I have been listening to, watching and reading the series of adverts by NAC, DFID, and PSI and endorsed by the Ministry of Health with concern. I am referring to the adverts dealing with the issue of small houses. At a meeting some time last year at which Wellington Mushayi from PSI presented his findings on the issue of concurrent multiple relationships, l problematised a number of their findings. I also problematised the way he presented his data. In particular l found offensive his use of the word hure in the title of their research report titled “Small House, Hure, Sugar Daddies, and Garden Boys: A Qualitative Study of Heterosexual Concurrent Partnerships Among Men and Women in Zimbabwe, 2007″.

My contention then and now is that the acceptability of the use of hure in this research was not an accident. Nor was it just a case of the researchers being objective. It reflected the patriarchal world view of the research team. I remember him justifying the use of this word on the grounds that it was merely meant to reflect what was coming out in the findings. But that does not wash. The research was done mainly in local languages. They translated the responses and they maintained the word hure even after this translation. What did they want to communicate?

Read more

I’ve been feeling increasingly sickened by The Anti-Homosexuality Bill (yes, that’s its official name. At least it’s not trying disguise sheer hatred with a euphemism) currently being debated by the Ugandan Parliament.

As summarised by the Guardian’s Xan Rice in Kampala:

Life imprisonment is the minimum punishment for anyone convicted of having gay sex, under an anti-homosexuality bill currently before Uganda’s parliament. If the accused person is HIV positive or a serial offender, or a “person of authority” over the other partner, or if the “victim” is under 18, a conviction will result in the death penalty.

Members of the public are obliged to report any homosexual activity to police with 24 hours or risk up to three years in jail – a scenario that human rights campaigners say will result in a witchhunt. Ugandans breaking the new law abroad will be subject to extradition requests.

A landlord who rents to homosexual tenants risks seven years imprisonment.

Ugandan feminist and lawyer Sylvia Tamale shared her concerns about the Bill at a recent public dialogue and in this article.

News reports suggest that the bill is likely to be passed – even though doing so would violate international human rights treaties to which Uganda is a state party, such as the Universal Declaration on Human Rights, and would jeopardise Uganda’s international standing and assistance. Sweden has already pledged to cut aid to Uganda if it passes the legislation. But Uganda’s move into oil production makes it less likely to be sensitive to international donor pressure.

Ironically, the drive for the bill came in the wake of a seminar hosted by Ugandan organisation Family Life Network, which brought in American evangelical speakers known for their anti-homosexual stance. According to Rice: “After the conference Langa arranged for a petition signed by thousands of concerned parents to be delivered to parliament in April. Within a few months the bill had been drawn up.”

Sexual Minorities Uganda (SMUG) is working with the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) to protest the legislation. Email the Ugandan officials listed below and add your voice to these protests.

View the IGLHRC sample letter here

• President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni – info@statehouse.go.ug
• Prime Minister Apollo Nsibambi – ps@opm.go.ug
• Speaker of the Parliament Edward Ssekandi Kiwanuka – speaker@parliament.go.ug
• Minister of Gender, Labour, and Social Affairs – ps@mglsd.go.ug
• Med Kaggwa, Chair of the Uganda Human Rights Commission – uhrc@uhrc.ug
• Directorate for Ethics and Integrity – info@dei.go.ug
• Mathisen Gørild, Chair of the Uganda Diplomatic Human Rights Working Groups – gorild.mathisen@mfa.no
• Dr. Ruhakana Rugunda, Permanent Representative of the Republic of Uganda to the United Nations – ugandaunny@un.int
• Send a copy to: communications+action.alert@iglhrc.org

If only Zimbabwe had a free press and politicians who could handle some fun poked at them. Compare our media environment with South Africa’s where Nandos have just launched an ad campaign that focuses on South Africa’s “shameless ministerial gravy train“. Any chance of Wimpy doing the same here? Fat chance.

Someone once asked whether I thought women could ‘ever’ be equal to men. I told them that I did not think women could ever be equal to men because as far as I was concerned women have ‘always’ been equal to men – they were just conned into thinking otherwise.

The very fact that the matter could be subject to debate, dispute and indeed controversy points to how a people can be so indoctrinated as to miss the truth that is staring right in front of them. Can there be anything more ludicrous than relegating one group of people to subservience just because they don’t happen to possess the right anatomy?

