Will Uganda really ban the miniskirt?

Lydia Asano sashays down the red carpet at Kampala’s luxury Serena hotel, wearing an “Afrocouture” black lace gown, partially see-through and with a slit up her left thigh. Onlookers are captivated by the 6ft model. “It’s my favourite piece that I’ve ever modelled,” gushes Asano (21) backstage after the fashion parade. She regularly goes out to Kampala nightspots in this kind of outift. “It could be something little and cute, anything goes,” she says. Fast forward to Saturday night and Lilian Mubende (25) is sipping a cocktail in De Posh Bar in Kabalagala, Kampala’s party area, sporting a purple above-the knee dress. “When I wear my short dresses I feel free,” she says.

But if a bill passed by the Ugandan Parliament in December becomes law, fashion parades such as that at the Serena hotel may be threatened and Ugandan women will have to cover up or face arrest. Passed the day before a more notorious anti-gay bill, the government-backed anti-pornography legislation has a broad definition of “pornography”. According to the 2011 version, retabled in parliament last year, this includes “any cultural practice, radio or television programme, writing, publication, advertisement, broadcast, upload on internet, display, entertainment, music, dance, picture, audio or video recording, show, exhibition or any combination of the preceding that depicts sexual parts of a person such as breasts, thighs, buttocks and genitalia”, among other meanings. The 2011 draft bill reportedly proposes that anyone found guilty of abetting pornography face a 10m shilling (£2,473) fine or a maximum of 10 years in jail, or both.

Simon Lokodo, Uganda’s ethics and integrity minister, insists the bill in its current form will be signed by President Yoweri Museveni, and therefore come into force, very soon. “Maybe he will take some time to sign the anti-homosexuality bill, but for that anti-pornography [bill] we are sure he’s going to sign,” he told the Guardian. “He has not commented on this [publicly] as he has with the anti-homosexuality bill. That means he is comfortable with it.” Lokodo says that the bill targets “irresponsible” women wearing clothes above the knee in public because they are “hurting the moral fibre” of Uganda.

“So today if I met somebody putting on a miniskirt, a miniskirt that explains a lot of what that person has in one’s mind, that person should be arrested,” he said. “What we want to condemn is the provocativeness, that they want to draw somebody to desire them. We are saying that we are blaming and condemning any of these girls who dress so indecently, especially in public areas. We shall not accept it, whether it is fashion or what.”

Read: ‘Pornography according to Simon Lokodo‘

Last April, when the bill was reintroduced in Parliament, Asano sported a “save the miniskirt” T-shirt and went to many save-the-miniskirt parties. Despite Lokodo warning that people will be “sensitised” by the law so they report others breaking it before police catch them, Asano is not letting down her hemlines yet. “We should be focusing on getting thieves and rapists off the streets instead of bringing in a miniskirt bill,” says Asano. “It violates our rights. If they refuse to let us wear miniskirts, why should the guys be able to wear little shorts?”

Protestors in London at a Slut Walk event in 2011. The Slut Walk initiative serves to protest against the perception that the way a woman dresses can justify rape and sexual violence. (Pic: Flickr / msmornington)

Mubende thinks that certain politicians are just trying to whip up fear. She is more cautious than Asano, saying: “The minister is serious about it [the bill] but the president’s not. When the president is serious about this we shall stop wearing them.

But Rita Aciro Lakor, the executive director of Uganda Women’s Network (Uwonet), argues the issue is about more than whether women can wear miniskirts. “It’s about going back to controlling women,” she says. “They’ll start with clothes. The next time they’re going to remove the little provisions in the law that promote and protect women’s rights.” She says the more people talk about miniskirts, the more people wear them, and that the law will be hard to implement.

Human rights lawyer Peter Magelah believes the bill, which he stresses is also largely about press freedom, will be used “selectively” and “for political reasons” if it becomes law. “Idi Amin had a miniskirt law in Uganda and a lot was written and said about it, but it wasn’t removed from the statute books until 2002,” he says. “It was in place and no one enforced it. And, of course, the law doesn’t provide for how short a miniskirt should be, so in a court it’s one thing a lawyer would have a field day challenging.”

Amy Fallon for the Guardian

10 years ago

Dispelling stereotypes about Africans

(Pics: Gallo)

What makes an “authentic” African? Who is an “authentic” African? I often spend hours asking myself : Will I be an “authentic” African if I put away my biological individualism and refer to myself as one? Will I be an “authentic” African when I become familiar with all her countries? I speak fluent Hausa (the most common language spoken in northern Nigeria), I wear pants from Senegal, walk in Moroccan slippers and eat South African pap, yet I am not starving. I did not witness genocide. I have never suffered from drought. I do not cook using firewood and I do not live in a shed. I’ve had malaria more than three times and I am still alive and healthy. Am I not “authentically” African?

