It’s a windy Friday afternoon. I walk through shopping stalls that line a tiny pathway between a fish and chips shop and Woolworths. A kid in a torn T-shirt flashes a 32GB memory stick in my face. I refuse the deal, even before hearing his price. I sink underground in an escalator. At the bottom of it is a man selling newspapers and three women touting various perfumes. A few minutes later, I surface in front of McDonald’s. I dissect the Golden Acre Shopping Centre in half with its walk-through and emerge on the other side that faces Darling Street. Now I’m in front of Jimmy Braye’s Rasta stall. Reggae blares from it; a huge Bob Marley poster flaps in the wind; red, green and yellow clothes are draped everywhere. “Welcome to Jamaica,” it all seems to say, but this is Cape Town.
Jimmy Braye’s stall. (Pic: Dudumalingani Mqombothi)
I start to say sorry for being late but Jimmy quickly stops me. “No need to apologise, my king,” he says. He’s young, loud, big and friendly; Ghanaian but he’s been calling South Africa home since 2003. Before that he spent some time exploring Argentina. “I have been everywhere my king. Singapore, Holland, Togo, Uganda and Australia,” he says proudly.
South Africa beckoned because he saw it as an “economically viable” country. He started out working for Community Peace Project, an NGO based in Observatory, for two years. In 2005, he embraced his passion and opened up his Rasta stall. “I saw a need for it,” he says simply. People come to Jimmy for caps, T-shirts, pants, hoodies, bags, smoking pipes, Rizla and books. He gets his supplies in bulk from Johannesburg.
I ask Jimmy how he finds Cape Town – “It’s beautiful, my king” – and South Africa today. He stares at me for a short while rearranging his thoughts and finding the right words to communicate them. “South Africa is getting there. Its democracy is still young but slowly it is getting there. I hope it does not end up ruined like other African countries. But under the current government, that seems to be happening,” he says. Jimmy tells me he doesn’t follow the news or politics but “South Africa is ready for new leadership. The same thing happening here is happening across the continent. I know this because I’ve been around.”
Jimmy Braye. (Pic: Dudumalingani Mqombothi)
Apart from the shop, Jimmy runs the Marcus Garvey Foundation out of his home in Vredehoek. He started the project to source funding to build homes for homeless kids. This dream is yet to materialise but he remains hopeful that donors will come on board.
During the two hours I spent with Jimmy, tourists, street kids and passersby dropped in often, some to browse, others to say hi, and some after “a spliff to blaze”. Jimmy smokes weed but doesn’t sell it. “The cops come to search for it but they do not find it because I do not sell any dagga,” he says.
Sales aren’t great but he is happy his stall is still operating after nine years. Making a profit is secondary to doing what he loves, he says. You will find Jimmy here from six to six every day except on Sundays, when he goes to church, and Tuesdays, when he goes to the Deer Park with his fellow Rastas to pray and smoke. He spends his free time working on his project for homeless kids.
Jimmy is one of many informal traders in Cape Town but he’s not only here to make a living; he wants to make a difference. We say goodbye, Rastafarian-style. I pound his left fist with mine and touch his open left palm with my own, and then I step out of Jamaica into Cape Town.
Dudumalingani Mqombothi is a film school graduate who loves reading, writing, taking walks and photography. He plans to write a novel when his thoughts stop scaring him.
Funerals can be lengthy affairs in western Kenya, and Liz, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, was out late at a wake for her grandfather that had stretched into the evening. She was on her way home when she recognised some familiar and unfriendly faces in the darkness. She knew instantly that the six men in front of her meant her harm. A tall girl, she tried to run. When they caught up with her, she tried to fight. Her attackers, thought to be aged between 16 and 20, began by punching and kicking her. After she was hurt too badly to resist, they took it in turns to rape her. The problem was that the teenager would not submit quietly: she kept screaming.
When they had finished with the girl, they dragged her to a deep pit-latrine nearby and threw her inside. But despite her horrendous injuries and a fall of nearly 3.6 metres, Liz managed to find the earthen steps used by the workers who dug the latrine to get out. As she pulled her broken body up the steps, villagers who had heard her cries found her.
They quickly raised a mob to give chase. The schoolgirl knew some of the men who had raped her and started shouting their names. The villagers managed to find three of Liz’s attackers and frogmarched them to the police outpost in the village of Tingolo, in Kenya’s north-western county of Busia. The officers arrested the trio for assault and promised the girl’s angry neighbours that the men would be punished. At daybreak, the rapists were handed curved machetes, known as “slashers”, and told to cut grass in the police compound. Duly punished, they were sent home.
