“Africa’s Men Fight for Women’s Rights,” The Daily Beast, 24 July 2010.
A provocative campaign to convince men to fight violence against women kicked off in South Africa during the World Cup.
Lewis Kasindi Kilongo, 26, has always believed that women are equal to men. At home in South Kivu, a war-torn province in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo, that makes him a rare breed. “My friends in different villages consider women an object of pleasure,” he said. “Many guys think they can’t marry a really educated woman because it will be like having two men in the house. It’s a fear for them. They just want someone they can control.”
Kilongo is a rare male voice in the movement to halt his home country’s mass rape epidemic, and one of 85 youth delegates who traveled to Johannesburg, South Africa this month for Man Up, a one-week conference intended to get men and boys involved in women’s rights activism.
Jimmie Briggs, an American journalist, founded Man Up after writing Innocents Lost, a book about the child soldiers forced to fight and rape in the wars of Central Africa. Briggs was burnt out as a reporter, depressed by endless tales of sexual violence. “I did not see men standing up on this issue in a real way—and not just standing up on this issue, but standing alongside women on this issue,” he said. “We needed to create something to bridge that gap.”
Man Up, though, was by no means the most obvious way to combat problems like rape, female genital mutilation, and women’s political disenfranchisement. Even the group’s name itself is controversial, knowingly embracing a phrase that has often played to sexist stereotypes about men being tougher, stronger, braver, and more independent than their sisters, mothers, daughters, or female partners.
But Man Up also takes advantage of a traditional male bias toward protecting the vulnerable; in places like Congo, those same sisters, mothers, and daughters are potential victims who could be saved from trauma if men simply chose not to rape. Briggs, who brought his own mother and daughter to the conference, believes he can reclaim “man up,” borrowing a term used in the African American community to signal male responsibility and transforming it into a worldwide movement.
“The men in this effort are men who are aware of their responsibilities to their families and to themselves,” he explained, “who are comfortable using their strength in a non-traditional way—not for sexual conquest or physical overpowering, but to be leaders and advocates for nonviolence.”
Barack Obama’s one-day jaunt to Ghana this weekend carries a message for “multiple audiences,” according to the White House. On the heels of a Russian expedition and frustrating climate-change negotiations at the G-8 conference in Italy—all of which were overshadowed by the death of Michael Jackson—the first black president of the United States is arriving on African soil as a hero, but not a stranger. Unlike every other American president who has made an in-office trip to Africa, Obama is no virgin tourist on the continent. In fact, Ghana’s new president described Obama’s visit as a “homecoming”—though in some ways, the media focus on the head of the family is misguided. Obama may be the first African-American president, but it is Michelle Obama for whom Ghana represents a true return.
IBADAN, NIGERIA — The last Saturday of every month in Lagos is reserved for a governmentally mandated “environmental holiday.” Citizens are barred from leaving their homes until noon that day, and instead are directed to clean their homes. In a country where the adage “cleanliness is next to godliness” can be found printed on buses and street murals, this is no great surprise. Sincere but unintentional, this odd form of individual “environmentalism” does have some appreciable collective benefits. Abundant petroleum, subsidized to a price of 70 Naira (50 cents) per litre, plus a lack of efficient transport alternatives, ensures that, left unbothered, everybody drives everywhere — all the time. By keeping cars off the road in congested, cacophonic Lagos (much like 