A thousand women staged a silent rally outside Parliament in the strife-torn Central African Republic on Monday, their mouths bandaged in a mute protest against violence towards women.
Civilians including women and children are bearing the brunt of a surge in violence in the country, aid agencies have warned, with torched villages and abuses including murder, rape and torture.
“Stop violence against women. I am not an object,” or “No to murders, torture, rape” read banners held by women of all ages and religions who planned to cover their mouths with white tape from 6am to 6pm to make their case.
Women with their mouths covered with pieces of cloth gather on the steps of the National Assembly in Bangui as part of an anti-violence demonstration. (Pic: AFP)
Held in Bangui as part of International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women, the rally aimed to raise awareness of the spike in violence between unidentified armed groups and former rebel fighters.
It is the deadliest the country has experienced since March, when a coalition of rebel groups known as Seleka deposed president Francois Bozize, who had ruled since a 2003 coup.
In his place they installed the mostly-Christian country’s first Muslim leader, President Michel Djotodia.
Djotodia received a delegation of women at the presidential palace on Monday, but said he would wait until the protest was over before discussing their concerns.
“Since you are not talking we will wait until the time comes to organise a meeting and discuss the problems women are facing,” he said, before donating two cattle and $6 000 to the movement.
The president said his wife should have been present “but since this morning she has not said a word”.
“I talk to her and she doesn’t reply. I ask myself: Why isn’t my wife speaking? And I am told she is observing the movement of Central Africa’s women.”
The Rex, a single-storey, slope-roofed movie house was once the hotspot for film fans in Ghana, but, like many of the country’s cinemas, it hardly shows movies anymore.
The building is now abandoned, except on Sundays when dozens of evangelical Christians cram through its century-old walls for weekly, boisterous prayers sessions.
The Rex theatre in Accra, Ghana. (Pic: AFP)
The Rex’s fate is part of a wider decay of film-going culture in Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence and which become the hub for the continent’s film industry in the immediate post-colonial era, experts said.
But a 29-year-old Ghanaian-American filmmaker, Akosua Adoma Owusu, has launched a plucky grassroots effort to save the picture house and fight the trend.
The “save-your-local-landmark” campaign is commonplace in the West but remains a rarity in some developing countries like Ghana.
For Owusu, the motivation behind “Damn the Man, Save the Rex” was partly personal: after building a reputation abroad as a maker of short films, she realised there was nowhere to show her work in the country of her birth.
“Whether it’s short films or performance or anything, you have to kind of pay a venue to screen your work,” Owusu said.
Owusu, who won the best short film award at the 2013 African Movie Academy Awards and whose productions have been added to the permanent collection at the Whitney Museum in New York, managed to raise $9 000 online.
It was enough to hire out the old movie hall for a night and show her latest work.
But she has bigger plans and wants to convert the Rex into a dedicated artistic space.
If “Save the Rex” succeeds and the structure built in the early 20th century by Lebanese immigrants becomes a permanent film-screening venue, it would double the number of functioning cinemas in Ghana’s capital.
Currently, the only working movie theatre is an American-style cineplex embedded in an upscale shopping centre.
But more are planned to serve the country’s growing consumer class, with Ghana boasting one of the world’s fastest growing economies, fuelled by gold and cocoa exports as well as a nascent offshore oil industry.
Experts voiced frustration at the current state of film culture in the west African nation, recalling a time when the head of state personally oversaw the industry.
At independence in 1957, when Kwame Nkrumah was president, “Ghana was the hub for filmmaking in west Africa and generally Africa,” said Anita Afonu, a director and expert of Ghanaian film history.
Nkrumah believed he could shape opinions in the new nation through indigenous films and personally read scripts and viewed pre-release cuts, she added.
The former president, ousted by the military in 1966, had set up the Ghana Film Industry Corporation, which helped aspiring artists access film and editing equipment.
“His ability to change the mindset of Ghanaians … to tell them (they) are equally worth what the white man thinks he is worth… and to be able to teach them to do things for themselves was very, very paramount,” Afonu said.
After the coup, Ghana’s once-burgeoning film industry crumbled. Military rulers imposed curfews in the capital, keeping people indoors and away from cinemas.
The film corporation’s properties were eventually sold to Malaysian investors, who sloughed off the movie theatres to private owners who gradually converted most of the halls to churches.
As in other countries, the proliferation of DVD technology also devastated historic movie houses such as the Rex.
But the impact has been more acute in Ghana, which is flooded by straight-to-DVD productions from Nollywood, Nigeria’s film industry, which pumps out more than 1 000 titles per year.
Mark Amoonaquah, owner of the Roxy in Accra, said he held on as long as he could, showing movies to the dozen or so people who would sit on the outdoor cinema’s faded blue benches.
Ultimately he had to close temporarily, he said, because unless “a strange movie or a very interesting movie” came out, Ghanaians had effectively abandoned going to the cinema.
