A medical worker checks his protective clothing at an MSF facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone. (Pic: AFP)
I can’t help but notice the similarities of the world’s reaction to Ebola today and to Aids 30 years ago.
When Aids first appeared in the early 1980s, scientists explained that the disease was transmitted primarily by sex, blood transfusions and shared needles.
But, in fear of the deadly disease, many were quick to blame gay men, sex workers, Haitians and Africans. Some suggested that Aids was God’s punishment for sinful sexual behaviours.
In the first decade of Aids, we let ignorance, indifference, hate, stigma and discrimination guide us. We missed the point. World action started late, and we lost millions of people to Aids.
Finally, in the 1990s, it became obvious that HIV and Aids could affect married couples, pastors, sport stars, hemophiliacs, rape survivors and children. Children like me.
I belong to the first ever generation of children born with HIV. As a child, I was very thin and my classmates called me names, like “skeleton” and “Aids”. I would go home and tell my dad. He would comfort me, saying: “You can’t have Aids, it’s for older people, you are just a kid, you are my little queen.” He would kiss me and hug me and make me forget the bullying.
Blame and shame
I became an activist when I was 18 years old. I didn’t and still don’t like the Aids image in people’s minds. Some quickly ask: “How did you get it?” When I say I was born with HIV, they keep asking: “Who brought HIV into your family?” and often jump to conclusions, like “Men are unfaithful”, suggesting my dad was a bad guy.
My dad wasn’t a bad guy! He was infected and affected by HIV and the world didn’t assist him much. Instead they judged him and called him names. As I look back, I realise all he went through, raising me as a single father when my mum died, burdened with guilt and guided by love, convincing me to take medication and answering my questions. He died painfully from Aids 17 years ago and I still miss him.
One day, at an Aids conference in Rwanda, I met a distant aunt. She started describing my dad as an evil man who had infected my mum and me with HIV. With tears in my eyes, I refused to listen.
It hurts when people fail to understand the pain my dad went through and to acknowledge that he raised me lovingly and gave me everything I have now, from my name to my education.
With Ebola, some are acting like my aunt, stigmatising Ebola sufferers, survivors and caregivers.
We can’t fight an epidemic by ostracising affected communities. We can only win if we let science and compassion guide our interventions.
The Ebola epidemic is proving that the world hasn’t changed much. We are quick to stigmatise, discriminate and criminalise affected communities.
African boys are bullied and called Ebola at American schools, a volunteer saving lives in West Africa is unreasonably quarantined in the USA, and visa and travel bans punish citizens from Ebola-affected countries. Do people really think they can create a safe haven by shutting out others?
An MSF medical worker feeds a child at a facility in Kailahun, Sierra Leone on August 15 2014. Kailahun along with Kenama district is at the epicentre of the world’s worst Ebola outbreak. (Pic: AFP)
Stigma, discrimination, travel bans and prejudice won’t solve Ebola.
Instead, we should unite against the HIV and Ebola viruses. We can do more, and better.
“The AIDS disease is caused by the HIV virus but the Aids epidemic is caused by HIV and Aids- related hate, indifference, stigma and discrimination and criminalisation,” said singer Elton John.
The same applies to Ebola. Let’s not fall into Ebola’s trap. We can’t afford to lose more people by ignoring science and conceding to bigotry and stigma.
Claire Gasamagera is an HIV activist from Rwanda, with a degree in food technology and a passion for defending the rights, health and dignity of young people living with HIV. She is the founder of Kigali Hope Association, which later became Rwanda Young Positives.
Safety: Mtongori Chacha (left) and her wife, Gati Buraya, with their children. The women say their union saves them from abuse by men. (Pic: AFP)
It is 12.30pm and an older woman emerges from her tiny mud house. A younger woman is making some porridge outside.
These two women are husband and wife: they are traditionally married and they have children.
This practice is called nyumba ntobhu in western Tanzania. It is a traditional form of same-sex marriage. The two women share a bed as a couple, they live together, bear children in their union; they do everything a married couple would, except have sex.
In the Mara region, nyumba ntobhu allows older women to marry younger women in order to have children of their own and assist with the household chores. Women say nyumba ntobhu also helps them overcome problems of gender-based domestic violence.
Mtongori Chacha (56), who is married to a woman, Gati Buraya (30), says the traditional practice arose as a result of male violence against women.
It is also an alternative family structure for older women who do not have sons to inherit their property and whose daughters have moved away to their husbands’ villages. It offers a form of security for elderly women so they do not live on their own.
Chacha and Buraya have three children. Chacha says she decided to marry Buraya because she was unable to have children in her previous marriage to a man, who she says physically abused and tortured her.
To bear children, women who are married under nyumba ntobhu usually hire a man and pay him when the younger woman falls pregnant.
The hired man will also enter into an agreement with both women that he will not demand paternal rights to any children born out of the agreement.
