That was the stage name for a young man who won the title of Miss Jacaranda at a drag queen pageant in Zimbabwe. He refused to give his real name because he feared for his safety in a country whose president has described homosexuals as “worse than pigs and dogs”.
The flamboyant pageant, one of the biggest gay and lesbian events in Zimbabwe, was held discreetly last weekend in an isolated farmhouse on a forest-shrouded hilltop on the outskirts of Harare.. It was the finale of the annual ZimPride week, which included low-key events such as a film-screening and a launch of Out in Zimbabwe: Narratives of Zimbabwean LGBTI Youth, a book on experiences of young people coming out about their sexuality to families and society. The events were publicised by word of mouth and messaging on social media.
Sodomy is a crime in Zimbabwe, punishable by at least seven years in prison. President Robert Mugabe has said gays should be castrated. However, there were no police raids on any of this year’s gay pride events; gay activists say it is not an offense to dress in drag, a common feature in the nation’s amateur theater productions. Despite anti-gay policy, attacks on people in same-sex relationships are few and isolated to occasional pub brawls.
Some gays speculate that Mugabe, in power for decades, has harshly criticised gays to win popular support and is not intent on enforcing the sodomy law rigorously even though his government exercises tight control over society.
The 17-year-old winner Ezmerald Kim Kardashian wore a long, shimmering, purple dress and beat eight other contestants, many wearing makeup, high heels, skimpy beach wear and sequined dresses. Dozens of spectators cheered and whistled at the catwalk.
Contestants in the Miss Jacaranda pageant. (Pic: AP Exchange)
“I want you all to be proud of who you are, regardless of what anyone thinks about us,” pageant organiser Sam Matsipure told contestants.
Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe (Galz), the group that organised the event, said it wanted to celebrate its pride week with a street parade, as in other countries, but feared prosecution or even violence.
The farmhouse provided a safe haven for the young men who vied for the pageant crown, chatting in the dressing room while stuffing rolled socks in each other’s bras.
They said the pageant was a way of expressing a femininity that they keep in check while in public.
“Events like these raise my sense of self-worth in a country that hates us,” said one participant who identified “herself” as Coco DaDiva.
In 1996, the Galz group’s first exhibit of literature about homosexuality, safe sex and human rights at the annual Harare International Book Fair was trashed by members of Mugabe’s political party, forcing the group to abandon public displays.
It was at the book fair that Mugabe denounced gays as “worse than pigs and dogs” and declared that homosexuals “don’t have any rights at all”. – Sapa-AP
Using a sharp kitchen knife, “plant doctor” Daniel Lyazi sets to work dissecting a slime-covered cabbage at a farmers’ market in Mukono, central Uganda, where the devastating cassava brown streak disease was first identified in 2004.
“There’s a small caterpillar which is eating the cabbage and according to me it’s a diamond-back moth,” he tells the group of farmers who crowd around his table.
He advises the cabbage grower to switch to a different pesticide and in the next season inter-plant with onions (as an additional repellent to moths), and fills out a form with this prescription before turning to the next “patient”, an under-sized cassava tuber.
“Plant clinics” like this one, free of charge and open to all, were piloted in Mukono from 2006 and in the past year have been scaled out to 45 (out of 112) of Uganda’s local government districts, according to the UK-based Centre for Agriculture and Bioscience (Cabi).
Plant doctor is not an official title; the term has been adopted by Cabi for the 1 000 agricultural extension workers it has helped to train as part of its Plantwise programme. Since 2010 Plantwise has set up plant clinics in 24 countries, (three in West Africa and nine in East Africa). In August it opened 13 in Zambia.
A plant health clinic in Machakos, Kenya. (Pic: IRIN / Cabi)
Plant pests and diseases are major threats to food security and livelihoods in most developing countries. Cabi cites research suggesting that worldwide, 40% of the value of plants for food is lost to pests and diseases – (15% to insects and 13% each to weeds and pathogens) – before they can be harvested by farmers.
That research dates from 1994 and did not cover some staple crops, such as cassava, for which the losses to brown streak disease alone have been 30% to 70% in the Great Lakes region, according to the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA).
