the power to get wealth right within our minds and in our hands? How can we continue to pretend money is the root of all evil when we already know poverty is the face, soul and spirit of evil itself? The days of depending on governments must give way to the realisation that government cannot even save itself let alone save the people. We need to hit the farms and the workstations and look to be more productive. We need to learn new, better and faster ways to deal with old and new problems. We need to embrace the realities of a world that now depends on inter-relationships, not as a choice but as an unavoidable consequence of its continued modernity. We can pretend about the realities that exist in the world but our pretense cannot save us from their effects.
Every African reading this must come to an understanding; we cannot continue to blame others for our failings. We have to look at ourselves and seek for answers to our own questions. If we do not take responsibility, we will always be responsible for our failings. Thankfully, today looks far better than the Africa we used to know. Things are fast changing and economies are picking up. We must note that this did not happen in our years of almost complete dependence on aid, but in our newfound penchant for trade. That trade is today much more about natural resources but as long as we invest the money from these to better the lots of our people through education, the services sector that are already springing up across the continent will experience a boom in the face of the continued supply of labour in the coming years.
About 50% of our continent is under 20. That says a lot about our future. It can go either way – we either use this youthful energetic population to produce the much-needed value for our continent and the world, getting the consequential wealth in return, or we prepare for the curse of an idle youth population tomorrow. It is all in the understanding of this truth; value creation is the root of money and as long as we do not create enough value, we will continue to have enough poverty to cry about. It is in our hands. Literally.
Japheth J Omojuwa for Okayafrica, a blog dedicated to bringing you the latest from Africa’s New Wave. Omojuwa lectures at Berlin’s Free University. Connect with him on Twitter.
More than 15 000 women in Addis Ababa make their living from illegally collecting fuelwood from the protected eucalyptus grove atop Entoto Mountain. Every day they travel around 30km to collect and carry branches, twigs and leaves. They sell the fuelwood door-to-door, on street corners or in the many open markets in the city.
Amarech Dorota (52) has been collecting fuelwood for the past twenty years. After her husband died, she had to single-handedly provide for her kids, two of whom are now in high school. “It was challenging to feed the children, so I had to go to the forest every day except on Sundays,” she says.
Dorota is little over five feet tall, sturdily built, with deep wrinkles on her face and hands that testify to a hard-working life. She has no tools so she uses her hands to pull the branches. Once she’s collected enough, she carries the weighty load on her back, strapped to her body by a harness made of cloth which runs over her shoulders and across her chest, and uses a stick for support.
Amarech Dorota outside her home in Dorze Sefer. (Pic: Arefaynie Fantahun)
Dorota is part of the Dorze ethnic group in Ethiopia who are known for their weaving of intricate, colourful borders on Ethiopian traditional dresses. She has lived in Dorze Sefer, which is above the Addis Ababa University and home to many other low-income families, for most of her life. Their houses are made of mud, with wooden doors that open directly onto the street.
Ethiopia now has one of the fastest growing economies in Africa. Despite recent gains in education and health, it still ranks 173 out of 187 countries listed on the Human Development Index. The cost of living and inflation in Ethiopia remains cripplingly high. This makes it harder for Dorota and her family to survive.
“I have now worked for around 20 years. It is not an easy job. It does not pay a lot either. But I am grateful that it helped me support my family without the need of external help. It is very small money. But we don’t complain. We survive,” she says.
Dorota earns about 60 birr ($3) a day selling fuelwood in the local market. She uses this money for food and her children’s school fees.
The eucalyptus plantations in the Entoto area are not privately owned and the women can’t buy the fuelwood legally. This means they often have to endure harassment from authorities. They are vulnerable to beatings and rape at the hands of roving guards, and they often have to pay bribes to them so they do not lose their bundles.
“We encounter a number of problems,” says Emebet Abera, a younger woman who also travels to Entoto to collect fuelwood. “Sometimes we are chased by the forest guards. Sometimes we fall down and break our legs.When the sun is hot, we get really tired and thirsty. Returning home takes longer because the wood is very heavy and we have to stop often to rest. I wish I could have small amount of land around my house so I could sell vegetables and not have to walk all the way to the mountains for wood. But that is not easy,” she says.