The older woman is the guardian of the children and they usually take her surname.
Chacha says the man who impregnates the younger woman is paid with food or a goat.
In some rare cases, a man may return to claim a child, but Chacha says this can be avoided by choosing a man who is not known in the village or who is known to be irresponsible. These men are known as “street men”.
“I decided to run away from my marriage as I was humiliated and sometimes beaten nearly dead. At 45 I was not able to have children and I had to look for a new family to give me an heir to my property,” Chacha says while she feeds two of her children.
She says she could not accept the fact that she would die without children of her own. Her parents were rich and had many cattle so she chose to marry another woman who would give her children.
“Here, a woman will pay a lobola like any system of marriage in African culture, and the ‘wife’ is supposed to obey and live under the rules of her ‘husband’. Nyumba ntobhu is blessed by all the family members and accepted by the society,” says Chacha.
Agnes Robi (61) says she decided to pay six cattle to marry Sophia Bhoke Alex (25) after her six daughters moved away.
“She has given me one baby girl already, while we are still praying for her to get a baby boy who would take over this compound when I die,” Robi says.
It’s not uncommon for women to be prohibited from inheriting property in Tanzania. Initially, the culture of women marrying women was practised as an option for barren women. It enabled them to claim the children borne by the other woman as their own. This was a way of providing security for their old age.
But now it’s not only for those unable to have children. Some women choose not to marry a man because they say they want to avoid domestic violence.
Bupe Matambalya says she witnessed her older sisters “beaten nearly dead” by their husbands and decided that she would never marry a man.
Some villagers discourage the practice, saying it leads to an increase in the spread of HIV.
In some cases, nyumba ntobhu can be a polygamous marriage. The older woman will marry two younger women, who will both bear her children.
But nyumba ntobhu does not always save women from domestic violence. Take the case of Jesca Peter (25). She experienced domestic violence and humiliation even from her nyumba ntobhu husband.
“I was married to Nyambura, a 63-year-old woman. She had paid a dowry of six cattle and I moved into her compound. Within a few years of that marriage, Nyambura demanded that I have to look for my own food,” she says.
She says her union with Nyambura was unhappy and she was used “as a slave to just work and produce on her farm and look after her cattle”.
“She wanted children from me, which I bore her, but the relationship was unfriendly.
“We lived like a cat and dog. I was simply a slave for her,” says Peter.
She fled from the marriage and her parents had to return the cattle paid as a dowry.
Tanzania’s Minister of Information and Culture Fenela Mukandara says gender violence is prevalent in the Mara region, which is why nyumba ntobhu is becoming more common.
“When women decide to marry each other and live by themselves, it means there are extremely violent acts in that place.”
After driving a tractor the length of Africa, Dutch adventurer Manon “Tractor Girl” Ossevoort is setting out to fulfill a decade-long dream of chugging her way to the South Pole.
Asked whether people think she is crazy, the 38-year-old actress replies with a wide smile and bubbly confidence: “Only if they haven’t met me.”
She’s at least partly right.
“The world needs people who are a little crazy like this,” a burly South African tractor mechanic says as Ossevoort clambers onto a huge red Massey-Ferguson in a shed north of Cape Town.
Wearing a mini-dress in the summer heat, the ebullient new mother of a 10-month-old baby girl perches on the seat and chats about her epic trip as mechanics put the final touches to her beloved tractor.
Ossevoort will spend about 12 hours a day in that seat – having swapped her summer outfit for Arctic gear– as she heads for what she likes to call the “end of the world.”
She will make a 4 500-kilometre round trip across the largest single mass of ice on earth, from Russia’s Novo base on the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole and back.
The MF 5610 tractor and support vehicles for Ossevoort’s trip to the South Pole. (Supplied)
When not pushed to the limits by the hostile environment of frozen mountains and deadly crevasses, she will have plenty of time to admire the scenery.
“Ten kilometres an hour would be good,” she says. “Fifteen would be nice, 20 lovely.”
Ossevoort travelled alone through Africa, but in Antarctica the tractor will need to creep forward day and night, so French mechanic Nicolas Bachelet will share the driving.
That way, they hope to make 100 to 200 kilometres a day and complete the trip in four to six weeks.
“I think I’ll love the experience, travelling the last leg in relative silence over this vast and white continent,” she says.
“It’s a beautiful last phase in a long pilgrimage.”
In total, she will be accompanied by a team of seven, including crew who will film the journey for a documentary.
‘Belly of a snowman’ Ossevoort began her trip in 2005, taking four years to drive from her home village in Holland to Cape Town at the southern tip of Africa – and then missed the boat that was due to take her to Antarctica for the final leg due to delays.
Frustrated, the former theatre actress spent the next four years back in Holland, writing a book, working as a motivational speaker and desperately trying to get back on a tractor.