Crop scientist Eric Boa, who pioneered plant clinics for Cabi, says: “The variety of pests and diseases [in eastern and central Africa] is daunting. Clinic data reveal the farmers present problems on over 30 crops, and plant doctors have to consider over 60 different pests and diseases.”
Farmers’ need for advice was evident at Lyazi’s clinic in Mukono. During a three-hour session, consultations were non-stop and 17 farmers were given detailed recommendations, both verbally and on “prescription” sheets.
Asked if they had been benefitting from the clinics, Erifazi Mayanja, the head of a local farmers’ group, said: “Of course. That’s why we have come in great number today, because of the good advice we are getting.”
Plant clinics versus extension workers
The co-ordinator of the Plantwise programme in Uganda and Zambia, Joseph Mulema, says plant clinics are a far more effective model for getting advice to farmers than the traditional one where extension workers, in theory, visit farms.
“Plant clinics can help so many farmers in a short time,” he says. “In fact, more farmers are seen in a session, if good mobilisation is done, than an extension officer can look at in an entire month. Even if the clinic only runs twice a month, with good mobilisation you can see hundreds of farmers.”
Data collected by researchers in Uganda suggest that normally a plant clinic session provides written recommendations to about a dozen enquiries on average.
However, enquiries may not result in a written prescription, and evidence from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where extension services are hard to find, suggests plant clinics can attract up to 1 000 people per session.
There is also an “exponential” effect of farmers receiving advice at a clinic, passing on the information to neighbours with the same problem, says Misaki Okotel, Uganda co-ordinator for the international NGO Self Help Africa, a partner with Cabi in the Plantwise programme.
There is wide agreement that extension services in countries like Uganda, which has only a few thousand extension officers – (4,300 in 1997, according to research by Nygard et al), needed a new approach to small farmers.
The government has a programme to empower farmers “to demand, pay for and benefit from extension”, but smallholders do not have this capacity, Okotel says.
Government crop protection officer Robert Karyeija suggests an additional reason why the extension services needed help from the Plantwise programme.
“We have thousands of extension workers, but previously farmers would not know where a “plant doctor” was, or whom they could ask for plant health advice,” he explained.
“The extension workers were there, we have agricultural officers in each of Uganda’s 1 100 sub-counties, but the problem [was] they would be general agriculturalists who knew agronomy but didn’t know much about pests and diseases.”
Farmers tend newly planted trees Kimahuri, Kenya. (AFP)
Impact
Little research has been done on the effects of plant clinics. Perhaps the most detailed was a study in Bolivia, summarised in a paper which found clinics “can make large contributions to farmers’ earnings”.
The authors looked at changes in farmers’ incomes in the year after visiting a clinic, minus additional crop protection costs in that year. On the assumption that the difference was down to plant doctors’ advice plus any training, they found the average income gain in one year for those farmers who merely visited plant clinics was US$392, while for those who also had additional training the average gain was $991.
Those figures may overstate the potential income gains for the average farmer (given that visitors to plant clinics may have experienced above average losses to diseases) but they also leave out of account collective benefits from the disease surveillance and wider diffusion of knowledge encouraged by the system.
The authors acknowledge the “survey may lack the statistical certainty of a rigorous impact assessment” since there was no control group, and other factors could have accounted for some of the income gains.
Nevertheless, they conclude that “the clinics have a high positive impact”, one reason being that “the clients come to them, looking for a specific answer; thus they are especially receptive to the advice given”.
The most detailed study of plant clinics in Africa does not attempt to calculate income gains. Instead it looks at the quality of diagnoses and recommendations given by clinics at Mukono and two other locations.
The researchers had only the data on plant doctors’ prescriptions to go by, and were trying to judge its consistency. They assessed 82% of the recommendations as “partially effective” but only 10% as best practice and 8% as ineffective.
The researchers note that soil fertility problems seemed to be neglected by plant doctors and that they seldom mentioned biological remedies.
As for the diagnoses, they could “completely or partially validate”” only 44% of these. This did not mean that 56% of plant doctors’ diagnoses were wrong, but most were ambiguous.
