How A Malawi WhatsApp Group Helped Save Women Trafficked To Oman

It is a little past two on a June afternoon. Aisha Muhammed holds her four-year-old son, Ahmad, in her left hand as he assists her to a green plastic chair. She leans against a nearby tree so he can clean the dust on the chair and then she settles.

Every day, Muhammed, who is blind, scours through Gusau, the capital of Nigeria’s northwestern state of Zamfara, for alms. That Saturday afternoon, she had learnt about a nonprofit distributing food items to displaced people. An hour earlier, she was at Tudunwada, another part of the city begging for alms as well.

The mother of three, who currently stays at the camp for internally displaced persons in Tsunami, has been struggling to fend for her family and take care of herself without a source of employment.

“Life has not been easy since we left our village,” she tells Minority Africa. “Although there are times people come here to distribute food and money to us, we mostly go out to look for what to eat.”

Muhammed is one of many other persons with disabilities in the region contending with an uncertain future amid increasing attacks by bandits.

The Struggle for Visibility: How Zimbabwean Journalists are Tackling LGBTQ+ Issues

In Zimbabwe, a highly conservative country that has been under a repressive regime for years, LGBTQ+ issues have remained highly polarised – a legacy of the hard-line stance of the late Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s former president.

A legacy that can be summed up in “worse than pigs and dogs,” a statement he once shockingly made about homosexuals, that still lingers among many people in the country, including journalists who have conveniently skirted around LGBTQ+ issues like a plague. So when a representative of the LGBTQ+ community, Agatha Marekera, recently told a public media workshop in Zimbabwe’s eastern border city of Mutare that the gay and lesbian population in the country is far higher than many people think, some journalists were both shocked and perplexed.

“There are so many people who are members of the LGBTQ+ community, but many people in the country don’t understand LGBTQ+ issues,” Marekera revealed to incredulous gasps.

For some journalists, it was their first time sharing a conference room with individuals who openly identify as members of the LGBTQ+ community. This is because, in the past, LGBTQ+ members have largely taken the backseat for fear of backlash from both the conservative society and the government.

A remarkable shift is reshaping the traditional landscape of piloting iconic canoes in one of Africa’s most extraordinary places – a role that has long been the domain of men.In the early morning light, before the blistering Botswana sun reaches full heat, the only sounds are the brushing of traditional mokoro canoes as they slide over the grass and slip gently into the glassy waters of the Okavango Delta. Eager tourists sit poised with cameras and smartphones as their mokoro guides, or “polers” as they are known, expertly cast them off from shore with their lengthy poles pushing deep into the delta’s muddy bed. It’s a trade that requires a challenging combination of balance and physical strength, as well as in-depth knowledge of wildlife and wilderness survival skills.

Traditionally, this has been considered a man’s job, but now a handful of courageous women are challenging stereotypes and steering change in the world of guiding.

“At first I was nervous,” confessed Bontle Cindy Mothogaathobogwe, who has been guiding for three years. “At first, I was thinking, ‘What will people say? This is a man’s job!’ Then something came into my mind that, no, I need to make a change and I need to set an example to every woman to show that anything is possible as long as you have passion, confidence and love what you are doing.”

Aljazeera

Japan court rules ban on same-sex marriage is ‘unconstitutional’

A high court in Japan has ruled that the country’s ban on same-sex marriage is “unconstitutional” as pressure mounts for such unions to be legalised.

On Thursday, the Sapporo High Court said not allowing same-sex couples to marry violates their fundamental right to have a family, and called for urgent government action to address a lack of laws allowing same-sex unions.

A lower court in Tokyo issued a similar ruling earlier on Thursday, becoming the sixth district court to do so.

But the Tokyo District Court ruling was only a partial victory for Japan’s LGBTQ community calling for equal marriage rights, as it does not change or overturn the current civil union law that describes marriage as between a man and a woman.

Japan is the only member of the Group of Seven (G7) nations that still excludes same-sex couples from the right to legally marry and receive spousal benefits.

BBC

How a Malawi WhatsApp group helped save women trafficked to Oman

Warning: Some people may find details in this story distressing.

A 32-year-old woman breaks down in tears as she relives the abuse she experienced when, hoping for a better life, she found herself working as a maid in Oman.

Georgina, who like all the trafficked women interviewed by the BBC opted to only use her first name, believed she had been recruited to work as a driver in Dubai.

She had owned a small business in Lilongwe, Malawi’s capital, and was managing when approached by an agent saying she could earn more money in the Middle East. It was not until the plane landed in Muscat, the capital of Oman, that she realised she had been deceived and subsequently trapped by a family who made her work gruelling hours, seven days a week.

“I reached a point where I couldn’t take it,” she says, detailing how she got as little as two hours’ sleep. She had not been there long when her boss began forcing her to have sex with him, threatening to shoot her if she said anything.

“It wasn’t only him,” she says. “He would bring friends and they would pay him after.”

She struggles to speak as she recounts how she was forced into anal sex: “I got badly injured. I became so distraught.”

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The New York Times

A Queer Chinese Artist Finds Liberation Through Folk Art

In the years he hid his sexuality from his children and village neighbors, Xiyadie would take short-bladed scissors to rice paper and give shape to unfulfilled dreams.

At first glance, his creations conform to traditional cutout designs of animals and auspicious symbols adorning doorways and windows in China. But a closer look at the shapes — birds, butterflies and blossoms perched on twisty vines — reveals bodies conjoined in the throes of intimacy or separated by brick walls.

The artist, 60, who goes by the pseudonym Xiyadie, was born in a farming village in northern China, and he creates queer paper cuts. Paper cutting is a folk tradition dating from the Eastern Han dynasty (25-220 C.E.) that involves cutting crisp lines and shapes into folded layers of rice paper. It’s about excising the negative space to reveal the picture inside.