Edition #38
This week, we start in Nigeria where thousands of people fleeing bandits in the north have found safety in Niger. Then, we visit Ghana, where men are stepping up to fight gender-based violence. Finally, we head to Afghanistan, where women in Taliban prisons are suffering from torture and sexual abuse.
But first, in Sudan, the ongoing war between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has made the capital, Khartoum, increasingly unsafe for women and girls, according to a recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report.
The conflict started in April 2023 due to a power struggle between the army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and RSF commander, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. Since then, nearly 15,000 people have died, with more than six million internally displaced and about 26 million at risk of famine. The United Nations has described this as one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history.
Women and girls in Sudan have particularly faced the brunt of the violence, with reports of widespread sexual violence, forced marriages and sexual slavery, mainly by the RSF. These abuses have left survivors with severe physical and psychological trauma, worsening the country’s humanitarian crisis.
The SAF has also been implicated in sexual violence. However, many survivors and healthcare workers have been intimidated into silence about SAF-related cases. Additionally, the SAF has restricted humanitarian supplies, including drugs, from reaching RSF-controlled areas of Khartoum.
The HRW report calls out that these acts of sexual violence, forced marriages, and deliberate attacks on healthcare facilities and providers as war crimes and crimes against humanity. It also urges the international community to take immediate action to protect survivors and ensure justice.
Stories to read
CNN
Famine declared in Sudan’s Darfur region after months of civil war
DW
Afghanistan: Women in Taliban prisons face abuse, rape
From our site
“This is where I belong now”: Niger tries a new refugee model as Nigerians flee bandit attacks
This story was edited and published in partnership with The New Humanitarian. With reporting support from Alzouma Seini Soumaila. Videos and photos by Al-Amin Muhammed Ibrahim. Animation by Gams Studios.
Tens of thousands of people fleeing bandit violence in Nigeria’s northwest have been welcomed across the border in Niger, with local communities sharing both land and business opportunities in a potentially new model for refugee integration in West Africa.
Galadima Hadi is one of an estimated 80,000 Nigerians who has found hospitality in the Sahelian country. He and his family left Kwadi, a village in Zamfara State, after scores of bandits riding three-up on motorbikes raided one afternoon in 2020 – just before the harvest – and killed five people.
“We heard the gunshots all the way in the village centre and knew they were coming for us,” he recounted.
Hadi has now settled in Garin Kaka, in southern Niger’s Maradi region. But rather than the fences and gates that usually mark refugee camps around the world, he lives in a regular village. It is one of three in Maradi known as “Opportunity Villages”, an initiative that seeks to dissolve the barriers between refugee and host communities.
The Opportunity Villages programme, the first of its kind in West Africa, has been pioneered by the Niger government and UN refugee agency, UNHCR. It aims to boost the livelihoods of both the new arrivals and residents by encouraging sustainable small-scale business ventures.
“Farming is not a crime”: Kenya’s smallholder farmers are challenging a law preventing them from sharing Indigenous seeds
For 30 years, Peninah Ngahu, 58, has practised subsistence farming on her one-acre farm in Elementaita village, 175 km west of Kenya’s capital Nairobi. Ngahu, who practises organic farming, says that “accessing indigenous seeds was easy because farmers would share, sell, buy and exchange them freely.”
“A farmer who had a surplus of indigenous seeds would freely share out to those who lacked, and this ensured that every farmer had something to plant, and this guaranteed our food security,’’ Ngahu tells Minority Africa.
According to Ngahu, things changed when a new law regulating the distribution of indigenous seeds came into force.
“Currently, I cannot take my seeds and distribute them to farmers across the village because the law bars me,’’ she says. “[One] can only do that clandestinely. This has literally limited the smallholder farmers’ ability of producing food.’’
In 2012, Kenya’s parliament passed a law to set out regulations for the country’s production, processing, testing, certification and marketing of seeds. The Seeds and Plants Varieties Act also sought to impose restrictions on the introduction of new varieties, control seed importation and grant proprietary rights to persons breeding or discovering new varieties.