Upon my arrival at the African Leadership Academy, between feelings of excitement and expectation, I carried my single stories bundled in a sack, imprisoned, yet striving to get out. In this fictional sack, a South African was demanding an HIV test to declare her negative status and a Nigerian was swearing upon his sister’s grave that he had never been in possession of drugs. Also in my bag was a Kenyan, whose entire life was spent trying to get a long-distance medal because, apparently, true Kenyans have speed in their DNAs. Then, the all too familiar prey: a Muslim woman was caught up between covering herself as the Qur’an instructed, or wearing less clothes so as not to be referred to as a terrorist.

Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said: “To create a single story, you show a people as one thing and only one thing over and over again and that is what they become.” Of course we cannot say that these widespread stereotypes are completely fictional, but they are just pigments of the truth. As I unpacked this sack during the course of my first term, I made friends with Kenyans that were proudly Maasai, who spoke fluent Swahili, but never even attempted to run. I met many South Africans who were HIV negative, but had in mind that Nigerians were drug addicts. I was born a Nigerian Muslim, and so I represent all the perceptions about both Nigerians and Muslims. However, I am neither a drug addict nor a terrorist.

People of my generation are defacing their natural forms just to feel accepted into the society. In Nigeria, it is very conventional to think that the noble people come from the Hausa tribe, while the people that seem to be after almost nothing but money are of the Igbo tribe. Stereotypes are the over-generalisations created towards a particular group of people due to class, race, gender, country, religion, looks and any other feature we may not openly relate to. This behavior comes with a belief that whatever we do not immediately identify as “normal” should be recognised and, possibly, corrected. It emphasises how different, rather than similar, we are from one another. Stereotypes can be used to create or destroy us, but we must not let them define us as a country, race, gender or class.

During my African studies class, we were asked to conduct research on African countries we had never heard of and observe the image and information being given to people that have never been there. The dominant images were of indigenous people, mostly naked or half -dressed women with black, sagging bosoms who lived in huts. Natives who suffered from famine and many easily identified diseases such as malnutrition, malaria and HIV and Aids. There were images of African mothers, in tears, deciding between which child to feed and which one to let go. Child soldiers, genocide and slums represented the “accurate” definition of what our beloved African continent is really all about. And of course there were pictures of wild animals, which many in the West believe are the only appealing thing in Africa.

I did not see a picture of Wole Soyinka, the first black man to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, or Nelson Mandela, who spent 27 years in prison for the freedom of his country. I looked for Haile Selassie, who resisted the Italian invasion of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in the 1930s and saved the country from colonisation, but not a picture of his was found. What of Dr Christiaan Barnard, the South African who performed the first heart transplant in 1967? Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry that produces more movies annually than Hollywood, striving to promote the African culture, was not even acknowledged.

Mandela once said: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can be taught to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes even more naturally to the human heart than its opposition.” It is very easy for us to intensely dislike people for the stereotypes that they have, but we must also understand that they are only acting upon the single stories they are exposed to. What if they had heard differently? What if we give them the truth, rather than pigments of it? What if they learn about the earlier civilisations of African countries before the ruthless arrival of the British? As a society, we can seek to dispel stereotypes through education and a social action. We can seek to give the world the full stories of Africans – how many children actually attend schools and sit for both the SATs and the Cambridge International Examinations, for example.

Another Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, said: “If you do not like someone’s story, write your own.” I will write my own stories because I do not condone the oversimplified image of Africa. Stereotypes divide us as countries, continents, cultures, nations and most importantly, as individuals.

Khadija Sanusi is a first-year student at the African Leadership Academy.

10 years ago

Tunisia’s desert dunes lure amateur astronomers and Star Wars aficionados

Deep in Tunisia’s Sahara desert is an otherworldly planet familiar to Star Wars fans: Tatooine, the twin-mooned childhood home of Darth Vader.

Once a pilgrimage site for aficionados of the cult sci-fi film, the dune-swept landscape that provided the backdrop for almost every Star Wars movie, among many others, has been out of reach since the Tunisian uprising, which kickstarted the Arab Spring three years ago. Now, as the North African country inches towards a successful transition to democracy, many hope that will change.

The set of Star Wars Episode 1 in the desert in Tunisia. (Pic: Flickr / Pondspider)

“We have a new government and we’re full of hope,” said Taieb Jallouli, the set director who oversaw the Star Wars shoots in the country, speaking as Tunisia’s Parliament passed a long-awaited new Constitution. Seen as the final step towards establishing a democracy after an uprising that toppled the autocratic ruler Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, it could be help lure back film fans and desert adventure tourists, whose numbers plummeted during the turbulence of the uprising.