The morning after the attack, Liz (not her real name) was taken to a dispensary, a rudimentary pharmacy that is the closest much of rural Kenya gets to a clinic, where she was given antibiotics and paracetamol. It was only when she found that she still could not walk, a week later, that her mother sold their chickens – the family’s only source of income – and took her to a medical clinic in the nearest town. The doctor ignored the fact that she was doubly incontinent and told her she needed physiotherapy. Her condition worsened and her mother leased the family’s land for about £60 – effectively mortgaging their home – to get her to the nearest big town, Kakamega, where she was eventually diagnosed with a fistula and damage to her spinal cord.
‘One of many’ This appalling, tragic tale would never have reached the outside world had it not been for the outrage of Jared Momanyi, the director of one of a handful of Kenyan clinics that specialise in the treatment of victims of sexual violence, to which Liz was eventually referred. He called a young reporter at the Daily Nation in the capital, Nairobi, who had previously written a story about the facility in Eldoret, a town perched on the western side of Kenya’s Great Rift Valley. “It troubled me so much I needed to take it head on and tell the world,” he said. “This was an attempted murder and it’s not an isolated case; it’s one among many.”
When the Nation’s Njeri Rugene visited Liz more than three months after the 26 June gang rape, she found a broken, traumatised girl in a wheelchair. The story Rugene wrote helped raise £4,000 to pay for an operation to repair Liz’s internal injuries, the first of two procedures the girl will need to have any chance of controlling her bladder and bowels or walking again.
What has made the teenager’s trauma even worse is that her assailants are still free. “She can’t understand why people keep coming to ask questions but those men don’t get arrested,” said Rugene.
Three of those who raped Liz are pupils at schools near her own and police have had the names of all six attackers since 27 June. After stories appeared in local newspapers, officers were finally sent to arrest those still in school. Teachers at one of the schools asked if the arrests could be postponed to allow them to take part in exams. The request was granted and police claimed afterwards that they were “tricked” by the teachers, who helped the pupils go into hiding.
Mary Mahoka, a social worker with a local child protection organisation, said cases such as Liz’s were the product of entrenched chauvinism in her home area of Busia, an impoverished county close to the shore of Lake Victoria.
Polygamy was widely practised and girls were not valued by the community, she said. When she first started to work with rape victims in 1998, she found that perpetrators would pay for their crime by handing over a goat or a bag of maize to the girl’s parents.
Last week, Mahoka was helping a six-year-old girl who had been sexually assaulted by a man in his 20s. “It’s happening every day, but often it’s not reported,” she said.
Mahoka, whose organisation is partly funded by UK aid, has to disguise the nature of her group’s work, calling it “rural education and economic enhancement” so as not to provoke hostility among traditionalists in the community.
She has investigated the gang rape and says it was not a chance occurrence: “Liz had rejected advances from one of the boys, so he brought his friends to discipline her.”
‘Silent epidemic’ After reading about Liz’s ordeal, Nebila Abdulmelik, a women’s rights activist in Nairobi, launched an online petition with the international campaign group Avaaz that has attracted more than 660 000 signatures. “Letting rapists walk free after making them cut grass has to be the world’s worst punishment for rape,” she said. “There is a silent epidemic in Kenya. It’s not as loud as in Congo or South Africa, but the statistics are high.”
People walk past a poster bearing a message against rape on a street in Nairobi on November 24 2005. (Pic: AFP)
As many as eight out of 10 Kenyan women have experienced physical violence and/or abuse during childhood. A report from Kenya’s national commission on human rights in 2006 found that a girl or woman is raped every 30 minutes.
Orchestrating rape is also among the charges facing Kenya’s president, Uhuru Kenyatta, who goes on trial on 12 November at the international criminal court accused of organising the violence that killed at least 1,300 people after a 2007 disputed election.
Abdulmelik notes that, under Kenya’s Sexual Offences Act, Liz’s assailants should face prison sentences of not less than 15 years. The same legislation stipulates that the expenses incurred by victims of such attacks, including surgery and counselling, should be borne by the state. “This is the government’s responsibility,” she said. “There is impunity from top to bottom, and meanwhile our president takes an entourage to the Hague at taxpayers’ expense.”
Avaaz and the African Women’s Development and Communication Network (Femnet), of which Abdulmelik is a member, plan to picket the ministry of justice and police headquarters in Nairobi on Wednesday, where volunteers will cut the grass in protest at the handling of Liz’s case.
The outcry over the fate of the 16-year-old last week prompted Kenya’s director of public prosecutions, Keriako Tobiko, to order the arrest of the six suspects and promise an inquiry into police failures. However, the investigating officer in Busia, Shadrack Bundi, said he had received no such directive and could not take any further action.
