Africa has never been short of avant-garde, maverick and daring writers – one of them is a Kenyan Binyavanga Wainaina. In contemporary literary circles, Wainaina is respected for his eloquence, wit and love for the continent. It was for the same reasons he drew a full house at the auditorium of the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), in Johannesburg. It turned out to be a bizarre winter evening with the writer and gay activist.
It was awkward and excruciating to listen to Wainaina, who struggled to speak without breaking mid-sentence. Sitting there, in front of his loyal admirers, he was a shadow of himself. Wainaina, with a clean-shaven head, in black kaftan adorned with an elegant necklace, sipped beer between sentences in this hour-long conversation with Wits literature lecturer Danai Mupotsa and Indian writer Achal Prabhala. Wainaina was the guest at the event titled ‘How To Write About Everything’, which echoed his essay How To Write About Africa.
In 2015, at the age of 44, Wainaina suffered a series of minor strokes that impaired his speech. I don’t know how many beers he had, but sitting in the second row, I noticed his head lolling at times.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2017/08/15/bees-knees-honey/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">It&#8217;s The Bees&#8217; Knees, Honey</a>
Like many in the audience, I had admired his work since childhood. We could have walked the same streets when I was growing up in Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape, where he lived for nine years. He stayed in Mthatha, the small town where Nelson Mandela was born, while studying accounting. He dropped out and earned a living copywriting on his way of becoming a renowned essayist.
In 2014, Wainaina was named as one of TIME’s 100 most influential people but he refused to attend the function. Similarly, in 2007, the World Economic Forum acknowledged him as a young global leader but he declined again. He said the organizers should have asked him first before publishing his name.
At the time of writing his memoir, One Day I Will Write About This Place, Kenya was going through violent elections and Wainaina was home during his recess at Union College, in the United States. He said the book made it difficult for him to return to the college.
“This affected the book very immensely because it was supposed to be personal. I must tell you, many African writers face the same thing, where you say, ‘I believe in art for art’s sake, I believe I am supposed to just write this book about my life’, and then shit happens that politicizes the thing. And that is beautiful, but it doesn’t feel like that at the time,” said Wainaina.
<a href="http://www.forbesafrica.com/sometime-in-africa/2017/07/14/gliding-grace-flies-without-flap/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Gliding Grace That Flies Without A Flap</a>
Wainaina is well known for his scathing reviews of fellow writers but has also fostered talent all over the world.
“…He has a kind of yearning for utopia, an Africa utopia. It’s because of his glorious heart, his capacity for love. Once we had a fight and I was in the wrong but I didn’t acknowledge it then. He taught me with grace what real friendship means and for that I will always be grateful. I love him, I respect him, I admire him, and I am glad he finally listened to me about the cut of his kaftans,” said Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in her message.
Wainaina knew at the age of 10 that he was gay but he refused to talk about it until Chimamanda asked.
“Of course, I said no. But she liberated something in me, already, just by asking me. Because normally the skies will fall if you say yes,” says Wainaina, overwhelmed with emotions in a continent that often misunderstood him.
Chimamanda’s question led him to pen his popular essay I Am a Homosexual, Mum, which was published on his birthday.
“It’s hard to describe the kind of effect it has had. It sort of stopped the world in a little while in a great way. Binyavanga, ironically, was very keen to produce this essay as a conversation he wanted to have on the African continent with people that he felt close to, rather than be published in the New Yorker, which he could have an easy access to do. Ironically, of course, the New Yorker had a headline Binyavanga Comes Out a week later. Binyavanga had to deal with the world press. There’s not a single publication anywhere in the world that didn’t cover this event,” says Prabhala.
Wainaina, and his bizarre, bombastic world, is likely to write more headlines yet.