“[Star Wars director] George Lucas always said he loved the light in Tunisia’s southern desert. We hope old directors and a wave of young, new ones will come back now there’s stability,” said Jallouli, who was also artistic director for The English Patient and Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, which were both partially filmed in Tunisia.

The creators of imaginary galaxies like Star Wars aside, peace in Tunisia’s deserts also stands to benefit a small group of people more interested in real extraterrestrial objects: meteorite-hunters. Star Wars‘ Tatooine is named after the Tunisian town of Tataouine, the site of a famous meteorite landing in 1931. A small group of meteorite-hunters are keen to resume a hobby that has been largely impossible since the revolution.

Buildings in Tataouine inspired George Lucas for his Star Wars films. (Pic: Flickr / Henry Patton)

Sofien Kanoun, president of Tunisia’s 40-strong amateur astronomy society, said: “We’ve asked the government for permission to undertake meteorite-hunting expeditions in the desert because some of those areas have become military zones during the last three years.

“In the desert, there’s a huge surface area of land that’s uninhabited, so it’s the best place for successfully recovering any fragments which don’t land in the sea. We need them to have a better idea of the birth of the solar system.”

For now, as news of jihadists training in remote regions has made large swathes of the Sahara too dangerous for travel, the group relies on a human chain of Berbers who live in the desert to pass on information.

“I personally count on citizens who call me up to say they have got bits of meteorite,” said Hichem Ben Yahyoui, the association’s treasurer, waving a page of complicated formulae that explain the supersonic path of a meteorite, which landed between Tunisia and Algeria last September. “We were the first to calculate the trajectory and pass on the information to [professional scientists] about exactly where in Algeria it fell,” he added proudly.

The amateur astronomers also battle a lack of funding, and hardline Islamists who have cracked down against everything from art shows to rap music. Government funding for Tunisian astronomy has dwindled to a trickle, though the country was once home to Muslim scholars such as Ibn Ishaq whose works still influence modern physics and astronomy. With a symbolic membership fee of 2 dinars (75p) a year, Tunisia’s amateur astronomers rely largely on pooling their own money together to fund trips, build experimental rockets or order sophisticated equipment only available from abroad.

Mundane earthly difficulties have not stopped them from reaching for the stars. Every few weeks Yahyoui, who also volunteers as a curator at Tunisia’s science museum in his spare time, journeys to meet other fellow space-lovers across the Arab world.

“It’s dangerous but I don’t mind taking the risks because it’s a labour of love,” he said, ahead of a recent trip to advise on the building of a space museum in Libya, where internal conflict has seen a spate of abductions and political assassinations by militia gangs this month alone.

“As amateurs we do it for ourselves, to pass on knowledge through each generation,” he said, standing beneath a staircase spiralling upwards to a blue planet encircled by red rings.

10 years ago

Female artists from Egypt, Tunisia and Libya record ‘Sawtuha’

Earlier this month Egyptian songstress Maryam Saleh’s Nouh Al Hamam landed a new Tunisian-based recording effort on our radar: Sawtuha (Arabic for “her voice”), a compilation of female artists from Libya, Tunisia and Egypt who are exercising their rights to freedom of expression. The full album features Sudanese-American hip-hop scholar Oddisee, the production hand of Olof Dreijer (one half of the Knife), and remixes from French producer Blackjoy and Austrian beatsmith Brenk.

Sawtuha, released by German label Jakarta Records, takes the listener on a journey through French pop, Arabic infused hip-hop and accordion-heavy production.

On the Oddisee-produced languid ballad Figurine, N awel B en Kraiem‘s vocals nod towards classical French influences (she sounds like a cross between Edith Piaf and Barbara), and yet they’re layered with enrapturing Tunisian melodies. Olof Dreijer’s distorted beats and pitched-down vocals provide a backdrop to Medusa‘s flow on the head-nodding Naheb N3ch Hayati.

A protest against “corruption, despotism, patronisation and narrow-mindedness”, Sawtuha is purposeful fresh air. As Jakarta Records explains: “Sawtuha, the album that is the product of [a] two-week session, is a vital encouraging testament of rebellion against the repression of democratic rights, gender inequality, and lack of inclusion”.

Stream the full compilation below.

Remi for okayafrica, a blog dedicated to bringing you the latest from Africa‘s New Wave.

