The bruising political row over the rape charge being investigated by police against former deputy president Jacob Zuma has become a barometer of where South Africa stands on gender violence as the Sixteen Days of Activism campaign gets under way. Never before has the campaign, that runs from 25 November- International Day of No Violence Against Women- to 10 December- Human Rights Day - been held in such a charged atmosphere. Leaving aside for a moment what did or did not happen in Zuma's Johannesburg home on 3 November – something we may indeed never know – the unfolding story rings many familiar bells, says this Gender Links commentary.

A number of African gender advocates in both government and civil society have put up spirited fight to have the United Nations create a Fund to address millennium development goal issues of reproductive health and gender empowerment. To be known as the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) Fund, resources channelled to this Fund are to be used to lower the high maternal and child mortality rates in sub-Saharan Africa, ensure gender empowerment and environmental goals are implemented with speed. “It looks like we are not getting our priorities right. Although other Funds are important, the one to save lives is more important,” says Dr Richard Muga, the Director of National Council for Population and Development. But the United States, especially the Bush Administration and other pro-life advocates, are said not to be warming up to the idea.

FIDA Ghana plans to increase its awareness and educational campaigns programs as well as women and children empowerment programs in Ghana. This placement is intended to strengthen the capacity of FIDA to continue to promote its human rights programs in Ghana.

A new Shona edition of Leading to Choices: A Leadership Training Handbook for Women is now available. The manual is translated into 13 languages including three African languages, Hausa, Swahili and Shona, as well as in English and French. Developed in collaboration with WLP’s partner organisations in the Global South, this resource is based on a conceptualisation of leadership as horizontal, inclusive, and participatory.

Humanitarian agencies have called for increased efforts to prevent sexual and gender-based violence (GBV) in war-torn western Sudan, saying such acts against women violate their human rights. The call was made during a meeting in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur State at the start of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence campaign, on 25 November. "Violence is not inevitable," said Hassan Mohtashami, a UN Population Fund (UNFPA) representative in Sudan. "Rather, it is often predictable and preventable. A number of interventions can be promising and effective in preventing violence and reducing the harm caused when it does occur."

There has been some criticism in the Central African Republic of a ban on misogynistic songs which came into force over the weekend. Communication Minister Fidel Ngouandjika threatened action against the broadcasting of songs that portrayed women as inferior to men. He said they undermined the role of women and contravened their rights. Women only got the vote in the former French colony 20 years ago and men are allowed to marry up to four wives. The BBC's Joseph Benamse in Bangui says the minister has been condemned by many for acting beyond his authority.

Rebecca Lolosoli radiates a quiet authority beneath layers of elaborate beadwork that cover her forehead, neck, chest, and wrists. She smiles readily while addressing an audience of US college students, though to them, her topic is a metaphor for hopelessness. Rebecca is talking about AIDS in Africa, specifically among women in her Indigenous, Samburu village of Umoja, Kenya. "For years, people were dying and we did not know why," she recalls. "Now we know that AIDS can be avoided, but only by making great changes in our lives."

It takes at least two people to circumcise a girl, one to hold her legs and the other her arms," said Ourey Sall, who for years performed the procedure. "Afterwards, we apply a mixture of goat droppings and plants to stop the bleeding." It has been five years since she put down the knife, breaking a tradition handed down from her mother, and her mother before that. It was a difficult decision but one being made more and more in Senegal today. On this day, Sall was among a crowd of men, women and children attending a ceremony in which members of 70 villages from the country's northeastern Matam region publicly renounced female genital mutilation (FGM) as well as forced and early marriages, according to IRIN.

On November 21, 2005, after a five-year constitutional review process, Kenya held a referendum to approve or reject a draft constitution. Sixty-seven percent of the voters rejected the draft. Association of Women In Development interviewed Winnie Guchu, a Nairobi based women's rights activist and consultant, about the country's constitutional review process and what it has meant for women's rights. Follow the link for the full interview.

On December 1, World AIDS Day in Kenya was marked with seven radio stations telling the stories of disinherited AIDS widows who have managed to get back their deceased husbands’ land. The broadcasts followed a two-day training in Nairobi for senior journalists on the issue, organized by Internews and the POLICY Project.