How then have we managed from one generation to the next to perpetuate, authenticate and reproduce the same patriarchal attitudes and values that disempower women and privilege men?

Even in the most glaring inequalities and the most ghastly social injustices, we are led to believe that a woman’s inferiority is a natural consequence of having been born female – that it is ordained by some deity or divinity.

So to challenge the status quo, we are forced to commit the great unforgivable sacrilege of pointing out the fact that women folk are oppressed by a system that rests solely on the idea of male supremacy. Those of us who have the temerity to point out what is so obviously wrong with the status quo are treated with hostility by the very women we would hope to liberate for even a captive starts to believe that their captivity is the will of God and having made peace with it – they become reluctant to believe anything to the contrary.

Years and years of internalizing patriarchal values have created in us a deeply ingrained belief in our own ‘inferiority’ and the spaces we have been given to occupy suddenly seem appropriate and natural to us – we feel we have no right to aspire for more.

And who is more enslaved than the person whose chains bind the mind and whose shackles tie the soul?

For the things we imbibed in our childhood become so much a part of us that to conceive of breaking them seems unnatural – yet we can never be free until we start to question, to query, to prod, to interrogate, to inquire and if need be – to challenge, to reject and even to rebel against those beliefs that would keep us caged by our anatomy.

We have believed a lie, we have lived a lie and we have fallen victim to the greatest con of all time – we have believed that our womanhood obscures our humanity. I would rather be a human being than a woman any day – because womanhood is a social construct – a figment of some man’s imagination, a prescription derived from the sexist ideology that places people’s biological make up above their humanity.

Before I toe the line – I demand to know who drew it. Before I measure myself against any yardstick – I demand to know who carved it.

Before I stop myself at any boundary – I demand to know who set it. Before I confine myself to any space – I demand to know who created it.

For if we are to be free we must know the answers to the questions and we must be the answers; for too long we have not cared to know the answers for we have not even been allowed to ask the questions.

So now we, those of us who have been told we suffer from the ailment of too much schooling, constipated and ruined by ‘excessive’ education – we who are not afraid to desecrate the shrines of silence our mothers erected – we question the status quo.

And the sound of our voices is like a thing of shame – that we should have the audacity to ask questions and the nerve to demand an answer – we are a generation hell-bent on calling culture’s bluff.

The pigeonholes of stereotype can no longer contain us; in our minds we carry the resolve that we will not be our mothers’ daughters.

For our mothers bestowed upon us so narrow a path, so limited a scope of choice and so silent a voice that we could not speak up and be heard.

We believed the myth of male superiority, bowing before the tyranny of patriarchy and accepting miseries and misfortunes with the stoicism of cows standing in the rain.

So we chose to be feminists because feminism is the radical notion that women are people too and that patriarchy is nothing more than male supremacy posturing as ‘culture’.

And in the years that have gone by we have gradually come to realize that we suffered needlessly from internalizing the doctrine of one group of people seeking to protect the privileged status quo that was their due merely by having been born male. Simply by being taught two different sets of catch phrases – we grew up marginalized, relegated and subjugated.

The oppression of women rested firmly on the greatest con there ever was – it rested on the fallacious belief that women were ‘natural’ subordinates of man and lesser beings.

Zimbabwean social and political commentator Rejoice Ngwenya discusses protest consumerism in his article entitled “Citizens are the real heroes” . . .

I am not a street activist, but more from the irritable pool of intellectual key-punchers who hope that Robert Mugabe and his cronies are literate enough to notice how collective resentment and hatred for shameless, fascist dictatorship is better expressed in the written word. This I say because there is a fallacy pervading Zimbabwean society that the number of times and period that one is beaten and arrested is the only means of verifying serious political activism.  And perhaps there is precedence to this malnourished viewpoint, given that the icons of Africa’s liberation struggle have, at one time or other, had a bruising encounter with local justice systems.

The tragedy is that nationalists, like Mugabe, have used this as a basis for extended stay in power, arguing that long periods spent in colonial gaol gives them the right to oppress their countrymen.  Critics of Professor Arthur Mutambara have raised the same argument that he never received as much political bashing and detention as Morgan Tsvangirayi, thus his claim to political fame is flimsy and frivolous. The good news is that this viewpoint is devoid of good judgement and destined for extinction.

