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Tuesday, 25 March 2008 |
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 4 days to go
Four candidates are standing: Robert Mugabe, the incumbent (of Zanu-PF), Morgan Tsvangirai (of the Movement for Democratic Change, MDC ), Simba Makoni (the former Minister of Finance and Economic Development; he fell foul of Zanu-PF when his policies contradicted that of his former party) and Langton Towungana (running as an independent).
No one has been unaffected by the economic crisis, but as always, it is the inhabitants of the ghettos, who weren't earning much in the first place, that have suffered the most. So, what's the mood in the ghettos?
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Wednesday, 19 March 2008 |
 Respect, sistas!
Female lawyers from five American countries founded the International Federation of Women Lawyers in Mexico, in 1944, and the Kenyan affiliate was set up in 1985.
Due to ignorance, fear and poverty, and to the fact that some cultures don’t believe in women’s rights, the African woman has suffered silently for decades with no place to turn for help. Some of the cases, and FIDA’s daily challenges, include rape, incest, inheritance issues (men in our society believe that women should not be mentioned in a will), and various forms of violence against women.
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Tuesday, 18 March 2008 |
 At the camp on IWD
A large part of my inspiration this year, to work and fight even harder, is due to the struggle I saw women go through during the post-election violence in Kenya. For years women have fought against the odds in every area of life, career, education, marriage, any area you think of, but after the post-election violence, we were thrown back. Years back. So, on March 8th, Linda my co-presenter on ghetto radios women’s show chanuka dada, Maarten Brouwer, our director, and a camera guy from a local TV show all got into a car and headed for one of the internally displaced people's camps. These camps are areas allocated by the government to the Kenyans who lost their homes during the violence. Try to imagine, for a moment, what it must feel like to be a refugee in your own country. Hard to imagine, isn’t it?
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Tuesday, 18 March 2008 |
 Our rights, now!
I love my culture, I really do, but this same culture was set up to restrict a woman’s role to the kitchen. For a long time it was taboo for women to involve themselves in certain fields, particularly those in which any sort of leadership roles were involved.
In the ghettos, women have continued to be sidelined by their male comrades. Women can be seen selling vegetable at roadsides, one hand receiving cash and the other holding the baby or breastfeeding. They are also to be found cleaning houses in the suburbs or making illegal liquor, and many young girls are turning to prostitution or joining gangs to pay the bills.
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