Beletech Zewde from the area’s women affairs bureau says that the women are examples of hard work and diligence. “They have shown great courage and strength in dealing with their difficult lives, and their acceptance of adversity is remarkable,” she says. Her bureau, she says, is supporting the Former Women Fuel Wood Carriers Association (WFC) that has existed in the area for nearly two decades. WFC is trying to provide a growing number of women – currently 790 – with alternative sources of income by teaching them skills such as weaving, embroidery, knitting and various handiwork.
The organisation has similar projects in the Yeka, Keranyo and Kolfe areas and is set to expand its reach, targeting an estimated 30 000 women across Addis Ababa who collect fuelwood. They’ll be offering a broader range of skills to them, including forestry management and the marketing of crafts and portable stoves.
Back at Dorota’s house, her daughter is preparing genfo (maize flour) that her mother bought with the money she earned that day from selling fuelwood. It’s nothing fancy, but Dorota says she is proud of being able to take care of her family without having to ask for help.
Arefaynie Fantahun is a blogger based in Addis Ababa. Follow his posts on fashion, art, travel and photographyhere.
I recently visited a primary school in my neighbourhood to run an errand. It was break time when I arrived and the chorus of children’s excited voices had reached its crescendo. As I made my way to the office that I was looking for, I was confronted by emotions that I have become used to feeling each time I enter a government institution: shock at the levels of dilapidation of infrastructure and frustration at the seeming lack of interest in improving it.
As I walked down the concrete pathway, I looked over to the school’s sports field where thick clouds of dust erupted continuously as hoards of children played football.
There used to be a green and fertile lawn on those grounds once.
A Cabinet of three women Upon stopping to spectate, I began to notice a few other things about this match. Firstly, it wasn’t an 11-a-side affair – most informal games aren’t. In fact, I don’t believe there were even sides to begin with, seeing as there were at least 40 children on the turf scrambling for the ball. But secondly, and this more interesting to me, there was a sizeable group of girls sitting in the bleachers half watching the encounter and half engaged in their own conversations.
There were no boys in the bleachers, just as there were no girls on the pitch.
Again, there isn’t much that’s new about this scenario; it plays itself out in schools everywhere. But I began to think about it from a more pointed perspective.
A few weeks ago, Zimbabwe’s Cabinet was announced. Of the 26 ministers appointed, only three are women. This represents an 11.5% female proportion – a figure significantly lower than the 50/50 threshold aspired for by 2015 through the SADC Protocol on Gender and Development. Furthermore, the announcement came at a time when Senegal had just elected feminist leader Aminata Touré as Prime Minister and Rwanda’s Parliament had recorded an unprecedented 64% representation for women in the Chamber of Deputies. While the main focus of Zimbabwe’s new Cabinet has largely been the reinstatement of an old Zanu-PF guard (with the MDC no longer a part of power-sharing), the retrogression of female political participation calls for some expedient action and analysis.
Aminata Touré was appointed prime minister of Senegal on September 1 2013. (Pic: AFP)
As women took to social media to protest, there was a very clear voice from the men – “Well, who did you want them to put?” – as if a defence of turf and territory had erupted within them.
In many ways, I feel that the soccer field scenario yields some of the answers to Zimbabwe’s present female leadership and participation dilemma.
‘Rough’ pursuits are for the boys
Why do the little girls not play football with the boys?
My first response is to say that they – just as the boys who do play – have been socialised to believe that football and other ‘rough’ pursuits are for boys. Girls are supposed to be dainty and pristine in a system that is preparing them for marriage and motherhood.
There is nothing new in this analysis and we know that it generally means that the little girl who wants to play football – or the little boy who wants to sit and talk – each face an incredible amount of pressure to conform to prescribed gendered roles and expectations. Their peers will tease them if they do not; even their teachers and parents might join in.
And with crazed amounts of homophobia in Zimbabwe, anything that sits outside the bounds of ‘normality’ is deeply chastised. I recall once overhearing a father tell his son not to touch or play with his sister’s pink teddy bear because he would “become gay”. The boy, just five, was obviously puzzled. But therein had begun his socialisation around the colour pink, teddy bears and sexuality.
But I also began to look at the football scene from a practical perspective. The playground was dusty and the boys’ uniforms were getting filthy. While already an accepted consequence of ‘playing rough’, there is another layer to the matter.
From what I have observed, most boys do not do their own laundry; a maid or mother or sister or aunt takes care of this chore, leaving the male child free to soil and damage his clothes as much as wants to. Someone else will take care of the mess.