Owusu’s films bear little of the shaky camerawork and screaming matches that typify Ghana’s current indigenous productions.
Her latest film, Kwaku Ananse, is a semi-autobiographical imagination of an old Ghanaian folktale and was awarded best short film at this year’s African Movie Academy Awards.
Owusu organised a special screening a local French cultural institute for the film’s debut.
Her next work, she hopes, will open at a renovated Rex.
“I think it would be like the mecca, the place to be,” Owusu said. “Who knows? Perhaps it could make a trend of reviving cinema houses all over that are abandoned.”
Photographer Cristina De Middel’s trip to Nigeria has been profitable. Not only did she exhibit her acclaimed series The Afronauts but also was inspired for her next project.
Tucked away in her suitcase as she left the country’s commercial capital Lagos for Paris last week was a copy of Nigerian author Amos Tutuola’s 1954 novel My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
“It’s about a child who has to flee his village because of war and goes into this magical place called ‘the bush’, a mystical place in Yoruba mythology where all the ghosts and spirits live,” the 38-year-old Spanish photographer told AFP.
“I realised straight away that [the slum neighbourhood of] Makoko could be a great metaphor for ‘the bush’ – a magical place with laws that we don’t understand and shouldn’t be.”
During her time in the teeming megacity, De Middel paid a visit to sprawling Makoko, much of which rises up on bamboo stilts out of the oily Lagos lagoon and is home to hundreds of thousands of people.
As if by magic, her project took shape.
Spooks and ghouls Over four days, De Middel’s imagined ghosts and spirits came alive with the help of local volunteers, market-bought costumes and cheap Halloween accessories brought from London.
In one image, a “ghost” made from an old curtain rises up hauntingly amid the ramshackle, tin-roofed huts and in another seemingly hangs from a sagging washing line.
A third frame shows plastic joke shop spiders, beetles and flies “crawling” over the face of a young man while a mirrored landscape captures the ethereal quality of Makoko through burning wood smoke and a leaden sky.
(Pic: A photo from Cristina De Middel’s acclaimed ‘The Afronauts’ series.)
De Middel was in Nigeria for the fourth edition of Lagos Photo, the annual festival that increasingly attracts some of the biggest names in world photography.
This year her celebrated The Afronauts was shown alongside new works by Cameroon’s Samuel Fosso, known for taking chameleon-like photos of himself dressed as a range of figures from black African and American life.
The former newspaper photographer is finding her own voice in the art world, blurring the lines between fact and fiction with the aim of taking people out of their comfort zone.
The Afronauts was born as she surfed the internet one day and stumbled across an article on an improbable space programme mounted by Zambia in 1964.
“I realised straight away that it was an incredible story that allowed me to play a lot with the photos and give a different point of view about Africa” beyond the old stereotypes of war and famine, she explained.
A storyboard was quickly drawn up of a fantasy adventure in space.
Worldwide acclaim De Middel was not put off by her lack of knowledge of either Africa or space and instead drew on her own catalogue of cliches, from elephants, African material and the arid climate to the first steps on the moon and spacecraft.
The result was a self-published book featuring photographs of African astronauts in colourful space suits, compiled with letters and articles from the time.
One thousand copies of the book were quickly snapped up, helped by the backing of leading British photographer and collector Martin Parr, who was won over by the project.
The Afronauts has now been shown about 20 times across the globe and won its creator the prestigious International Center of Photography (ICP) prize in New York and a nomination for the 2013 Deutsche Boerse award.
A film, co-produced with the Catalan photographer and documentary maker Pep Bonet, is currently in the works.
Every overseas showing has been a chance for De Middel to explore new ideas, as in China where she came back with Party, her own version of Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book
De Middel said the compilation, which was shown at at the annual Paris Photo festival (November 14-17) , was “an adaptation of the communist bible”, containing extracts from Chairman Mao’s book and scenes of modern everyday life in the Asian giant.
She admitted, though, that globe-trotting has taken its toll – not least on where she now calls “home”.
“I’m based in London but I haven’t spent more than 20 days there this year,” she said over tea in a Lagos hotel.
But living out of a suitcase could yet be profitable, as the sketches and doodles in her precious notebooks magically come to life.
The usually straightforward act of going to the toilet is is far from simple in Kibera, the sprawling slum on the edge of Kenya’s capital.
Hundreds of thousands of people, whose homes are little more than makeshift shacks, are crammed into an area that lacks the most basic water and sanitation facilities, and where just one public toilet is available to every 300 people.
The result is two-fold: First, people become adept at holding it in, often spending hours in discomfort. And second, they eventually find relief by doing the necessary in a plastic bag, and then tossing it out onto the street or path outside.
Hence “flying toilets”, one of the many scourges of life in Kibera.