An Awesome, Awkward, African Night

Naked, shackled and suffering from severe head injuries is how South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko died in a prison cell. It was a death that changed South African politics forever.
The Steve Biko Foundation says it was at this moment, on that cold Sunday on September 12, 1977, the country was robbed of its “foremost political thinkers”.
Kwandiwe Kondlo, a Professor of Political Economy at the University of Johannesburg, says that South Africa would be a different place if Biko was still alive. He says Biko would have made President Nelson Mandela reconsider his approach to introducing democracy to South African.
“If Steve Biko did not die, there is a probability that he would have actually forced and influenced the African National Congress (ANC) to change their approach. He would have been a factor that compelled the ANC to rethink its strategy of national liberation,” says Kondlo.
“Biko was not ANC, he was not PAC (Pan Africanist Congress), but he was standing for a movement of black solidarity. He sought to make known the deliberateness of God’s plan of making black people black,” says Kondlo.
Biko was one of the founders of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO), a body for black, Indian and colored students in the country. SASO evolved into the anti-apartheid Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in the early 1970s. Biko’s ideologies were instrumental in people rekindling their pride in being black, and culminated in the Soweto Uprising in 1976. The student riots against Bantu education led to other protests spreading across South Africa and greater pressure on the government to end apartheid.
Now, almost 40 years since Biko’s tragic death, his philosophies could be as important as they were then.
Strike Thokoane, Deputy President of the Azanian People’s Organization (Azapo) – a political party formed out of the ashes of the BCM – believes that if Biko was alive today, South Africa would not be struggling to curb racism.
“If Biko was alive today we would not have [Economic Freedom Front leader Julius] Malema saying black people must occupy land, instead we would have transformed the question of the country’s economy and not have the Ruperts and the Guptas running our country. We would definitely have a transformed society but more so, a transformed leadership,” says Thokoane.
Biko was often jailed and in 1973 he was forbidden from writing or speaking publicly because of his ideologies rejecting apartheid. He was also restricted to King William’s Town in the Eastern Cape. The arrest that led to his death came because he was stopped on his way to Cape Town. Despite this oppression, Biko continued to rally for black solidarity and a self-reliant black nation.
His son, 45-year-old Nkosinathi Biko, recalls a conversation he had with an elderly woman who described his father as a “warm feeling”. Nkosinathi says this is the most accurate way to describe not only what Biko means to him, but to others around the world.
He says that warm feeling is the core of Biko’s teachings; it is a strong sense of self.
“Once you have that, you have won 90 percent of the struggles that you face because hopefully with that sense of self you can then organize yourself as an agent of change,” he says.
Biko’s belief in black consciousness could be as important today as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
“I think the young people of today, particularly the university students, are now seeing the benefits of the philosophy of black consciousness because while those who went to what we’d call ‘black universities’ think that things are better, the ones who went to the lily-white universities of Cape Town and Wits, have come to realize that the teachings of [founder of PAC] Robert Sobukwe and Steve Biko are actually needed,” says Thokoane.
“They are saying ‘I have access to Wits and UCT, but when I step outside and I go to my hostel room, I am in a room that is filled with the trappings of poverty, and when I go home I am immersed in poverty’,” adds Nkosinathi.
“No struggle in the world is not born out of people’s lived reality, and no struggle disappears unless those conditions are changed,” he says.
Biko’s rise to prominence started in student politics. What he fought for is being resurrected by South African university students today.
“Not so long ago, we were defining our young people as a lost generation; I guess we were saying they don’t care about anything of substance. Now the young people have woken up,” says Nkosinathi.
In 2015, students at the University of Cape Town (UCT) led the #RhodesMustFall movement which campaigned for more transformation at the institution and for the removal of a statue of colonialist Cecil John Rhodes. That was followed by another nationwide student campaign, #FeesMustFall, where students are demanding free education.
The students at the frontline of the protests often wear Steve Biko and Robert Sobukwe t-shirts.
Kondlo says they connect with black consciousness after realizing the ideological bankruptcy of today’s politics.
“We say we are liberated but at the level of ideas, we are so bankrupt, much more bankrupt then before 1994,” he says.
Nkosinathi was six years old when his father died. He says he is inspired by his father’s legacy.
“It was most embodied in what would become known as the Black Community Programme, which was the community development arm of the Black Consciousness Movement. So he and his colleagues would take these ideas they were talking about and give them a practical expression, like with health and education projects, as a way of demonstrating it isn’t just pie-in-the-sky ideas,” he says.
Biko rallied to bring tangible change to black communities. Before his death, he was to meet with then ANC President Oliver Tambo to discuss uniting the ANC, the PAC and the BCM, to promote black South Africans without isolating white South Africans.
This was difficult as both the ANC and PAC were competing to be regarded as the voice of black people in the country.
“The problem they had is Biko never wanted to define himself as ANC or PAC, but he defined himself as ‘the people’ and was saying they want one united voice of the liberation struggle. Both parties actually had a lot of headaches over how to relate with Biko,” says Kondlo.
The police headquarters at the Sanlam Building in Port Elizabeth, where the activist was assaulted before being transported to Pretoria where he died, is now called Steve Biko House. The abandoned and dilapidated building is a poor attempt to remember a man who gave his life trying to gain freedom for his people.
After a visit to the Sanlam Building, Professor Bill Rolston writes that “as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission confirmed, Biko’s head was rammed into the wall of the interrogation room by the security police who then manacled him to the metal grill of the door and left him there, unconscious and foaming at the mouth. They then tried to revive him by putting him in a bath of cold water…”
The government then lied to the world by saying Biko died from a self-imposed hunger strike. Helen Zille, the former leader of the opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, exposed the truth while working as a journalist for the Rand Daily Mail.
“I just knew a very great injustice had been done and I shared my commitment with my editor, Allister Sparks, to get to the truth of the story and I was pretty much driven by that. There were moments of great trepidation when I would go and confront the doctors but I was determined to get the story,” says Zille.
Biko’s murder might have silenced him but it could not silence the world. English musician, Peter Gabriel, wrote the song Biko for his self-titled album in 1980.
“I think it’s a song that was able to capture the imagination of audiences that would have otherwise perhaps not been interested in the plight of the South Africa,” says Nkosinathi.
Thokoane believes that South Africa’s politicians should embrace black consciousness.
“Black consciousness is about a self-love towards a society of black people. As a leader, you won’t only bring those who are in the same political group as you, or who carry your surname, black consciousness would say, ‘let’s stand together and fix things’. They had an approach to reject the white man’s crumbs that are falling from his table,” he says.
There are some populist politicians emerging in South Africa that are influenced by Biko. The founder of Black First Land First, Andile Mngxitama, says the members of his movement call themselves Bikoists. During a lecture titled How Biko Helps Us To Think Black, member of Black First Land First movement Neo Mokatsanyane says, “Biko might have suffered a physical death but his spirit, through his liberating ideas, have become immortal.”
Kondlo says with poverty, unemployment and inequality rife in South Africa, black consciousness isn’t being fully realized.
“We still feel we need leaders who are not only politically bold but also theoretically and intellectually,” he says.
Almost 40 years since his death, it’s intriguing to imagine what South Africa would be like if Biko was still alive. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.

