A ‘Red Notice’ for the arrest of Samantha Lewthwaite issued by Interpol in September 2013. (Pic: Getty)
Kenya’s government has offered an all-expenses-paid holiday in Kenya to a 15-year-old American teenager and her family after police mistook her for Samantha Lewthwaite, the British terrorist suspect nicknamed the “white widow”.
The teenager was “harassed by police in Mlolongo”, outside the capital Nairobi, “on accusations of looking like” Lewthwaite, the government said.
Joseph Ole Lenku, Kenya’s interior minister, announced that “the government will sponsor a fully-paid holiday for the family” to make up for the incident and that police were also investigating.
Lewthwaite was married to Germaine Lindsay, one of four Islamist suicide bombers who attacked the London transport network on 7 July 2005, killing 52 people.
The 30-year-old Muslim convert has been linked to Somalia’s al-Shabab rebels, who have launched a string of attacks in Kenya including the assault on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping centre that claimed at least 67 lives a year ago on Sunday.
There has been no confirmed sighting of Lewthwaite since she gave Kenyan police the slip in Mombasa in 2011, reportedly using a false South African passport. Last month Kenyan detectives hunting her said the trail had gone cold.
She is wanted in Kenya on charges of being in possession of explosives and conspiracy to commit a felony dating back to December 2011, and is the subject of an Interpol “red notice” warrant for her detention issued at Kenya’s request.
Popular Nigerian preacher and televangelist TB Joshua was under mounting pressure on Wednesday to co-operate with the authorities after a fatal building collapse that claimed at least 67 lives.
TB Joshua and staff at his Synagogue Church of All Nations had so far failed to disclose information to the investigation, the Lagos state government and emergency services said.
South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma announced on Tuesday that 67 of his compatriots were killed in the collapse on Friday.
Pretoria’s ambassador to Abuja complained investigators had faced difficulties in getting detailed information on the ground.
In Lagos, rescuers were still picking through the rubble with heavy lifting equipment and using sniffer dogs in the search for survivors.
“The church is not co-operating with emergency workers at all,” said National Emergency Management Authority (Nema) spokesperson for the southwest region, Ibrahim Farinloye.
“For the first three days of the incident, the church people were very hostile and prevented rescue officials access to the site,” he told AFP.
Earlier access may have saved lives, he added, giving the latest toll as 67 with 131 survivors.
South Africa’s ambassador to Nigeria, Lulu Mnguni, told the eNCA news channel that the death toll was still uncertain.
“The numbers can still either go up or down. We have put more people on the ground to assist us,” he said.
Some five South African church tour groups totalling about 300 people were thought to have been in Lagos at the time, the government said.
Toyin Ayinde, Lagos State commissioner for town planning and urban development, said an investigation would examine Joshua’s claim that a low-flying plane may have been responsible for the collapse.
He told Nigeria’s Channels television they were checking with Lagos international airport, which is just east of the church, about the altitude of planes in the area at the time.
Samples were being taken from the building to determine the material used in the construction.
Initial indications suggested the collapse was caused because extra floors were being added to the building without strengthening foundations.
Ayinde said Joshua and his staff had not yet met engineers and representatives of the Lagos State Emergency Management Agency, which was affecting their ability to disclose accurate information.
Men work on a damaged section of the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi on January 21 2014. (Pic: Reuters)
Kenya began emotional commemorations on Tuesday to mark the first anniversary of Nairobi’s Westgate mall massacre, remembering the 67 people killed by Somali Islamist gunmen and those who risked their lives to stop them.
In a speech at a memorial site opened at the capital’s National Museum, First Lady Margaret Kenyatta said the East African nation had been “seriously scarred” but was not broken by the attackers from the al-Qaeda-affiliated Shabab rebels.
“This is a time that brings much pain and sorrow to many, and is still a time of healing, [we] having also lost members of our family in this senseless massacre,” said Kenyatta, whose nephew and his fiancee were among those killed.
“The nation may have been seriously scarred but we shall never be broken as a people,” she said.
A week of memorial events opened with an emotional film called Our Nairobi, which included testimonies of those caught up in the attack.
The four Shabab gunmen stormed the upmarket mall on a busy Saturday afternoon on September 21 2013, hurling grenades and shooting scores in cold blood with automatic rifles.
“We saw people panic, running and screaming everywhere all around the mall,” said Rama Manikumar, who was having a drink in a cafe when the shooting started, and whose testimony was featured in the film.
“It was like a battlefield, the whole place was in smoke, there were no lights… a lot of broken glass and ammunition on the floor,” she said.
