Africa News blog

Must we see rape in Britain to understand rape in Congo?

I was left somewhat traumatised after going to see a screening of a controversial new Hollywood-backed short released this week, aimed at highlighting the link between minerals mined for British mobile phones and the use of rape and murder as weapons of war in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

The highly graphic campaign video – appropriately called Unwatchable – starts with a little English girl picking flowers in the garden of her family’s multi-million pound mansion in a picturesque Cotswolds village.

This tranquil scene is shattered in an instant when armed men descend on the house, gang-rape her sister on the kitchen table and then murder her parents. It ends five minutes later with the girl running for her life.

“We placed it in a sort of cliché idyllic countryside, and tracing it back to mobile phones would make it relevant to people on the street,” Marc Hawker of production company DarkFibre told AlertNet.

“It’s a foreign story and that’s how people think. We wanted to target 16 to 30-year-olds who know nothing about what is happening,” said Hawker, who wrote and directed the film.

The film is based on the story of a woman from eastern Congo, Masika, and her family’s suffering at the hands of militia, re-enacted in rural England. According to Hawker, Masika was made to eat her husband’s flesh before the rebels mutilated and killed him, and then raped her and her daughters.

“We wanted people to imagine what is going on in the Congo,” said Vava Tampa, director of Save the Congo, a human rights group made up of London-based Congolese students and professionals which is backing the campaign. “If they can imagine what is happening on the ground then perhaps we will be compelled to take more action.”

Sweet potatoes to beat climate change?

A major obstacle to producing enough food has been the dry weather which hit many African countries last year, including Kenya, where 10 million people urgently needed food when rains failed. Now Kenyan farmers have been asked to grow drought tolerant crops to help prepare for the effects of climate change.

Nancy Opele has been growing sweet potatoes on her farm in Kenya’s western Trans Nzoia district. She started growing the potatoes in 2003 after researchers approached farmers and introduced them to the crop.

“We have discovered that these potatoes just need a small place to grow and they do very well. You harvest a lot of potatoes, Opele told Reuters Africa Journal.

Nancy is part of a group of women in the Bahaso self help group who are planting alternative crops to Kenya’s staple food, maize. Sweet potatoes do well in the region, are hardly attacked by pests and need minimal rainfall to grow. The crop also takes about 5 months to mature, half the time needed by maize.

 Sweet potatoes can be stored in the soil for up to 8 months but once harvested they don’t stay fresh for long. Nancy and her friends usually preserve the potatoes by grating them and drying the flakes out in the sun. The flakes are then ground into flour.

The potatoes are gaining popularity after four failed rain seasons led to a drought last year. Experts say it was the worst seen in the country since 1996. Many farmers lost their maize crop but the sweet potatoes did well.

One way to build food security is to promote use of drought tolerant foods like sweet potatoes. The Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, or KARI, is training farmers to plant improved varieties of the crop.

A tussle over trousers in Sudan

One moment everything was quiet on the streets outside the Khartoum courtroom where Lubna Hussein was on trial this morning, charged with indecency for wearing trousers.

The next, a three-way fight had exploded between riot police armed with crackling electric batons, women’s rights protesters waving banners and posters, and Islamists fuelled with righteous indignation and pious chants.

You couldn’t have asked for a better illustration of the opposing forces that have come piling down on Sudan’s government since the start of the case — opposing forces that also compete for influence at the heart of the Khartoum regime.

Women’s rights campaigners and other activists were the first to get involved after Sudan’s public order police barged into a party in the capital in July and found Lubna and 12 other female guests wearing trousers.

The activists saw it as a test case for the hundreds of women who get picked up every year in Khartoum, and face flogging for a range of for public order offences, mostly related to dress. Punishments aside, may women also complain about the sporadic way the law is applied and the lack of a clear definition of indecent dress.

The human rights protesters had a powerful case to make to a Sudanese government that is currently keen to cosy up to the West, in the hope of getting some of Washington’s crippling trade sanctions lifted. A highly publicised flogging would have been particularly bad news for Khartoum on Monday, two days ahead of an expected visit from the U.S. Sudan envoy Scott Gration.

Aid – a new model?

Women lead from the front in Rwanda’s parliament

After next year’s election in Rwanda, women hope they will take around two thirds of the seats in parliament.

It would be an ambitious dream for equality campaigners in many countries, but after the 1994 genocide, women made up 70 percent of Rwanda’s population.   Rwanda became the first country in the world with a female majority in parliament after last year’s election.   Solange Tuyisenge has a rural constituency and has been a legislator for about four years. She says even more can be done to give women even more political clout.

“We cannot say that we have empowered all women; we still have a long way to go,” she told Reuters Africa Journal.   “We still have girls and women who need representation, to be spoken for.”   She says she believes changing the mindsets of Rwandans is the key, so they “understand that the woman of the 40s is not the same as the current woman, a woman is not only to bear children or stay in the kitchen, there is development”.

Rwanda brought in constitutional reforms to boost the number of female parliamentarians, as well as supporting other projects to develop opportunities for women – such as encouraging them to take up farming.   “Well, personally, the initiative to empower women in Rwanda has really made it possible for me to develop,” Alphonsine Umwubahimana, whose husband was killed was killed in 1994, told Africa Journal.   She signed up for a farming programme, which gave her three dairy cows. She now has 15 and employs seven male labourers.

An estimated 800,000 minority ethnic Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were killed in Rwanda by militiamen and soldiers during just 100-days in 1994.

Activists from Burundi, where two decades of civil war killed 300,000 people before it ended in 2006, have been to Rwanda to try to learn from its experience.   After changing the constitution in 2005, the proportion of women in Burundi’s government rose from zero to 30 percent.   “Right now we are preparing ourselves for the next election in 2010, so that they can work some more on the constitution and increase the percentage of women from 30 percent to 50 percent in all sectors,” Burundian delegate Manairakiza Godelive said.   Male delegate Nayishake Eugene said: “We have seen the truth … even if we have not yet started the hard part, we now know that it is possible.”