10 years ago

We must act to end inequality in education

$(Pic: Flickr / THINKGlobalSchool)$

(Pic: Flickr / THINKGlobalSchool)

As several thinkers have said over the past century, a society should be judged by how well it treats its most disadvantaged members. By that count, the world is not faring very well when it comes to education.

In spite of the laudable progress across the world in getting more children into school, the most marginalised – including girls, children in poor rural areas and the disabled – continue to be systematically left out.

Consider these troubling facts, from the 2013/4 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Teaching and learning: Achieving quality for all, which launched today in Addis Ababa:

In low and lower middle income countries, the poorest rural young women have only spent three years on average in school – at least six years less than the richest urban young men.

In sub-Saharan Africa, at recent rates of progress, all the richest boys will complete primary school by 2021, but the poorest girls will not catch up for at least another 60 years.

It may take until 2072 for all poorest young women to become literate in low and lower middle income countries.

About 90% of children with disabilities in Africa are out of school.

The global picture is even more stark: 250 million primary school age children are not learning the basics, whether they are in school or not – and a majority of them are children who face marginalisation or discrimination.

These numbers should not only prick our collective conscience but also galvanise us to act – and act quickly. It is fair to say that the main reason we are 57 million children off-target to reach the second Millennium Development Goal (MDG) – to get every child in school – is because we have not paid attention to the most marginalised and the most vulnerable. We should resolve to do better.

Luckily, we have an opportunity to do just that as we focus on the global development framework that will succeed the MDGs. We have to make it our top priority to end inequalities by meeting the needs of the marginalised.

Young people made that clear during the first “Youth Takeover” of the United Nations General Assembly. On July 12 last year – dubbed Malala Day because it was the 16^th birthday of the Pakistani education activist Malala Yousafzai – youth leaders including Malala called for equity to be at the heart of new global education goals. We want the post-2015 goals to have clear targets that can be measured using indicators that track the progress of the most disadvantaged.

The 2013/4 EFA Global Monitoring Report reinforces this point, outlining the need for targets should be set to achieve equality, taking into account that characteristics of disadvantage often interact: girls from poor households in rural areas, for example, are usually among the most marginalised. Each goal should be tracked not only overall but also according to the progress of the lowest performing groups in each country to ensure that these groups reach the target by 2030.

One of the report’s findings is that children with disabilities are likely to face the most severe discrimination and exclusion, which often keep them out of school. It is urgent to collect better data on children with different types and severity of impairments so that policy-makers can be held accountable for making sure these children’s right to education is respected.

And it is not enough just to get marginalised children into school – they also need to be actually learning once they are there. But they tend to get the worst deal when it comes to education quality, often being taught by the least-trained teachers. The EFA Global Monitoring Report’s main theme this year is the need to meet their needs by recruiting teachers from diverse backgrounds, training them to help disadvantaged children, and giving the best teachers incentives to teach in difficult areas and to remain in the profession.

In a special section, the new EFA Global Monitoring Report also lays out the wealth of evidence for education’s unique power to transform lives. Education boosts people’s chances of escaping poverty, of leading a healthier life and of getting a good job.

I can attest to this. I grew up in a poor, war-torn country, Sierra Leone. Despite overcrowded classrooms and the challenges of being a refugee, I have been lucky to be among the few that have managed to get a good education. That education has not only unlocked many opportunities for me and my family but has also equipped me to contribute positively to the betterment of my society.

Too many of my friends and others in similar circumstances have been denied the boost that education affords, however. It is is doubly unjust that the marginalised, who most need such a boost, are so often bypassed by efforts to improve education.

In 2014, it is not acceptable for any child or adolescent to remain out of school, or to be getting such low-quality education that they aren’t learning. Neither should we tolerate a situation in which so many young people lack the skills they need to get decent work and lead fulfilling lives. Across all our post-2015 global education goals, we should aim for no one to be left behind by 2030.

Chernor Bah is a youth advocate and former refugee from Sierra Leone. Following years of civil war in his country, he founded and led the Children’s Forum Network, Sierra Leone’s children parliament. In that role, Chernor presented a report on the experience of Sierra Leonean children to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In 2002, Chernor served as Junior Executive Producer of a UN Children/youth radio project, designed to involve young people in Sierra Leone’s post conflict discourse. Since then Chernor has worked with youth in Liberia, Lebanon, Haiti, Philippines and other emergency settings, leading efforts to strengthen youth voices in development and policy processes. A former UNFPA Special Youth Fellow, Chernor co-wrote a report titled “Will You Listen-Young Voices from Conflict Zones” and co-led the Youth Zones initiative. He holds an MA in Peace Studies from the University of Notre Dame and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Sierra Leone.