With sponsorship from Massey-Ferguson and other companies, she and her tractor will finally fly to Antarctica from Cape Town this week and set off for the pole around November 20.
While fulfilling her own long-held dream, Ossevoort will be carrying with her thousands of ‘dreams’ collected from people in Africa and around the world.
Scraps of paper and emails have been converted into digital form and will be placed in the belly of a big snowman she plans to build at the pole – to be opened only in 80 years’ time.
“I want to turn them into a beautiful time capsule of the dreams of the world so that in the future children and people can read something about our dreams and not only about politics or war.”
Fear holds people back from pursuing their dreams, she says, and many believe that “putting them into reality is as impossible as driving a tractor to the South Pole”.
“The tractor for me symbolises this very down to earth fact that if you want to do something, maybe you will not be so fast but if you keep going and keep your sense of humour you will get there.”
The pull of her own dream is so strong it has trumped being at home for her baby Hannah’s first Christmas.
But she has the full support of her partner, airline pilot Rogier Nieuwendyk, who will look after Hannah while she is away.
“We’ll be there to meet her at the airport when she comes home,” he said, cradling Hannah in his arms as she phlegmatically watched her mother prepare to leave.
Ossevoort’s tractor is named Antarctica 2 in honour of legendary explorer Sir Edmund Hillary, who travelled to the South Pole on a tractor in 1958.
His vehicle was equipped with full tracks, however, while Ossevoort’s has normal inflatable tyres which have been slightly modified for better grip on the snow and ice.
In 2012, a spoof music video calling on Africans to donate radiators to Norway as part of a charity drive went viral on social media and made headlines across the world. The campaign, created by the Norwegian Students’ and Academics’ International Assistance Fund (SAIH) on a small budget, aimed to challenge the stereotypes people have of Africa and create a new conversation about the global south.
A few days ago, the SAIH released a second video that’s bound to draw as much attention as the first did. Who Wants To Be A Volunteer? is a provocative and hilarious take on voluntourism in Africa and the well-known stereotypes of the “white hero” and “exotic other”. It’s already received over 90 000 views since being posted on YouTube on November 7. Part of the video mimics a reality TV show: think Western aid workers competing to come ‘to Africa’ to save us all, without having a clue about the continent. Go on, watch it.
Forty years ago, Henri Kouakou was struggling to support his family farming a small plot outside Bondoukou, a dusty town in northeastern Côte d’Ivoire, when he first learned that money did, in fact, grow on trees – cashew trees.
“I was raising yams back then and wasn’t earning enough. I heard people talking about a new tree you could make money growing,” he said, strolling through his plantation beneath a canopy of cashew tree branches.
By his own reckoning, Kouakou, among the earliest pioneers of the Ivorian cashew sector, is nearly 100 years old. He has seen the nuts, initially planted in the 1970s to combat desertification, emerge as an important cash crop for the West African nation’s impoverished north.
And with output growing by over 10 percent annually – attracting the attention of a government desperate to jump-start its economy after a decade of war and political chaos – he will likely live to see his country dominate the world market.
Henri Kouakou at his cashew plantation in Bondoukou. (Pic: Reuters)
Even a decade ago, Côte d’Ivoire was a middling producer, growing around 80 000 tonnes of raw cashews per year. By last season, however, as demand for the nuts has grown, output had jumped to around a half million tonnes, making it the world’s top exporter and second to India in overall production.
Astounding growth In the north of the country, cotton and cashews are the only cash crops, so as some cashew growers have started to do well, others have piled in. Output has increased because new plantations planted in recent years are coming into production.
“The growth is more than impressive. It’s astounding,” said Jim Fitzpatrick, a cashew expert. “We’ve never seen a country grow its production in the way Côte d’Ivoire has over the past decade.”
This season, for the first time, the government set a guaranteed minimum price for cashew farmers, fixing it at 250 CFA francs ($0.48) per kilo of raw nuts. According to Malamine Sanogo, managing director of the sector’s marketing board, the Cotton and Cashew Council (CCA), Côte d’Ivoire has hardly scratched the surface of the enormous potential.
Ninety-five percent of Ivorian output is exported raw to India and Vietnam for processing. Sanogo says that work should be done in Côte d’Ivoire by Ivorian workers.
“We think that with processing we will create many jobs and we will create lots of added value for the country,” he said.
Within the next five years, the CCA wants 35 percent of Côte d’Ivoire’s raw cashew output processed locally. Sanogo said bringing processors closer to producers will allow Côte d’Ivoire to cut out some of the intermediaries in the supply chain, boost prices for farmers, and above all create jobs.
Having doubled production over the past decade, Africa’s two million cashew farmers produce nearly half of the world’s supply of raw nuts, according to the African Cashew Alliance. Many, including growers in top African producers Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria and Mozambique, are watching closely Côte d’Ivoire’s efforts to become a major player in a global market valued at up to $7.8 billion.