Steven Biko

If Steve Biko Were Still Alive…

While on my first late Monday morning subway ride, from 34th Street to 125th Street in Harlem, New York, it felt like I was traveling from Soweto to Park Station in Johannesburg, with a few notable exceptions.
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Just like back home, the coach was jam-packed, but there were no young men train surfing and the construction workers wore clean and bright work suits, without the odor that comes with long hours and back-breaking work. Some passengers jammed to music coming from their headphones; the dapper executives were fixated on their iPads held in one hand while the other grasped the overhead rails. Initially, feeling slightly paranoid, I was vigilant and clung to my valuables. After a while, I loosened up as I realized how chilled my fellow passengers were.
Amid the frantic activity of New York, I was flooded with memories of Johannesburg as three African women sat opposite me. The women, each of them hawkers, had two oversized plastic bags between their legs. They wore identical black headscarves and matching flat shoes. Taking no notice of the commuters squeezed around them, the women chatted and passed kente cloth, a traditional Ghanaian interwoven material, among themselves. Kente has become an integral part of African-American graduation attire.
While a handful of passengers were annoyed, the hustle of the hawkers, and the ‘gibberish’ coming from their tongues, left the rest amazed. I came to realize that the women left their village in Africa for the dream of a better life in the land of the free. Not a word of English was used in their conversation, but they know the basics of the language to make ends meet. I have met many other African foreigners like them who told me they learned English in the United States (US).
Soon after, I stumbled upon a 10-foot bronze statue of Harriet Tubman, the African American anti-slavery activist. Like the hawkers on the train, Tubman’s head was covered with a head wrap. Unlike the hawkers, Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland around 1820. In her late 20s, Tubman, along with her two brothers escaped the plantations; her brothers got cold feet and returned, leaving her to flee to the free state of Pennsylvania alone.
Later on, Tubman returned to Maryland to free slaves with the help of other freed African Americans. She carried out her mission armed with a shotgun. She never fired the gun because nobody tried to stop her. For her work, Tubman was called ‘Moses’ by her people.
Once slavery was abolished, Tubman joined the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The former slaves took African Methodism across the Atlantic to Liberia and Sierra Leone, and later southern Africa.
Tubman’s statue, on Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem, overlooks an array of African restaurants in an area dubbed ‘Small Africa’. The owner of one of these eateries, Patisserie des Ambassades, is Gorgui N’doye. This Senegalese engineer opened the first restaurant in the south Harlem 16 years ago, with less than 10 employees. Today, Patisserie des Ambassades has 50 staff and opens for 20 hours every day.
N’doye started the restaurant in 2001 when Harlem was notorious for being a gangster’s paradise. The area underwent gentrification in 2005 and business started to boom.
N’doye has since returned to Senegal where has expanded his business to exporting peanuts to Asia and South Africa. In his absence, Patisserie des Ambassades is managed by another Senegalese, Ahmadou Ndiaye Jean.
Harlem’s facelift, however, hasn’t benefited everyone. Eric Fraska, a 31-year-old Liberian financier at MoneyGram in New York, laments the displacement of black folk due to the rising cost of living in the area.
Fraska came to the US as a 20-year-old to study. Over the years, he witnessed a lot of change. Like Ndoye, Fraska is saving money to start a business in Africa. He says he’s certainly going back.
“My education and skills are no longer needed here. There’s nothing more to do here. Africa is the future,” Fraska says over a frothing cappuccino.
I have no doubt the next time I catch up with Fraska will be in either Johannesburg or Monrovia.