Rasna Warah, a Kenyan commentator, said women were being failed by the country’s leaders, male and female, who often left it to foreign-funded NGOs to raise awareness. “The Busia rape case is symptomatic of our society’s attitudes towards women. Violence against women has become so normalised it almost constitutes a sort of ‘femicide’.
When a few drops of rain spluttered on the ground on Sunday, my son and his friends, who a few minutes before had been running around shirtless, ran across the yard excitedly screeching, “Pula, Pula!” (Rain! Rain!). Although I warned them that they would catch a cold, even I couldn’t resist the joy in the moment as I stepped out for a few minutes to feel the slithering cold drops on my skin. Perhaps the gods had finally answered our continued prayers?
Last month, during a series of kgotla (an open court area where members of the public convene) meetings, President Ian Khama encouraged Batswana to come together to seek divine intervention and collectively pray for rain. He declared September a month of prayer for rain. Many religious entities heeded his call. Various churches converged at the Gaborone Dam for prayers. In the midst of song, dance and chants, the men and women in attendance broke into loud heartfelt prayers, hands raised to the skies, begging the Lord above for the heavens to open.
Botswana’s President Ian Khama. (Pic: AFP)
The water level of the Gaborone Dam, which is the main water supplier for the south of the district, currently stands at 19%, the lowest it has been in history. According to the Water Utilities chief executive officer Godfrey Mudanga, at that capacity and without rain, the dam can only supply the nation with water for the next eight months. Although grey skies frequently tease Botswana with the promise of downpours, we only ever get drizzles which soon make way for the scorching sun. It has rained very little in the past four consecutive years, particularly in the southern districts. The past year’s rainy season (November to March) was recorded as the worst by the local meteorological services.
The country is already experiencing dire water shortages, particularly in the southern districts. The Bokaa Dam in the west of Gaborone stands at 10%, while Nnywane Dam, situated to the south of the city, dried up in March. The South Africa Water Authority has agreed to supply 22-million cubic litres per day to Botswana; but only if the water level in its Molatedi Dam rises higher than 26%.
The long dry spells have frustrated crop farmers, who rely on the rains for their livelihoods. Although Batswana and the meteorological services are hopeful that it will rain again, the dry grass, sullen soil, brown trees, thin cows and dried up rivers don’t paint a positive picture. And if we do enjoy some much-needed downpours, it’s uncertain whether this will be enough to fill up the drying rivers and dams.
Due to long periods of no rain, water levels in the Gaborone Dam and other dams across the country are alarmingly low. (Pic: Flickr / Al Green)
This is not the first time Botswana, a semi-arid country, has experienced drought. The country has endured spates of dry spells in the past two decades. However, with climate change looming, it’s anticipated that conditions are likely to worsen. With so little rain, water shortages are common and government has had to enforce water rations for domestic and industrial usage.
Government has spearheaded the North-South water pipeline to address national development constraints and to transport water to the south, which is the industrial and economic hub of the country. The pipeline begins at Letsibogo Dam in the north and runs for approximately 360km, with pumping stations in Palapye, Marolane and Serorame Valley in the central south of the country. The first phase of this project was completed in 2000; the second phase is expected to be completed early next year.
Meanwhile, a traditional doctor named Monthusi Sekonopo has claimed the country is experiencing water shortages because President Khama, who is also the chief of the Bangwato, has not heeded his powers as a “rainmaker”. Sekonopo, who is also president of the Botswana Traditional doctors Association, told a local newspaper, the Midweek Sun, that this was revealed to him in a series of dreams. He asserted that on September 1 every year at 4am, Khama should be at the kgotla in Serowe Village, summoning the rains and declaring the beginning of the plough season. The traditional doctor also said that the president was a born chief and therefore has other duties beyond politics that he needs to see to.
His wild claims aside, the fact remains that rain continues to be scarce across the country. When the heavens do open for us, it’s no exaggeration that the whole country will be filled with the same euphoria that envelopes us when the national soccer team wins a game.
Keletso Thobega is a copy editor and features writer based in Gaborone, Botswana.
Music producer Apple Juice Kid and musician Pierce Freelon of the Beat Making Lab recently flew to Ethiopia to work with the IntraHealth global health organisation in an effort to use “hip-hop as a medium to spread awareness about health issues”. Beat Making Lab is an organisation that champions cultural exchange and provides beat-making equipment and training to youth around the world.
In the first of six episodes being filmed in Ethiopia, they get to know a 21-year-old singer and aspiring beatmaker by the name of Gelila.
The latest episode involves a new student who takes on the Lab’s challenge of penning lyrics about health issues in Ethiopia.
Check out the Lab’s YouTube channel for more inspiring collaborations.
Alyssa Klein for okayafrica, ablog dedicated to bringing you the latest from Africa‘s New Wave.
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