The authors say the results should caution against unrealistic expectations of plant doctors. They point out that very few samples were sent to laboratories, suggesting perhaps that plant doctors prefer not to admit to ignorance.
But given that the extension workers concerned had received only a three-day course from Cabi before being labelled “plant doctors” the results can hardly be taken as invalidating the plant clinic initiative, they suggest.
Plantwise reports that so far its doctors have advised 200 000 farmers, and they aim to reach 800 000 in 31 countries by 2014.
In Uganda, Joseph Mulema told IRIN, donors spent about $290 000 on the programme last year, setting up clinics and links with universities. In the process coverage has expanded from 45 clinics in 18 local districts to 115 in 45 districts.
Local government in Uganda is keen to go ahead with plant clinic expansion, says Boa.
On the benches outside the pub overlooking the cricket greens at Harare Sports Club, they hunch over laptops, selling ideas as diverse as how to sell cattle and how to help urban dwellers cook traditional meals.
It is a long way from Silicon Valley in California, but, amid a boom in social media use, Zimbabwe is seeing the emergence of a fast-growing start-up scene.
A few years ago Limbikani Makani was a bored IT manager at a nongovernmental organisation. He quit his job and set up TechZim, a tech news website that is hosting a “start-up challenge”, attended by dozens of tech developers.
The interest has grown since the first event, which was held two years ago, reflecting the growing number of developers in Zimbabwe.
“We have created a launch pad for these entrepreneurs, enabling them to accelerate their start-ups to a level where they can make revenue,” Makani says.
Teledensity, the ratio of telephones to the population, stood at 91% in February, a big jump from 14% in 2008. Over the same period, mobile access has risen from about 11% to nearly 100%.
Access to the internet
In 2000, only 0.4% of Zimbabweans had access to the internet. Now the figure has risen to 40%, according to official data.
Usage is also rising as access grows. Opera, one of the world’s largest mobile browsers, says Zimbabwe is one of its fastest growing markets, and had the highest numbers of “page views” in Africa in 2011.
Zimbabwe has been named as one of the most dynamic countries in the world, with above-average growth in information technology over the past year. (Shepherd Tozvireva)
And last week, the International Telecommunications Union named Zimbabwe among 12 “most dynamic countries” in the world that have recorded above-average growth in information and communications technology over the past year.
In the boom, developers are stirring; the numbers are growing, and so is the range of their ideas.
“We have traded close to $4-million so far,” Banks says.
Paying lobola via RLMS
On his website Banks invites users abroad to pay their lobola cattle via RLMS. He has a selection of cattle on display on the site, from which, he says, a prospective groom can choose.
“If there is no space in the in-laws’ residence for the cattle, don’t worry. Each animal you choose and buy can be ear tagged, branded, entered into a national database, kept at one of our partner farms, looked after.”
And then there is ZimboKitchen, a service that delivers tutorials such as “how to make plain sadza”, and gives recipes for other popular Zimbabwean dishes such as beef trotters, or muboora, pumpkin leaves stewed in peanut butter.
There is also TestLabs, a service that provides local high school students and teachers with relevant exam revision tools.
Some of the websites and apps are already popular, but the challenge is to help developers make money.
Investors are conservative and hesitate to gamble on start-ups, most of which are run by “green, fresh-out-of-college dreamers”, as one bank chief executive described them.
Free downloads
For now, most of the apps are free to download. Developers themselves have little knowledge about how to turn their ideas into dollars, a gap the likes of Makani are trying to bridge.
“The two sides don’t speak the same language,” he says.
The techies also struggle to be taken seriously.
“Our society demands that you have an actual job,” developer Pardon Muza says, making finger quotes to show his annoyance.
Muza is one of many developers building an online payments site.
“You have to put up with being asked when you’ll get a proper job, wear a tie and work normal hours and stuff.”
But Makani says developers are now increasingly focusing on building services that don’t just sound cool, but bring solutions that can earn them money.
“Initially, we focused on pure innovation in terms of technology and utility, but this has evolved into a more practical approach where strong market potential overrides technology that is used just for the sake of using cool technology,” Makani says.