‘There’s Nothing More To Do Here.  Africa Is The Future’

On a balmy Johannesburg morning, we meet South African photographer and activist Zanele Muholi at the Stevenson Studios in Braamfontein, a colorful cultural hub north of the city. Here, we are surrounded by her collection of self-portraits. Everywhere you look is Muholi, each image stark in mood and meaning.
You turn to the real Muholi – the award-winning photographer known for her work exploring gender, race and sexuality – in flesh and blood, lost in thought, just like her portraits.
Incidentally, blood has been a prevailing topic in some of Muholi’s works.
For her collection, Visual Sexuality: Only Half the Picture, she photographed herself in front of the mirror, portraying her first experience of puberty, trying to figure out what it meant to be a woman. Understandably, it was a difficult shoot.
“It was perceived as taboo to talk about periods, whereas people could easily speak about rape and other issues affecting women,” says Muholi.
“Before I am anything in the world, I am a woman.”
The last of five children, Muholi, 43, was only a few months old when her father died. Born and schooled in Durban in the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal, those initial years were difficult.
Muholi earned her first salary at a factory producing linen in KwaZulu-Natal. Destiny tempted her in the form of a camera. She left the factory job hoping to bus it to the city of Johannesburg to study film and videography at the Film and Allied Workers Organization.
<div id="attachment_31550" style="width: 899px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-31550" class="wp-image-31550 size-large" src="http://www.forbesafrica.com/app/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-889x1024.jpg" alt="" width="889" height="1024" srcset="https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1.jpg 889w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-300x346.jpg 300w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-600x691.jpg 600w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-260x300.jpg 260w, https://cms.forbesafrica.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/Somnyama-Ngonyama-II-Oslo-2015-1-768x885.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 889px) 100vw, 889px" />Somnyama-Ngonyama-II</div>
Unfortunately, her interview was unsuccessful and she wasn’t admitted to the program.
She ended up braiding hair at her tiny flat in Century Plaza, Johannesburg, to make ends meet. She realized she was quite creative at it.
But braid after braid, she was getting closer to her dream.
In 2003, she completed an Advanced Photography course at the famed Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, only three kilometers from the Stevenson Studios, where she now displays her self-portraits. In Newtown, she held a camera for the first time.
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“I have always wanted to tell human stories like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex [stories]. I noticed there was a lack of visual material that spoke to our needs and I wanted to capture that,” says Muholi.
In 2009, she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree in documentary media at Ryerson University in Toronto.
One of her portraits, Hlengiwe (pictured below) is a tell-all on hate crime and discrimination.
“It refers to the number of cases that I have heard, especially from hate crime victims and survivors who didn’t have the courage to report it to the police because they were going to lose it [the case] anyway. As much as it’s a beautiful image, it’s one of those painful and exhausting stories,” says Muholi.
Passionate about “visual history” and women, Muholi says photography is her life. And she has always wondered why there were few female photographers – especially in history.
“There were so many historic moments and stories around us, but I didn’t see any woman capturing those` moments… I asked myself why women are not drawn to this career. If we could have female bus drivers, why would it be difficult for women to carry cameras? I mean a camera is not too heavy,” says Muholi.
In 2012, she faced a serious setback in her career when intruders broke into her flat in Cape Town and made off with her hard drives containing five years of unpublished photographic work. She believes it was sabotage.
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“Those people knew what they were doing, they’re were trying to slow me down,” she says.
Calling herself the first black lesbian to tell her life stories through a series of black and white self- portraits, the highlight of her career she says was displaying these portraits at a solo exhibition in Brooklyn, New York, in 2015.
“I felt I had arrived, I couldn’t slow down and that only death would stop me from doing what I love,” she says.
“One thing that people don’t know about me, I cry a lot and get really frustrated when I cannot be creative. So, I guess photography makes me happy.”
Currently busy with a new collection of photographs, Somnyama Ngonyama, meaning ‘hail, the dark lioness’, she has four published books and hopes to have at least 10 publications under her belt by 2020. And she wants to leave a legacy, like some of South Africa’s icons.
“I want to leave a mark just like the legendary Brenda Fassie and Miriam Makeba did with their music,” she says.
Life taught her resilience. Photography taught her about connecting. With the world. And herself.