In awarding Magodonga Mahlangu the coveted Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, United States President Barack Obama mentioned that the firebrand Zimbabwean activist has been arrested more than thirty times. No doubt all progressive cadres of the struggle against Mugabe’s ‘scientific’ tyranny will and should applaud Mahlangu’s recognition, but I am one of the few who do not particularly subscribe to the theory that the number of times one is convicted for a good cause emits a force equal to or equivalent to the motion towards liberation. Moreover, the struggle  takes a further mortal knock when one, like Mahlangu does,  goes further to justify activism purely on the basis that his or her parents, friends, neighbours and relatives were at one time or another, victims of Mugabe’s Gukurahundi genocide.

More often than not, we Zimbabwean activists exaggerate our encounters in the struggle.  ZANU-PF has always been reminded that everyone fought against colonialism, thus heroism is not only a preserve of former Mozambican and Zambian exiles, members of the Central Committee or victims of post-independence detention and genocide.

Girl child activist Betty Makoni is currently exiled in England, advancing, like many of those Zimbabweans who inhabit that land, another case of persecution by the ZANU-PF government for exposing alleged ministerial girl-child abuse. No doubt she is in line for another award of recognition for her ‘struggle’ against tyranny. There is no doubt that other cadres like former political hostage Jestina Mukoko, human rights lawyer Otto Saki and constitutional activist Dr Lovemore Madhuku deserve all the accolades they get from the world movement for democracy. A crucial part of the struggle against oppression is confronting and defeating ZANU-PF it in its natural habitat – in the streets, but to limit recognition of this struggle only to the number of times one is arrested from the trenches belittles greater good.

My point is that the struggle to unseat tyranny is not about ‘rented’ college students doing street push-ups, old women and lactating mothers sacrificed on the altar of fiery fury of the dragon, merely to score political points. More often than not, strategic partners of governance and democracy have been accused of supporting only institutions that ‘raise hell and dust’ in running battles with Mugabe’s uniformed sympathisers in the alleys. This is a narrow view of resistance, for there is more like us who find pride in pounding tyranny from the keyboard. It may not be glamorous, elicit blood or swollen foreheads, but the message spreads far and wide. Street activists accuse us of ‘conference room activism’ because there is no glitz and glamour accrued from making interviews for CNN from hospital beds.

The moral of my argument is that when seminar attendance registers and police charge sheets become the only genuine evidence of political activism, strategic partners have taken the eyes off the ball.  ‘Anniversary’ day activism manifested in protest handbills and posters, glossy advertisements, angry press statements and red roses handed out at street corners are part of the continuum of the struggle against ZANU-PF dictatorship.

However, the demands of modern day transformative revolution require that we shift the gear from mere defiance to a higher pedestal of popular resistance. The answer lies in paralysing the business supply systems that keep the ZANU-PF dragon bite venomous. Restrictive and targeted sanctions are part of this exciting high-yield strategy; the other is embedded in protest consumerism.

Mr. Rejoice Ngwenya writes for AfricanLiberty.org.  He is founder of Coalition for Liberal Market Reforms, a Zimbabawean think tank.

Just in from the Zimbabwe National Students Union (ZINASU):

Today’s Alert (03-12-09)

There is chaos and pandemonium at the University of Zimbabwe (UZ) after college authorities barred students this morning from entering the examination room over nonpayment of tuition fees. The end of semester examinations started today, 3 December 2009 and security guards have been placed on all entrances to the examination halls. This has prompted the ZINASU leadership comprising of the President, Cde B. Dube, the Secretary General, Cde L. Chinoputsa and other general councilors from various institutions in Zimbabwe to swiftly intervene in the dire situation and is trying to meet the College Vice Chancellor, Proff Levy Nyagura to reverse the absurd decision and allow all students to write examinations irregardliness of whether they paid or not. Failure to reverse that will lead to a serious riot by students.

The Ministry of Higher Education reiterated on Saturday, 28 November 2009 during the ZINASU All Stakeholders Conference on Higher Education reforms that no students should be barred from writing examinations over nonpayment of tuition fees. The tuition fees charged in most state instititutions are exorbitant ranging between USD150- USD850 and the majority of students cannot afford these steep fees.

About 42% of the students at UZ failed to pay the inflated fees and if nothing is done to solve the crisis it means the future is gloom for almost half of the students from the biggest and oldest institution of higher learning in Zimbabwe.