“Sanitation is one of the world’s biggest problems. Forty percent of the world’s population don’t have toilets. They say about 70 percent of the diseases come from the lack of sanitation, where water is polluted,” said Camilla Wirseen, director of a project that proposes an innovative solution to the problem.
Wirseen, who works for the Swedish firm Peepoople, is using Kibera as a testing ground for the Peepoo, a biodegradable, self-sanitising, single-use toilet that could one day provide a cheap, smart fix for the world’s billion slum dwellers.
The Peepoo is a slim bag with a larger liner tucked inside, both made of biodegradable plastic and designed to fit over a small pot. Inside the bag are a couple of spoonfuls of granulated urea, an ammonia that eliminates dangerous pathogens contained in faeces and urine within two to three weeks.
After use, the bag is knotted and taken to a drop-off point – where the family gets a small refund on the bag’s small purchase price because the contents are sold on for fertiliser.
Peepoo Bag. (Pic: peepoople.com)
“Before the project started, flying toilets were everywhere,” Wirseen told AFP, explaining that Kibera residents dare not go out at night to relieve themselves because of security fears.
“It’s also a social problem: women hold all day.”
‘A question of dignity’ Lydia Kwamboka, a 29-year-old Kibera resident and happy Peepoo user, said the freedom to answer the call of nature whenever necessary had had a profound impact on her life.
“Where I stay there are no toilets. When my kids had diarrhoea at night, I just gave them a plastic bag and dumped it in the drainage in the morning. You had to be careful what you stepped on,” she said.
“When Peepoo was brought in, it changed almost everything,” added Ann Wambui, a schoolteacher and another user of the bag.
“You can use it alone. Once used you dispose of it and Peepoo is carried away the same day, while you need money to get the latrines cleaned,” she said.
Peepoo salesperson Patricia Okello, aged 51 and also a Kibera resident, said she believed the part of the slum where Peepoople has been testing the bags since 2010 – currently to the tune of 5 000 a day – was becoming a cleaner, healthier place.
“Before Peepoo, this place was very dirty, the water we drank was not clean. Now we don’t have sicknesses like cholera and typhoid anymore,” she said. “It has brought a big change in my life.”
An illustration of the usage of Peepoo bags and toilets in Kibera. (Pic: AFP)
Wirseen said the aim was for the Kibera project to expand ten-fold over the next year, and twenty-fold by the end of 2015.
While Peepoo’s business model is still unproven as a long-term, sustainable solution – after all, it depends on the world’s poorest people seeing a benefit in paying 200-Kenyan shillings (around USD $2) for something they used to do for free – the Kibera testing ground has at least proved that the product works.
In addition, the firm is hoping the bags can be stockpiled for humanitarian emergencies in order to help refugees from conflict or victims of natural disasters like earthquakes, floods or typhoons before proper sanitation structures can be put in place.
Above all, the project helps highlight how going to the toilet cannot be taken for granted.
“Sanitation,” Wirseen said, “is a problem of dignity.”
Some 40 black models, most of them women, have staged a topless protest in Rio de Janeiro against the low presence of Afro-Brazilians on fashion catwalks.
“What strikes you, your racism or me?” one of the female demonstrators wrote on her chest during the protest late Wednesday timed to coincide with Rio Fashion Week.
The demonstration also coincided with the signing of a deal between the Fashion Week organisers and the Rio ombudsman’s office setting a 10% quota for black models in fashion shows, the G1 news website reported.
“This agreement crowns a joint initiative that can open a space that does not yet exist,” said Moises Alcuna, a spokesperson for Educafro, a civil rights group championing the labor and educational rights of blacks and indigenous people.
Members of the Educafro organisation protest, demanding the increase in the number of black fashion models during the Rio Fashion Week. (Pic: AFP)
More than half of Brazil’s 200-million people are of African descent, the world’s second largest black population after that of Nigeria. But Afro-Brazilians complain of widespread racial inequality.
“If we are buying clothes, why can’t we parade in the [fashion] shows,” asked a 15-year-old model taking part in the protest. “Does that mean that only white women can sell and the rest of us can only buy?”
“Claiming to showcase Brazilian fashion without the real Brazilians amounts to showing Brazilian fashion [only] with white models,” said Jose Flores, a 25-year-old former model who now works in advertising.
After 13 years of debate, President Dilma Rousseff last year signed a controversial law that reserves half of seats in federal universities to public school students, with priority given to Afro-Brazilians and indigenous people.
In June 2009, the Sao Paulo Fashion Week (SPFW) – Latin America’s premier fashion event – for the first time imposed quotas requiring at least 10% of the models to be black or indigenous. Previously, only a handful of black models featured among the 350 or so that sashayed down the catwalk – usually less than 3%.
But in 2010, the 10% quota was removed after a conservative prosecutor deemed it unconstitutional.