The shopping centre was crowded with hundreds of shoppers, friends meeting for a meal, as well as a children’s cooking competition.
“I want Kenya to be back to itself, to have peace, harmony, love, and things like terrorism to never happen to us again,” said Kennedy Mungai, who had been working as a waiter at a cafe when the shooting erupted.
Shoppers were hunted down in supermarket aisles and killed, in what the Shebab said was revenge for Kenya’s sending of troops to fight the extremists in Somalia as part of an African Union force.
Kenyans, however, are hoping that the commemorations will also show how people were brought together in face of the horror.
Ranju Shah recounted how she and others had hid themselves in a storage area for two hours as fighting raged, with Kenyans from all ethnicities comforting each other.
“The whole incident has brought the people of Kenya together,” Shah said. “Everybody tried to help everybody, they didn’t care about what caste, creed or religion they were following, they were all helping each other.”
Prayers will be held on Sunday, exactly one year after the attack, with a memorial concert and candle-lit vigil for the following three nights.
“As a country we stand in solidarity with the victims and survivors of the attack,” First Lady Kenyatta added. “We will never be cowed by such acts of cowardice.”
Although Kenyan security forces were criticised for looting stores during and after the attack, The Standard newspaper said the country should pause to honour those who risked their lives to enter the gunfight in the mall to try to save lives.
“Some of the officers who went into the mall to engage the terrorists carry deep physical and emotional wounds… we need to celebrate them all,” it said in an editorial.
All four gunmen are reported to have died in the mall, their bodies burned and crushed by tons of rubble after a major fire sparked by the fighting caused a large section of the building to collapse.
Al-Shabab remain a major threat, and continue to launch attacks despite advances by African Union troops inside Somalia, and a US air strike killing its chief earlier this month.
The extremists have launched a string of subsequent attacks in Kenya, including a wave of massacres in the coastal region, which has badly affected the country’s key tourist industry.
Water and Sanitation Minister Nomvula Mokonyane. (Pic: Gallo)
Today, the South African media proudly told the world that a woman – a cabinet minister, at that – was so devoted to President Jacob Zuma that she would defend him with her buttocks.
I will give you a moment to reread that sentence, because if you are a learned speaker of any language it will quickly occur to you that such a statement is nonsensical. But if you are a speaker of a Sotho language, then you will not need to reread this statement, as it will be immediately clear to you that this is, in fact, a direct translation of the idiomRe tlo thiba ka dibono.
The saying directly translates to “we will block with our buttocks”. It simply means that the sayer pledges to (along with some group) defend an individual or ideal with every ounce of their being, even if that means the last resort will be to use a traditionally non-confrontational body part. There are hints by some that this saying comes from Sotho participation in the Anglo-Boer war where Sotho soldiers witnessed Scotsman die with their behinds revealed due to Scottish attire. I cannot say for sure if this is entirely true.
But apparently, this moment to reread this sentence was not afforded to the reporter who wrote this story and the editors who ran it – they neither had the time to research this idiom nor the interest in using this opportunity to provide the interesting history behind it. The original news report by the South African Press Association was republished on various websites including City Press, SowetanLIVE and Independent Online.
No, kind reader, the reporter was far too busy being excited about shoveling out another click-bait headline to give themselves the time to think about the dangers of misrepresenting Minister Nomvula Mokonyane. But the poor soul of this reporter is not my business here.
I am in the business of speaking Setswana and what an interesting business it is today. And by “interesting,” I mean “poorly advertised”, for had it been properly marketed, perhaps, the reporter would have heard about the over three million speakers of the language living in South Africa, and may have tried to contact at least one for clarification on the quote.
Perhaps it is poor marketing that prevented them from realising that an entire nation of Setswana speakers lies right above South Africa, and another nation of Sotho speakers actually lies in South Africa. Maybe if they knew this, they would have thought twice about their attempts to make the minister sound like a fool, by refusing to acknowledge the possibility that her language has any semblance of sophistication.
I want very much, as you can see, for this to be a matter of ignorance. And not what I fear it to be: a matter of pure disrespect. To refuse to investigate the meaning and context of this quote, is to refuse to consider that a language that has lived longer than South Africa can have the sophistication required for the phrase “fight with my buttocks” to make sense. To lazily slap on a headline with the barest seeking-out of clarification is to say to the speakers of that language that you will not even bother to think that it can have any kind of nuance, any kind of intellectual flexibility or in fact any kind of maturity.
The very idea that a woman would proudly proclaim that she will defend her leader with her buttocks should strike the listener as strange. But it appears this did not happen to the reporter of this story. For if it had, perhaps it may have occurred to him/her that there is a level of meaning that they are clearly missing. Perhaps, they would have wondered what they are missing.