But the same is not usually so for the girls who, in efforts towards entrenching domesticity (or is it independence?), are washing their own clothes long before puberty hits. So playing football with the boys has a few more ramifications than mere social stigma; playing football means getting dirty, and then having to clean the mess up yourself. Put simply, it means extra work. Even if the girls did start to play, they might play with a bit more caution and attention to dirtiness.
So what could, or would, happen if the school I visited decided to invest in growing back its lawn? Could a change in at least some of the girls’ behaviour be seen? Could such a structural modification challenge the socially driven aspects of their action, or inaction?
Supporters of Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe listen to his televised speech during the official opening ceremony of the first session of Zimbabwe’s Parliament in Harare on September 17 2013. (Pic: AFP)
If we change the arena, we may draw a few parallels. Just like football, politics is a dirty game. And the dirtier a woman gets, the more she has to ‘clean herself up’ while facing social stigma for her stance. Furthermore, if a girl is not opened up to the possibility of parity and full participation in her childhood, we shouldn’t expect to magically see this manifest in her when she’s a woman. Even the portfolios that Zimbabwe’s female ministers hold are telling of the positions that are deemed appropriate for a woman: Women’s Affairs (Oppah Muchinguri), Small and Medium Enterprises (Sithembiso Nyoni), Higher and Tertiary Education (Olivia Muchena). Unlike finance or ICT portfolios, these are women’s ‘normalised’ roles, like sitting in the bleachers.
I do not write this to exonerate President Robert Mugabe from blame for his heavily imbalanced Cabinet. But I do write it to make clear to the men who have dismissed women’s protests that they do so from a privileged position in society where all arenas, no matter how dirty, are normalised to their needs and aspirations.
Zimbabwean society needs a social and structural shakeup for women and girls to begin to get somewhere. And this starts with the seemingly small acts that take place during tea and lunch breaks in school yards. Those girls in the bleachers hold some of the solution, as do we, their mothers, sisters, aunts and elders.
Fungai Machirori is a blogger, editor, poet and researcher. She runs Zimbabwe’s first web-based platform for women, Her Zimbabwe, and is an advocate for using social media for consciousness-building among Zimbabweans. Connect with her on Twitter.
This is a true story. Somewhere in Bujumbura, the capital of the small African nation of Burundi, a colonel is building his house. He has laid the foundations, put up a staircase and the exterior walls, now he is fixing a roof. The economy in Burundi, like much of the African continent, is growing, and the price of land is on the rise. But people like our colonel, employed by the public sector, don’t always share in the spoils. In his case, the reward for years of distinguished service in the country’s military is only a few hundred dollars a month.
But the colonel also serves on the African Union Mission in Somalia (Amisom), the UN-backed peacekeeping mission. For this he is much better-paid – earning a few thousand dollars per month. Peacekeeping in Somalia is not for the faint-hearted. Since the country descended into a more or less continuing state of anarchy in 1991, it has harboured fighting clans, factions and terrorists. Amisom forces regularly clash with al-Shabab, the al-Qaeda-inspired group behind last month’s deadly attack on Kenya.
Al-Shabab are now the main cause of instability in Somalia, and instability in Somalia means instability in the whole region. Our colonel – like most people who care about security in Burundi and the rest of East Africa – is concerned about the state of Somalia. “I would like to see peace in Somalia,” the colonel says. “But not yet. Not until I’ve finished building my house.”
The truth is that instability in Somalia has costs and it has benefits. The fact that al-Shabab is able to use large parts of the country as a terrorist training ground presents a horrific cost. Not least the death of 67 innocent people at the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi when members laid siege, gunning down families as they sat at cafes and shopped at the supermarket.
The benefits, however, are financial, immediate and far-reaching. One senior Kenyan politician told me that Somalia is a “free-for-all”, giving foreign powers the legitimacy to maintain a military presence in the country and control over the lucrative trade in commodities such as charcoal – once a major source of income for al-Shabab.
And so there was little protest when European donors meeting in Brussels last month decided that the time was right to pledge an extra £1.5-billion for “rebuilding the nation”, despite the fact that, according to a UN group of experts, 80% of withdrawals from Somalia’s central bank are known to be used for private purposes and not for the running of government.
Former Conservative party leader Michael Howard has just spearheaded Somalia’s first new oil deal, despite the widely held view that chaos still reigns in its natural resource sector. Howard, who is non-executive chairperson of new company Soma Oil and Gas, signed the deal in Mogadishu in August, months after the Somali government said the fragile state was not yet ready for oil exploration, and the UN warned such deals could “threaten peace and security”.