"As the Joint Working Group (JWG) we are proud to be in a Constitutional democracy that honours the equality and dignity of all citizens, as reflected in the judgment. In terms of the current form of both the common and statutory laws of marriage, the Court’s ruling acknowledges the denial of equal protection of the law, as well as the unfair discrimination of the State, against lesbian and gay people. As such, the Court was unanimous in declaring the common law definition of marriage and the Marriage Act unconstitutional, as they infringe our right to equality and dignity. Furthermore, in line with previous decisions, the Court asserts the rights of lesbian and gay people to access equal benefit and protection of the law and for our relationships to hold equal status in the eyes of the law."

For the transcript of the Constitutional Court ruling, visit
http://www.constitutionalcourt.org.za/site/ga ylesb.htm

Further information can be found at:
http://www.mask.org.za

In Southern Africa, women’s ability to access, own and control means of production such as land and livestock is severely limited by cultural practices and customary laws. This in turn has devastating impacts on their economic independence and ability to move out of poverty. Yet women’s access to land for food production is critical to the welfare of the entire region as it is women who are primarily responsible for maintaining households. Women provide 70-to 80 per cent of all agricultural labour and 90 per cent of all labour involving food production in the region. But they own only a fraction of the land, and constitute the majority of the population living in poverty.

Solidarity for African Women’s Rights (SOAWR), a pan-African coalition working for the popularization, ratification and domestication of the Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, celebrates the Protocol’s coming into force today (November 25) on International Day Against Violence Against Women, 30 days after the government of Togo became the 15th country to ratify.

The world is set to miss its target of getting as many girls as boys into schools by the end of this year, the UN children’s fund (Unicef) said. In a new study, Unicef said that efforts to achieve gender parity in primary education were off track, despite progress in many nations.

Violence is a common thread in the lives of refugees and displaced people all over the world. War, torture and persecution provide the grim background to their flight, while displacement and exile often engender more violence, reports Peace Women. For women refugees, the situation can be even worse than it is for men, and UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said combating violence against refugee women was one of his top priorities.

The Africa Educational Trust is running a part-time training programme for African women on “Researching the Needs, Presenting and Representing Women in the Community”. Two courses are offered through this programme.

‘Resisting Racism and Xenophobia’ is a collection of papers on a multitude of inequalities and injustices, all of which are related to racism. The book is edited by Faye Harrison, professor of African American Studies and Anthropology in Florida, who already made her mark in promoting justice, for example when she edited ‘Decolonizing Anthropology’ and more recently when she organised a group of academics to go to Durban, South Africa, to the UN World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) in 2001. In large part, the book contains contributions delivered at WCAR, but is also a response to the event that occurred almost immediately after the conference, namely September 11.

The introduction, written by the editor, is an activist’s overview of the struggle for human rights, its aims, concepts, obstacles, achievements, challenges. Encouraging is that this is of interest to anthropology. At second sight, this is not surprising, because anthropology includes the study of difference and identity. Because our ‘differences’ have an impact on our socio-economic - and psychological - status, anthropology on the one hand and politics or community development on the other, are interlinked. Hence Harrison’s opening statement by Mamphele Ramphele on the proximity of these disciplines (p.1).

Harrison reminds us of what opportunities the UN has afforded us such as the International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) from 1969. She analyses the “diversity of racism”(p.8) and how different definitions point at different aspects of injustice. She explains why racism is also specifically a women’s issue, namely because “women bear the brunt of much of the discrimination perpetuated against racially subordinated people.”(p.10).

Casteism, another dimension and variant of racism, particularly in India, is discussed by Devaki Jain. She also gives us an interesting insight into the proceedings of WCAR. The “conference revealed the ugliness of the human species, what it can do to the Other”(p.36) and “The air at the venue was one of conflict, conflict between peoples within countries.”(ibid.) This is useful feedback for us as activists: Did people not feel a sense of togetherness in each of them having the opportunity to raise the respective aspects of injustice that they are subjected to?

Subhadra Mitra Channa gives a further insight into casteism as it operates in India against the Dalits and Dhobis, so-called ‘untouchables’ who face immense discrimination despite a constitutional ban on ‘untouchability’ decades ago.

