“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.”
Nostalgic recollections of 
President Barack Obama kicks off the Father’s Day weekend with a string of events designed to “begin a national conversation on responsible fatherhood and healthy families,” according to the White House.