Ndivile-II-Malmo-2014-9924-1

‘Only Death Would  Stop Me’

There’s a certain attention that a lone Kalashnikov rifle commands. Even more so when it is carried by a woman wearing a keffieh (the chequered scarf once used as the symbol of the Palestine resistance movement). This is exactly how the world learned to know of Leila Khaled.
What made the Palestine-born activist a terrorist was not the rifle but the first time she played a part in hijacking a plane in 1969, while still in her 20s.
It was after this hijacking that the now-iconic photo (see next page) of Khaled holding the Kalashnikov was taken by American photographer Eddie Adams. Khaled since underwent six facial surgeries to change her appearance, which also allowed her to participate in the second plane hijacking in 1970.
Her cause? That of the Palestinians, and their right to return to their homeland as a free people.
Today, at 70, she’s a mother of two sons and has a granddaughter she dotes on. The Palestinian Right to Return, as she explains during her visit to Johannesburg in February, is just as close to her heart.
“It’s very important to put the Palestinian question on the international agenda. After the first intifada [Arabic word for resistance] in 1987, it was a widespread awareness about the Palestinians because we did not, up to now, achieve our goals, in return for the refugees [to go back] to their homeland, to their cities, villages, properties,” says this member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP).
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“The Right of Return is still a dream. We cannot practice our self-determination without being in our land, and to establish an independence.”
Khaled’s visit to Johannesburg was however not without controversy. Her visit was organized by the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions South Africa (BDS South Africa), which is part of the global campaign aimed at pressurizing Israel to end its occupation of Palestinian land.
The South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD), alongside a number of other parties, were quick to condemn the visit before Khaled had arrived, and continued to do so. The SAJBD issued a statement against Khaled’s visit and BDS South Africa’s role in bringing her to the country, adding to the recent tension between South Africa’s Jewish and pro-Palestine groups.
Despite the tense backdrop to her visit, Khaled is nevertheless vocal about the Israel and Palestine conflict, and her crucial duty to fight for her people.
“Israel is still having [exclusions] against our people, in the West Bank and in the Gaza strip, and lately they have [committed] a holocaust for the Palestinians in Gaza. Now Israel denies all rights of Palestinians,” she says.
The Israeli-Palestine conflict has now become a focus of the International Criminal Court, and the Hague-based power could prosecute both parties for war crimes. At the center of any conflict, however, are women and children, and especially at a time where civilians have now become the target. Rape and systematic sexual assault is also a weapon of war, and according to Khaled, a societal ill that has taken too long to remedy.
“[These challenges] should be supported by civil society. It’s not just by one person. It needs time, it needs education, and the steps for the betterment of the people. It doesn’t mean that everything is okay. There are many big challenges facing not only the government, but society as well,” she says.
While there are societies in which some women have succeeded alongside men, statistics point to the gaping gender pay gap.
“[There is still a need] to have consciousness about the woman as a human being, not as a sex. Women’s rights are part of human rights, so if any country doesn’t apply this to its rules and laws, it means that they are violating human rights,” says Khaled.
Her active role extends beyond her iconic photograph, which has also become a part of popular culture, the same way Che Guevara’s image is emblazoned on T-shirts. The keffieh, which has been used as a symbol of Palestinian resistance and support, is now a fashion accessory. The message these symbols carry, according to Khaled, is however not lost.
“When I look at Che Guevara as a symbol, and also Nelson Mandela as a symbol of the struggle against injustice, whether it’s under [the] apartheid regime or [not], it’s not the whole thing that I see. I see behind it,” she explains.
“It means that this image should be in [popular] culture. We should learn from history, from other people. It’s not only our people who are struggling, there were many other people in the world who struggle.”
Young Khaled’s image is almost timeless as it speaks for the many women on the frontline, taking on an equal role alongside men in conflicts around the world.