A perspective from Aboriginal Australia is given by J. Maria Pederson who, like other Aboriginals, was not born a citizen of her own country (p. 67). Cheryl Fisher, another international human rights activist, speaks as a voice for rural African Americans, as opposed to the ‘urban voices’ that we hear more frequently. Helen Safa explains to us the link between marriage and racism in America: the American state itself is to be held accountable for the high incidence of black single mothers because they did not allow Blacks to get married and they did not enable black men to be sole breadwinners. Melissa Hargrove discusses the link between sex tourism and economics with racism. The governments of poorer countries such as the Caribbean view tourism as a tool for development but the tourism promotes exotic images of the black female. Given that concurrent structural adjustment programmes in her country reduce alternative (normal) opportunities to make an income she is forced to engage in “Structurally Adjusted Intercourse”(p.123).

Esther Njiro’s discussion of racism is on gender, HIV/AIDS and racism in Africa and with it opens up important topics within and beyond African feminism. Fatma Napoli and Mohamed Saleh’s aspect of racism under discussion is the situation of women in Zanzibar, which, as an island, experienced multiple colonisations and whose women experienced colonialisms parallel to and in addition to the colonisations that the men would experience, such as sexual abuse(s): colonized space and colonized bodies.

Philomena Okeke describes the struggle for “new Africans in diaspora”(p.175) in Canada, as opposed to those that have been in the diaspora since the onset of slavery, namely the African Americans. Her contribution is of particular significance to all those Africans from the continent who had to migrate in this lifetime, as this is a growing group but still neglected by academic literature on ‘black people in America’. Jan Delacourt discusses racism suffered by immigrants in Northern Italy. Haitian-born Gina Ulysse contributes a poem about her country of conceptual significance “My country in translation”(p. 209) revealing mechanisms of distortions, consequences of assumptions.
Camille Hazeur and Diana Hayman describe the faults and challenges of diversity training, an important topic as diversity training is one avenue of fighting racism, so we need to know what exactly is wrong with it and why.

The editor, Faye Harrison, gives a detailed analysis of the intersection of struggles for human rights being waged in the US South, a struggle that includes issues of and for various disadvantaged groups and individuals. Groups whose rights have been neglected – or never even established – form ‘evidence of injustice’. Hence her chapter is entitled: “What democracy looks like.”(p.229ff). Harrison also shows commonalities between the US South and the Global South throughout the chapter.

Finally, Fadwa El Guindi’s chapter on the struggle over Palestine, the crisis in the Middle East and the intensification of that crisis after September 11, illuminates the extent that victimisation has assumed.

The book is inspiring for all activists, insightful for all social scientists, educational for all who are not yet aware of the urgency of a global struggle against injustice. The book is unique in giving perspectives by and about voices from all the five continents of the globe. In this age of globalisation it is most useful and necessary to know how each one of us is affected. Reading the book is an inspiration to carry on our respective struggles and link up with one another.

* Reviewed by Ursula Troche. Ursula Troche is an Activist, Artist and Anthropologist. She does performance poetry on political issues; did Intercultural Therapy at Goldsmith's College; participated in a conference on Anthropologists Against Racism in the Czech Republic; founded Culture-Net-Work, and teaches adult education in Southall, West London.

* Please send comments to [email protected]

Increased access to antiretroviral (ARV) therapy and the resulting improvements in health have given many clients with HIV a renewed optimism about the future. As personal situations improve, these clients may reconsider their reproductive options — some deciding whether to have children, others resuming sexual activity while wanting to avoid pregnancy. As a result, demand for contraception among clients with HIV, especially those on ARV therapy, is expected to increase.

Women who suffer physical abuse from intimate partners - the most common form of violence perpetrated against women worldwide - experience serious health consequences, according to a report released last Thursday by the World Health Organization, the AP/Boston Globe reports. The survey of 24,000 women in 10 countries found that women who suffer domestic abuse were twice as likely as other women to suffer health problems, including pain, dizziness, gynecological and mental health problems, which persist after the abuse has stopped, the report says.

It was "Folake" who was jailed after she accused a man of rape. A domestic worker, she said her employer’s husband had forced her into his bedroom and made her watch a violent videotape before forcing her to have sex. A medical examination supported her allegation. Yet she was the one brought to court, charged with slander for making the accusation, and remanded in prison until her family could raise the bail money to have her released. The material evidence of the crime, handed over to the police, was later said to have disappeared. No charges were brought against the man she accused.