Book Café Gender Forum

Topic: Unveiling the unspoken realities of women’s reproductive health
Date: Thursday, 21 July 2011
Time: 5.30-7pm
Venue: The Book Café

Speakers: Mrs Masiyiwa (WAG), Mr Chiware(Gynaecaologist), Min of Health (TBA)
Chaired by: Sally Dura

In a report, Dr. Nafis Sadik, Executive Director, UN Population Fund says “The importance of good health and education to a woman’s well-being – and that of her family and society – cannot be overstated. Without reproductive health and freedom, women cannot fully exercise their fundamental human rights, such as those relating to education and employment.”

What are the current trends of reproductive diseases affecting women in Zimbabwe? Are there institutions and mechanisms in place to inform and offer affordable and quality health care for women?  If they are there what strategies for improving knowledge, access and affordable quality health care for women have been put in place?

This meeting seeks to demystify some of the reproductive threats affecting women in Zimbabwe as well as highlight interventions that have been developed to allow women to fully understand their bodies. The Right to Reproductive and Sexual Health is fundamental as Dr Sadik says but how far is the Zimbabwean woman availed this right?

Phillip Toledano has “never been very interested in straightforward portrait photography”. Check out his series of photographs of people playing video games.

Where is a more complex narrative on Africa asks Saratu Abiola writing for Pambazuka News. According to Saratu, this years Caine Prize short list leaves a lot to be desired.

Here’s an excerpt:

Writers write. Readers have opinions. It’s really that simple. One has a right to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and churn out just whatever (s)he pleases. I certainly did not like Hitting Budapest, a plotless story that does not seem to have a point beyond “these kids are poor and live squalidly and you should pity them”, but I do not really care about Bulawayo; she can write whatever she wants. I’m madder at the Caine Prize for seeming to favor stories of a particular strain, the ones that are less about characters and the network of trip-wires that make up their humanity and more about flattening characters to render them tools to make a political point, and absolving them from the basic responsibilities that come with writing a good story. I’m madder at them for not asking for complexity, and buying into an oversimplified narrative of Africa – poverty, war, disease, starving/fighting children — just like most Western media does. I’m madder at the Caine for saying that this collection of stories is the best they could get out of Africa. I’m mad because I and so many people out there know that that is not true. More

South Africa has produced its first all-black pornographic movie, which film-makers say is intended to help promote safe sex and combat HIV. Mapona – which means Naked in SeSotho – was made in response to demand from the 30,000 members of an amateur porn site, Sondeza, who complained about the dearth of local black talent in X-rated movies. More

Zimbabwean writers, poets, sportsmen and women, journalists, entrepreneurs are making Zimbabwe proud. Pity our politicians aren’t doing so as well.

Zimbabwe’s NoViolet Bulawayo has won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing, described as Africa’s leading literary award, for her short story entitled ‘Hitting Budapest’. The Chair of Judges, award-winning author Hisham Matar, announced NoViolet Bulawayo as the winner of the £10,000 prize at a dinner held last night at the Bodleian Library in Oxford.

Hisham Matar said: “The language of ‘Hitting Budapest’ crackles.  Here we encounter Darling, Bastard, Chipo, Godknows, Stina and Sbho, a gang reminiscent of Clockwork Orange. But these are children, poor and violated and hungry. This is a story with moral power and weight, it has the artistry to refrain from moral commentary. NoViolet Bulawayo is a writer who takes delight in language.”

NoViolet Bulawayo was born and raised in Zimbabwe. She recently completed her MFA at Cornell University, in the US, where she is now a Truman Capote Fellow and Lecturer of English. Another of her stories, ‘Snapshots’, was shortlisted for the 2009 SA PEN/Studzinski Literary Award. NoViolet has recently completed a novel manuscript tentatively titled We Need New Names, and has begun work on a memoir project.

Source: Booktrade.info

Last week SW Radio Africa published the first in a six-part list of alleged CIO operatives. The original list contained names and addresses, while an amended list, published over the weekend only has names.

Responding to the public reaction to the list, SW Radio Africa Station Manager, Gerry Jackson wrote a statement saying: Experts say the CIO is the most powerful arm of ZANU PF’s security apparatus, the ‘brains behind the regime.’

According to the Council on Foreign Relations: ‘There is no public record of the CIO’s size, but it is thought to have thousands of operatives. Many Zimbabweans think the organization has a network of informers that extends into the Zimbabwean diaspora.

Jackson omits the part of the 2008 report, which states: Some analysts think the CIO’s ability to generate fear among Zimbabweans might exceed its true power.

Assuming the list is authentic, then what? How is releasing classified government information going to benefit the people of Zimbabwe?

In the article, SW Radio Africa discusses several people on the list and uses circumstantial and inconclusive evidence to link them to acts of violence and torture. Commenting on the article in NewZimbabwe Professor Tendi points out that the journalist concerned is hardly reliable: [he] once made an outlandish claim that UK-based public intellectual George Shire is Air Marshal Perrance Shiri’s brother. George suffered serious consequences, one of which was the desecration of his father’s grave, because of [his] fable.

I have several problems with SW Radio Africa publishing this list. First, it takes the CIO out of context. Gerry Jackson is right to assert that there is no legislative framework for the organization, but going by her statement one would be forgiven for thinking that the CIO was formed during the last decade to maintain ZANU PFs grip on power, but this is an institution that was inherited from the colonial government, and in fact Ian Smiths Chief of Intelligence, Ken Flower was retained by Our Dear Leader after Independence.  The CIOs lack of accountability, methodology and terror-tactics are characteristics of the Rhodesian era. In doing research for this blog I came across this quotation about the operations of the CIO:

“In the mid 1970′s, in the most closely guarded secret operation of the entire Rhodesian war, the CIO embarked on a programme of chemical and biological warfare. Doctors and chemists from the University of Rhodesia were recruited by the CIO and asked to identify and test a range of chemical and biological agents, which could be used in the war against the nationalist guerrillas. By 1975 clinical trials were performed on human guinea pigs at a remote Selous Scout camp at Mount Darwin in northeastern Rhodesia. The CIO provided victims from their detention centres, choosing little-known detainees who had been arrested on various security charges. In the secrecy of the camp, the doctors administered various chemical and biological agents to the prisoners, experimenting with delivery systems and dose levels. The local CIO Special Branch disposed of the bodies in local mine shafts.”

The bodies discovered earlier this year might very well be some of the victims of this brutal and inhumane programme.

My second problem is that publishing a questionable list of CIO operatives does nothing to address the deficiencies of the institution, and may contribute in exacerbating the situation for Zimbabweans who are being terrorized by CIO operatives. The fact of where the list is placed, online and outside Zimbabwe does nothing to help those people.

Finally, the list was published as a reactionary measure, rather than as a revolutionary one. It is conceivable that anyone in possession of that list in Zimbabwe, having taken the trouble to download and print it for local distribution, would be charged with treason. If Munyaradzi Gwisai and the 45 can be beaten, tortured and held for weeks without trial based on conjecture and rumour, then surely there are worse evils in store for anyone who actually has State Secrets on their person. It was done without thought as to objectives and consequences, as though placing information in the public domain is the end, rather than the means to it.