But no, it is far more fashionable to undermine the intelligence of South African ministers, it is far more fashionable to undermine the complexity of African languages and it is obviously far more fashionable at the moment to insult African people as a whole.
And to that I say, le tla ipona! Or as the reporter might publish, “You will see yourselves!”
Siyanda Mohutsiwa is a 21-year-old mathematics major at the University of Botswana. She is currently slumming it in Finland. Follow her on Twitter: @SiyandaWrites
The UN base in Malakal is home to 17 000 displaced civilians. (Pic: IRIN / Jacob Zocherman)
Julie Francis’s self-imposed curfew starts when the sun sets. The widowed mother of four has been living at the UN base outside Malakal since December, one of more than 17 000 people who have fled there to escape episodic fighting in South Sudan’s Upper Nile State capital. But the overcrowded camp is not without its own dangers, especially for women and girls.
Francis can hear drunken teenagers hound women as they make their way around the site’s darkened paths. She has seen the holes men have cut through the tarpaulin walls of the showers so they can peep and leer at women. She has comforted rape survivors.
“It is too much,” she said. “They attack us at the place of the toilets or at night where we collect water.” There were 28 reported cases of sexual assault in the Malakal camp between January and June of this year, according to an assessment released by the inter-agency Global Protection Cluster late last month. But aid workers acknowledge the vast majority of attacks probably go unreported.
So Francis has decided it is best to push a bedframe in front of the entrance to her tent as soon as it gets dark. If she or her daughters need to go to the bathroom, they just use a bag.
But she doesn’t think it is fair. “People should take this seriously,” she said. “They should be serious to help. There are still people who need to know that it is not right to rape.”
Where, she wants to know, are the floodlights that could roust deter men hiding near the latrines, or the regular UN Police (UNPOL) patrols to protect women who want to visit their friends at night or go to the bathroom? Why, she asked, does it seem like she is the only one taking steps to make sure she does not get raped?
The problem is not in Malakal alone. Since fighting broke out in South Sudan in mid-December, nearly 100 000 people have crowded into 10 UN Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) bases across the eastern half of the country. They have been dubbed “Protection of Civilian” or PoC, sites. Though there are no official statistics, humanitarian groups say sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) – including rape, but also beating, harassment and domestic violence – exists in varying degrees at all of the larger camps, as does a growing resentment among women and girls that more is not being done to protect them.
“Increasing frustration”
“Of course there’s increasing frustration,” said Nana Ndeda, the advocacy and policy manager for Care International. She has been talking to women living in the camps about their experiences since the conflict started. “They’re getting very frustrated by the fact that UNMISS is not able to provide the kind of security that they would want provided.”
What is most galling, she said, is that the strategies for what should be done already exist. The 87-page Guidelines for Gender-Based Violence Interventions in Humanitarian Settings, compiled by a committee of UN agencies and humanitarian groups, offers detailed recommendations, including lighting communal areas, creating safe spaces where women can confidentially seek help and consistently soliciting the input of women and girls on how to improve the situation.
But in the early days of the conflict, with unprecedented numbers of civilians seeking shelter at the UN bases and scores of humanitarian workers evacuating, UNMISS employees were scrambling just to provide basic services.
“We had many more people than we could house and we needed to find a way to still be able to operate the base, as well,” said Derk Segaar, who heads UNMISS’s protection team. In the early days of the conflict, as people flooded into bases across the country, “it was a matter of trying to get them in a sustainable space that would allow just enough space for them to be there.”
Thousands of people are still living in shelters hastily constructed in the early days of the fighting, when issues like SGBV took a backseat to rescuing as many people as possible.
Tidial Chany is a community leader elected to represent one of the original parts of the Malakal camp, known as PoC 2. He works closely with UNPOL on security concerns in his area, but said it is nearly impossible to monitor all of the boggy, unlit alleys and has ultimately concluded, “It’s no good for security within the PoC.”
Aware of the problems, UNMISS started working to secure additional land and to construct more strategically planned sites almost from the beginning of the conflict, Segaar said, but their efforts were slowed by both bureaucracy and continued fighting.
New camps finally opened in Juba and Malakal in June. Within the new spaces, attention has been paid to the guidelines: women’s latrines are stationed near well-lit arteries and are separated from the men’s, for instance. Another site is slated to open in the Jonglei State capital, Bor, later this month.
“It’s not a matter of a few weeks or a few months and people will all be happy to go home,” Segaar said. “That’s why we built these bases. We need to be able to keep people safe and healthy for potentially a much longer period of time.”