War and revival In 2002, a failed coup attempt plunged Côte d’Ivoire into a civil war that split the world’s top cocoa producer in two. Once a model of stability and prosperity in a troubled region,Côte d’Ivoire would remain divided between rebels in the north and southern government loyalists for almost a decade.
Having emerged as the country’s new president following a civil war in 2011, Alassane Ouattara, a former senior International Monetary Fund official, has ushered in economic growth of over 9 percent in past two years.
But little of that growth – fuelled largely by billion-dollar investments in large infrastructure projects – has trickled down to the nearly half of Ivorians living on less than $2 per day. That’s where the government hopes cashews can help.
Some 600 000 farmers already grow the nuts, according to the CCA. But the creation of a domestic processing industry would mean more jobs in the sector.
Workers handle cashew nuts at a processing plant in Bouake. (Pic: Reuters)
Advocates of the plan point to the giant cottage industry in India where a typical unit processes around 10 tonnes of cashews a day with a workforce of 1 000.
According to a study carried out by the CCA, every 100 000 tonnes of processing capacity Côte d’Ivoire develops will create 12 300 factory jobs and another 10 000 elsewhere in the sector.
On the spotless campus of the large processing factory run by Singapore-based soft commodities trader Olam International in the central city of Bouake, uniformed employees queue up every morning for work.
The plant and a second, smaller facility, employ around 3 500 workers with capacity to process 40 000 tonnes.
“You can imagine if we can process 10 times this number how much employment can be created. And that is only direct employment,” Issa Konate, Olam’s head of procurement for the facilities, told Reuters.
Panacea for unemployment If it can pull it off, Côte d’Ivoire would be the first African nation to build a large-scale cashew nut processing sector as a panacea for unemployment, a problem plaguing countries across the continent.
The African Cashew Alliance estimates that a 25 percent increase in raw cashew nut processing in Africa would generate more than $100 million in household income.
But Ouattara’s government has an additional, even more pressing, concern: creating gainful employment for the 74,000 ex-combatants it is seeking to demobilise in the coming year.
“That’s what happened in Vietnam,” Yao Appia Koffi, vice-president of Côte d’Ivoire’s Cashew Exporters Association. “When they were emerging from their war in the 1980s they developed that industry and it allowed a lot of ex-fighters to find work.”
The broken nut conundrum Not everyone is so starry-eyed, however. “Processing? I’m not sure what the government can do … It’s foolishness,” one Côte d’Ivoire-based cashew exporter said, asking not to be named. Côte d’Ivoire indeed faces some daunting obstacles.
In addition to competing with processing sectors in India and Vietnam, it must convince private sector partners that political stability will last. It also needs major investments in machinery and must train tens of thousands of new workers.
But its biggest challenge will be what to do about nuts damaged in processing – what the industry calls brokens – which typically constitute 30 to 40 percent of output.
In India, the world’s largest cashew producer and also the biggest consumer, brokens are absorbed by the domestic market. The same is true in Brazil, the number three processor. Vietnam has traditionally sold much of its brokens in India and has another big market for damaged nuts, China, next door.
Côte d’Ivoire, with only infinitesimal domestic consumption, has none of these options, and its less skilled workforce means that the portion of brokens is even higher there.
Promoting cashew consumption in Côte d’Ivoire and neighbouring countries is one possibility. But even supporters of this strategy admit it will take time with no guarantee of success.
Côte d’Ivoire’s cashew sector may just have come of age at the perfect time. Experts say investors, worried by the dominance of India and Vietnam, are showing interest in diversifying supply and Africa is a logical choice for new processing facilities.
From just 35 000 tonnes in 2006, Africa processed a total of 114 600 tonnes of raw cashew nuts in 2012.
At the same time, manufacturers say technological advances in processing equipment will reduce the number of brokens to between 10 and 20 percent. Even the definition of what constitutes an exportable nut appears to be changing.
Only last year, the difference in the price of a pound of export quality, whole kernel cashews and large brokens was around $2. That difference is now less than a dollar.
“If that trend persists it will create a big change in the economics of processing,” said Fitzpatrick, who works with the African Cashew Initiative, United Nations, European governments and private investors to develop cashew processing in Africa.
Demand for edible nuts is growing, but the supply of pristine nuts is not. So it appears that buyers are willing to buy more, and pay more for, brokens.
Back in Bondoukou, Henri Kouakou is cautiously optimistic. He’s long been at the mercy of volatile, unregulated prices. Not far from his plantation stands a sprawling compound he started building for his family but has never been able to finish.
“If the government could raise the price to 400 or 450 CFA francs I would retire right now. I would be at home with enough money to eat and feed my entire family.” (1 US dollar = 517.9300 CFA franc)