CTX1557

The Grandmother who Hijacked Planes

When her father first glimpsed her, he said, ‘Bogaletch’, meaning ‘flash of light’. And so it would be. In her relentless fight against female genital mutilation and gender-based violence, Ethiopian physician and human rights activist Bogaletch Gebre carries the torch for women around the world.
She was born in rural Ethiopia in the 1950s. It was a time when Ethiopian women had limited aspirations and their experiences were restricted to their villages. Like 125 million girls across 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East, Gebre went under the knife, not for medical reasons, but for the ancient practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Thirty million girls worldwide are at risk of being cut in the next decade. Gebre wants that number to be zero.
FGM is the cutting away of part or all of the external female genitalia. The procedure is usually performed on girls from infancy to the age of 15. The painful practice has no health benefits and can cause fatal infections. Gebre points out that FGM may also have long-term consequences, such as infertility, damage to adjacent organs and birth complications.
“Women should not be mutilated alive for the pleasure of men. Basically, there is no other reason [for FGM] but to control women’s sexuality. The FGM practice is to cut female genitalia; the inner labia, the outer labia, and then sew it together … And then you reopen that which you have sewn when she marries. And after she gives birth, let’s say she has multiple births, you sew her up like she is some kind of object, to reduce the size of her vaginal hole, because it is widened through her giving birth,” says Gebre.
When Gebre became the first girl from her village to attend school further than the fourth grade, later receiving a scholarship to study in Israel and the United States, she promised she would be back, and that she would make a difference.
During her studies, Gebre realized FGM had no cultural or religious roots.
“Culture, according to the United Nations, is man-made. It is not ethnic, it is tangible, nobody belongs to one culture… Whenever we talk about human rights issues in Africa, it’s always about culture, so culture is being used as a scapegoat. If it is not in our religion, if it is not in the Bible, if it is not in the Koran, why are we using this culture as our culture?”
When she returned to Ethiopia in 1997, Gebre co-founded KMG—Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma-Tope, which means ‘women of Kembatta working together’—with her younger sister, Fikirte. The non-profit organization promotes communication and dialogue between communities and their leaders.
“We brought together representatives of the community: the young, the old, the educated, religious leaders, even government officials and police. They sit and discuss together, learn about each other and analyze the problems in the community together. And find a way to solve it, to reach a consensus and create their own social contract to abide by,” she explains.
With funding from USAID, international organizations and embassies, KMG promotes women’s education and increased economic opportunities for women. The organization also focuses on demystifying taboos about HIV/Aids and other cultural practices, such as widow inheritance and bridal abduction. Seventy percent of KMG’s three million beneficiaries are women. A measure of the organization’s achievements is the change in mindset on FGM. In 1998, every single woman in Ethiopia’s Kembatta Tembaro region had undergone FGM. A decade later, 97% of people living in the area opposed the practice. But Gebre is not satisfied yet; at 74%, Ethiopia’s national prevalence remains high.
In May 2013, Gebre accepted the King Baudouin African Development Prize on behalf of KMG. The award, which is worth $200,000, provides recipients with a platform to address international aid agencies.
Despite everything she has achieved, Gebre remains humble, describing herself as an ordinary person who works for the betterment of humanity.
And her efforts appear to be bearing fruit. In December, the UN General Assembly called for the complete elimination of FGM. Around 1,775 African communities heeded the call and publicly declared their commitment to end the practice.  ,
When her father first glimpsed her, he said, ‘Bogaletch’, meaning ‘flash of light’. And so it would be. In her relentless fight against female genital mutilation and gender-based violence, Ethiopian physician and human rights activist Bogaletch Gebre carries the torch for women around the world.
She was born in rural Ethiopia in the 1950s. It was a time when Ethiopian women had limited aspirations and their experiences were restricted to their villages. Like 125 million girls across 29 countries in Africa and the Middle East, Gebre went under the knife, not for medical reasons, but for the ancient practice of female genital mutilation (FGM). Thirty million girls worldwide are at risk of being cut in the next decade. Gebre wants that number to be zero.
FGM is the cutting away of part or all of the external female genitalia. The procedure is usually performed on girls from infancy to the age of 15. The painful practice has no health benefits and can cause fatal infections. Gebre points out that FGM may also have long-term consequences, such as infertility, damage to adjacent organs and birth complications.
“Women should not be mutilated alive for the pleasure of men. Basically, there is no other reason [for FGM] but to control women’s sexuality. The FGM practice is to cut female genitalia; the inner labia, the outer labia, and then sew it together … And then you reopen that which you have sewn when she marries. And after she gives birth, let’s say she has multiple births, you sew her up like she is some kind of object, to reduce the size of her vaginal hole, because it is widened through her giving birth,” says Gebre.
When Gebre became the first girl from her village to attend school further than the fourth grade, later receiving a scholarship to study in Israel and the United States, she promised she would be back, and that she would make a difference.
During her studies, Gebre realized FGM had no cultural or religious roots.
“Culture, according to the United Nations, is man-made. It is not ethnic, it is tangible, nobody belongs to one culture… Whenever we talk about human rights issues in Africa, it’s always about culture, so culture is being used as a scapegoat. If it is not in our religion, if it is not in the Bible, if it is not in the Koran, why are we using this culture as our culture?”
When she returned to Ethiopia in 1997, Gebre co-founded KMG—Kembatti Mentti Gezzimma-Tope, which means ‘women of Kembatta working together’—with her younger sister, Fikirte. The non-profit organization promotes communication and dialogue between communities and their leaders.
“We brought together representatives of the community: the young, the old, the educated, religious leaders, even government officials and police. They sit and discuss together, learn about each other and analyze the problems in the community together. And find a way to solve it, to reach a consensus and create their own social contract to abide by,” she explains.
With funding from USAID, international organizations and embassies, KMG promotes women’s education and increased economic opportunities for women. The organization also focuses on demystifying taboos about HIV/Aids and other cultural practices, such as widow inheritance and bridal abduction. Seventy percent of KMG’s three million beneficiaries are women. A measure of the organization’s achievements is the change in mindset on FGM. In 1998, every single woman in Ethiopia’s Kembatta Tembaro region had undergone FGM. A decade later, 97% of people living in the area opposed the practice. But Gebre is not satisfied yet; at 74%, Ethiopia’s national prevalence remains high.
In May 2013, Gebre accepted the King Baudouin African Development Prize on behalf of KMG. The award, which is worth $200,000, provides recipients with a platform to address international aid agencies.
Despite everything she has achieved, Gebre remains humble, describing herself as an ordinary person who works for the betterment of humanity.
And her efforts appear to be bearing fruit. In December, the UN General Assembly called for the complete elimination of FGM. Around 1,775 African communities heeded the call and publicly declared their commitment to end the practice.