Jason Moyo for the Mail & Guardian, where this post was first published.
Ethiopia unveiled on Friday the first phase of a space exploration programme, which includes East Africa’s largest observatory designed to promote astronomy research in the region.
“The optical astronomical telescope is mainly intended for astronomy and astrophysics observation research,” said observatory director Solomon Belay.
The observatory, which will formally be opened on Saturday, boasts two telescopes, each on- metre wide, to see “extra planets, different types of stars, the Milky Way, and deep galaxies,” Solomon added.
The 3.4-million dollar observatory, run by the Ethiopian Space Science Society (ESSS), is funded by Ethiopian-Saudi business tycoon Mohammed Alamoudi.
The observatory, 3 200 metres above sea level in the lush Entoto mountains on the outskirts of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, is an ideal location because of its minimal cloud cover, moderate winds and low humidity, experts said.
When established in 2004, ESSS was labelled as the “Crazy People’s Club”, according to the group, but has gained credibility in the past decade with astronomy courses introduced at universities and winning increased political support.
The ESS hopes to boost “astronomy tourism” among space fans interested in coming to one of the least likely countries in the world to boast a space programme. (Pic: AFP)
The Ethiopian government is set to launch a space policy in coming years.
Solomon said the group originally faced sceptics in Ethiopia and abroad, who questioned whether space exploration was a wise use of resources in one of Africa’s poorest economies, plagued in the past by chronic famine and unrest.
But Solomon said promoting science is key to the development in Ethiopia, today one of Africa’s fastest growing economies largely based on agriculture.
“If the economy is strongly linked with science, then we can transform a poor way of agriculture into industrialisation and into modern agriculture,” he said.
‘Astronomy tourism’ The ESSS is now looking to open a second observatory 4 200 metres above sea level in the mountainous northern town of Lalibela, also the site of the largest cluster of Ethiopia’s ancient rock-hewn churches.
Photographs from the ESSS show scientists with testing equipment looking for the best site to put the next telescope on the green and remote peaks, as local villagers wrapped in traditional white blankets watch on curiously, sitting outside their thatch hut homes.
Solomon hopes to boost “astronomy tourism” among space fans interested in coming to one of the least likely countries in the world to boast a space programme, an added economic benefit.
The country will also launch its first satellite in the next three years, ESSS said, to study meteorology and boost telecommunications.
Ethiopia is not the first African nation to look to the skies; South Africa has its own National Space Agency, and in 2009 the African Union announced plans to establish The African Space Agency.
Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, has also called for a continent-wide space programme.
Solomon said while the next several years will be about boosting research and data collection, along with promoting a strong local and regional interest in astronomy, he is not ruling out sending an Ethiopian into space one day.
Fashion week chairperson Dr Precious Moloi-Motsepe on October 10 announced that the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Africa (MBFW Africa) will be taking place from October 30 to November 2.
Collections of more than 30 designers from 15 countries across the continent will be showcased in 20 runway shows in the City of Tshwane; the new host of the four-day event.
Featured in the event is Mozambican designer Taibo Bacar – last year’s designer of the year winner – as well as Mille Collines from Rwanda, Mina Evans and Duaba Serwa from Ghana, Sheria Ngowi and Mustafa Hassanali from Tanzania, David Tlale, Marianne Fassler and Thula Sindi from South Africa.
The event is a trans-seasonal showcase, which takes place yearly in October and provides a stage for African and heritage designers to present their work.
Moloi-Motsepe said: “MBFW Africa is the pinnacle of African fashion: the platform is the gateway between African designers and the global fashion community to engage and promote our local industry.
“African designers have shown themselves to be world-class in their creativity and aesthetic, and MBFW Africa strives to heighten accessibility to new markets through regional and international exposure, creating a global desire for African-designed fashion.”
Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Africa will be held in Tshwane this year. (Pic: Supplied)
This year’s fashion week will also feature a retail element: the Africa Fashion Trade Expo. The expo offers designers the opportunity to engage in business-to-business networking with the media and buyers as well as sales directly to the public.