The US has recommended the arms embargo on Somalia be lifted despite the fact that Somalia has no proper warehousing, chain of custody or management system for weapons. Recommendations that the UN conduct systematic asset-freezing of senior al-Shabab figures at the heart of the murky trade and transactions in and out of significant parts of Somalia have been largely ignored.
Into this fray steps a woman – originally from the United Kingdom – whose story as told in the British press is such an enthralling mix of the exotic, the horrific and the familiar that the ensuing intrigue can almost single-handedly power the Twittersphere. Enter Samantha Lewthwaite, aka the “white widow”, a British convert to Islam whose husband Germaine Lindsay killed 22 in the London 7/7 bomb attacks. She fascinates in the way that white women who wear hijab generally do – I’ve seen them stared at on the tube in London – and because we still don’t believe that women can be terrorists.
A photo of a fake South African passport of Samantha Lewthwaite released by Kenyan police in December 2011. (Pic: AFP/Kenyan police)
Lewthwaite has caught the imagination of the Kenyan press for some time, since police disrupted an alleged terrorist ring she was financing, but somehow allowed Lewthwaite to escape, believing she was an innocent tourist.
But far from being anything so straightforward, Lewthwaite is a series of apparent contradictions. Born in Northern Ireland, her father fought against the IRA, yet the cause she has chosen is jihadism. When Lindsay blew himself up on the Piccadilly line, she described the attack as “horrific”, but it seems what she actually believes is that his act of terrorism was a sacrifice which meant that for her, “the hereafter promised to be sweeter”.
The ratings appeal of a character such as Lewthwaite is obvious. You only have to look as far as Homeland – an entire series based around our fascination with western-born, white jihadist terrorists, which returns to UK screens this weekend – to find evidence of this. One character in the hit US show, which centers on a US marine who turns into a would-be suicide bomber, is Aileen Morgan, an American woman who plays a key role in a terrorist plot.
“She has the face of an angel, but she’s a killer,” the US press cooed, presumably referring to the fact that actress Marin Ireland, who plays Morgan, is blonde-haired and blue-eyed, which is not how terrorists are supposed to look.
There are plenty of Somali-Brits, Somali-Canadian and other Somali dual citizens suspected of involvement with al-Shabab, but they are black and Somali-looking, and therefore their capacity for violence is apparently less surprising.
Nor is it just the fact that Lewthwaite is a woman that makes her story so unique. On the FBI’s most wanted list of terrorists is also Assata Shakur, a 65-year-old grandmother who has been hiding in Cuba for decades after she was alleged to have been involved in the shooting of a US state trooper – an involvement she has always denied. It is the fact that Lewthwaite is a white convert to Islam that fascinates.
The media obsession with Lewthwaite reminds me of something that has irritated me for years: I cannot name a major Hollywood film set in Africa that does not involve a white American as the main character. This goes back to Zulu – ostensibly about the Anglo-Zulu war, but really about Michael Caine; Out of Africa – set in Kenya but really about Meryl Streep and Robert Redford; Lord of War – set in Liberia but really about Nicholas Cage; Tears of the Sun – set in Nigeria but really about Bruce Willis and Monica Bellucci; Blood Diamond – set in Sierra Leone but really about Leonardo Di Caprio … the list goes on. Even Amistad – a film specifically about the impact on Africans of the transatlantic slave trade – is as much a film about the character played by Anthony Hopkins than it is about any African slave.
Samantha Lewthwaite is the white, western character we need in order to remain interested in a story that is primarily African. That is not to suggest her role in the Westgate attack was pure fiction. Like many other journalists in Kenya during the aftermath of the attack – trying to sift through the uncontrollable stream of fact and fiction emanating from its tragic ruins, I heard credible reports of a white, female jihadist wielding a gun.
One witness said he saw two white women with weapons directing the attack. There were reports in the Kenyan press of a white woman smearing herself with blood so that she looked like one of the more than 1 000 innocent people injured or caught up in the attack, desperately trying to escape.
Whether or not she was involved in the Westgate attack, Lewthwaite is already wanted for terrorist offences in Kenya and is believed to be hiding in Somalia. It’s the kind of place the most wanted woman in the world would choose to hide out, because despite two decades and millions of dollars in aid, years of training the military, the arms embargos, UN monitoring, expert recommendations and reports, it remains in a state of chaos. That, of course is the real story. But it does not have the face of an angel.