Bogaletch Gebre: The Light Bearer

It’s the 21st century, but countless South African women still struggle to become entrepreneurs, struggle even to open a small shop. The main culprit is the country’s deeply embedded patriarchal thinking, says Dr Mamphela Ramphele, even though this should have dissipated with its progressive post-apartheid constitution, which guarantees women equal rights.
But it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.
“Patriarchal culture remains very strong in South Africa. Women are still regarded as minors. They are still asked if their husband has given permission, for example, if they want to access a loan, even though it is unconstitutional,” laments Ramphele.
Yet, enabling women to become entrepreneurs would have a direct, wide-reaching and often multi-generational impact on a country’s economic growth, she explains: “Successful women educate their children to ensure they escape the poverty trap, whereas with men, wealth remains with men. There are also progressive men, but they are few and far between. When you compare the return of investment in women versus men, it’s far higher for women.”
Ramphele became aware of the struggle for gender equality early on. Growing up in a traditional household in rural Limpopo, one of South Africa’s poorest provinces, she watched her mother, Rangoato Rahab, a strong, self-assured woman, standing up to her husband, father-in-law and brothers-in-law.
“My mother fought patriarchy. And I grew up to assert myself.”
Ramphele remembers how she learnt that a woman’s life did not have to be constrained by her gender. It gave her the confidence throughout her career to pursue her interests and convictions with integrity.
“Whether I’m alone or in a group of a hundred men, I’m not easily intimidated,” she says.
It’s a character trait essential for someone like Ramphele whose career has been marked by ‘firsts’ and ‘onlys’. She was one of very few black women to study medicine during apartheid; in 1996 she became the first black South African and first woman to become vice chancellor of a University—the University of Cape Town (UCT); the first African managing director at World Bank in 2000 and she is still the only black, female executive in some of the country’s boardrooms.
“Throughout my career, I had to bear this burden of being the only woman, the first woman. It’s not something to celebrate. It’s a serious commentary on a society that has not leveraged the talent of women. If anything, it energizes me to fight the battle for gender equality,” she says.
She surely did. At UCT, Ramphele regarded equity not just as affirmative action based on race, but also on gender and class and ensured women were given opportunities to pursue professorships and become academic leaders. A few years later, at the World Bank, she fought for the implementation of a gender policy that not only targeted women in developing countries but was applied to the bank’s internal structures as well.
Responsible for human development at the World Bank—the global financial institution widely criticized for its capitalist structural adjustment policy, which worsened inflation in many African countries—Ramphele tried to get the bank’s hardcore economists to understand the softer issues that make for sustainable development.
Although her task was difficult, her philosophy was simple: “Countries have to drive the partnership with the World Bank based on their own national development plans. One of the problems of African countries is that we lack the self-confidence to know that we can take ownership of these international entities that we belong to, shape them to serve our interests.”
That’s what she did.
“I didn’t apologize for being an African woman, for not being an economist. I said, ‘I know you’re good at doing economics, but I think you’re not doing well enough when it comes to human development’.”
Being non-apologetic is a red thread throughout Ramphele’s career. Already in the 1990s, when she was the first and only woman on the board of mining giant Anglo American, she lobbied for a more gender equitable management structure. Progress has been slow. Today, Anglo’s board is made up of nine men—eight of them white, one Asian—and only two women, one of whom is Ramphele, still the only black executive. Later this year, a third woman will join the board.
Since Ramphele became chair of another mining firm, Gold Fields, in 2010, she has lobbied for more gender consciousness there, too. It’s a lonely battle: “The fact is the board is still very much a male domain. One has to keep fighting. What’s important for women like me to recognize is that their success means very little unless it’s used to support and enhance the success of other women.”