Around the world
Aljazeera
‘It’s evil’: Breast ironing leaves long-term scars for women in Nigeria
When children turn 10, their first double-digit milestone is usually a time of excitement. But not for Elizabeth John, who could only feel dread about what was to come.
A day after her 10th birthday, three older women held her legs down firmly as her mother pressed a burning hot pestle against her still-developing breasts, unyielding even as the child screamed in pain.
Nearly two decades later, the 27-year-old Cameroonian refugee who grew up in Nigeria’s Cross River State vividly remembers that day – as she grapples with the years of damage the ordeal inflicted. John said her life changed after her mother forced her to undergo breast ironing in an attempt to shield her from sexual abuse.
Breast ironing, or “breast flattening”, is a cultural practice whereby young girls’ breasts are ironed or pounded down with brutal or heated objects to delay their development or disguise the onset of puberty, according to the Africa Health Organization.
Aljazeera
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif becomes target of Olympics gender row
Algerian boxer Imane Khelif’s 46-second victory at the Paris Olympics has ignited a heated debate over gender eligibility rules with global public figures and sporting bodies weighing in.
Italian boxer Angela Carini abandoned the match against Khelif on Thursday, walking away from the contest to her corner – an extremely rare scene in Olympic boxing. Carini did not shake Khelif’s hand after the referee formally raised it. She cried in the ring, sinking to her knees. Minutes later, still-tearful, Carini said she quit because of the pain from opening punches.
“I felt a severe pain in my nose, and with the maturity of a boxer, I said ‘enough’ because I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to. I couldn’t finish the match,” Carini said.
Khelif was disqualified from the 2023 world championships after failing an unspecified gender eligibility test. Her participation in the Paris Olympics has become a divisive issue.
Author JK Rowling referred to her as a “male”, accusing her of “enjoying the distress of a woman he’s just punched in the head, and whose life’s ambition he’s just shattered”.
HumAngle
Human Trafficking Ring Where Misled Cameroonians Are Forced To Recruit More Victims
It was only months ago that Penka Michel escaped from a ruthless gang operating in the Agbado area of Lagos, South West Nigeria. As he began to give an account of his experience as a victim of human trafficking from Cameroon, it was evident in his voice that he was still traumatised.
Sometime last year, a friend from secondary school, Nke Krouma Perfect, reached out to him about a job opportunity in Nigeria. As the eldest child in a family of eight with the dream of rescuing his siblings from poverty, the 23-year-old sophomore at the University of Yaoundé was eager to know more about the offer.
Perfect said on the phone that he had worked with a multinational company called United Mining Supply (UMS) in Lagos, which was recruiting new staff.
When Michel reminded his friend that his academic programme would be affected if he accepted the offer, Perfect insisted that he should send his curriculum vitae so that he could propose it to the company’s human resources.
“He reached out two days later to tell me I could continue my studies in Nigeria. He told me the company would allow me to do a part-time course in Nigeria and made me understand that he already earned a good living, having worked for six months already,” he explained.
Stories we’ve enjoyed reading
Aljazeera
At Olympics, India’s top women wrestlers have more at stake than medals
On a hot summer afternoon, a strapping, fit man in his 30s drove his SUV to the outskirts of the crowded city of Rohtak in the northern Indian state of Haryana. Peeling off the main road, he braked at a large white metal gate of a sports stadium. The gate hadn’t been opened in years and the stadium looked empty. It was the only place he felt safe, he said, to meet and talk.
“You can’t use my name, and you can’t use hers,” the man, wearing a loose grey T-shirt, black basketball shorts and slippers, said.
The air conditioning in the SUV was on full blast, but the chill didn’t calm his nerves. He made sure I put away my recorder – the sight of it made him nervous. Then he began narrating a chilling account of one of the most powerful men in Indian sports, accused of sexually abusing young wrestlers for at least a decade.
“When she told me about her sexual harassment, I wept,” the man in the SUV, the guardian of one of the women wrestlers, said while staring down at the car’s floor, suddenly sounding weary.