Ramphele doesn’t place the blame with men alone. She stresses the fact that women who have made it in the business world have a responsibility to create networks that support other women in leadership and challenge patriarchal culture.
“There are lots of women who do that, but there are many more who don’t: the queen bees. Once they have made it, it’s only about them.”
Part of the problem is that women are struggling to position themselves, she believes, often out of fear of retribution.
“In parliament, as in boardrooms, women’s voices have been muffled. When women speak up, they are called disruptive, difficult, loud. But when men speak out, they are strong and decisive.”
It’s the gap between theory and practice. Although, theoretically, the glass ceiling that limits women’s success in business should have been lifted; in practice, it still exists. Again, Ramphele argues it has to be women who crack it, because men won’t do it on their behalf.
“The glass ceiling starts in women’s own psyche. The mindset shift has to start with women believing they are as good as anybody,” she suggests.
Women must have the humility to seek help, from other women as well as from supportive men.
“I’ve had mentors who were men—older men, white men. You’ve got to be open and recognize that there are a lot more men than women who have had the experiences you need.”
Another key to women’s success is to ensure their personal, professional and wider social values cohere, Ramphele believes: “Then you are at peace with yourself and don’t get intimidated when you’re alone in a boardroom where people make sexist or racist jokes. You just stand up and say, ‘That’s not acceptable’.”
Ramphele was lucky to grow up in a home that gave her the confidence to overcome many such hurdles. Even though she came from humble beginnings, her parents, both primary school teachers, had high expectations of her.
“They instilled the urge to excel in me. I was always number one in my class, but my father used to say, ‘That’s not good enough. You must now compete against yourself’.”
When her dream of becoming a scientist was destroyed by an apartheid ban on Africans studying mathematics and science, Ramphele enrolled for medicine and was accepted into the University of Natal’s Medical School in 1968, then the only institution that allowed black students to enlist without prior government permission.
“What medicine taught me was leadership, because in the medical profession, you have to take responsibility for every one of your actions,” she recalls, describing her student years as a time of immense personal growth.
It was here that she met anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko, with whom she co-founded the Black Consciousness Movement. She also fell in love with him and had a son by him. Together they fought for black self-worth and economic self-reliance.
Biko—who was killed by South African police 35 years ago—would be dismayed by the society South Africa’s leading African National Congress has created in the last two decades, Ramphele believes, which continues to suffer from high levels of poverty and inequity: “He’d be very disappointed that South Africa has not been able to realize its full potential.”
While the country has made strides in financial management, audited risk and governance, it has failed in areas Ramphele believes would contribute greatest to long-term economic sustainability: education, health and social development.
“We have the money, but there is no appetite within government to do the right thing,” she criticizes in her frank manner. “I can only suggest that they don’t think it’s important enough to invest in human capital.”
One of the greatest failures of South Africa’s development model was to turn 16 million people—almost a third of the population—into welfare recipients instead of promoting entrepreneurship, she argues: “That’s not sustainable and has enhanced inequity. Entrepreneurship is the only way South Africa can grow this economy fast enough, with a broad enough participation rate.” That way, the country could easily boost its economic growth from the currently meager 3.5% to 10%, she believes.
Hence, Ramphele’s latest pursuit is the Citizens Movement for Social Change, an organization she launched in April as a mechanism for citizens to hold government accountable.
“We need a mindset change, away from the notion that politics is for politicians,” she explains, likening South Africa to a business that cannot succeed if it ignores the interests of its shareholders.
“We, as citizens of South Africa, are the shareholders of South Africa Inc. The government is failing us, but the shareholder is missing in action. We need an engaged citizenry. To the extent that citizens acquiesce to the mismanagement of our state affairs, to that extent, we will fail as a country,” she says.

Tag: activist

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