How A Malawi WhatsApp Group Helped Save Women Trafficked To Oman - Minority Africa
Toluwani Omotesho
April 19, 2024
But first, in Uganda, an LGBTQ activist, Ronald Agaba, has been arrested for peacefully protesting against the scapegoating of the LGBTQ community by Anita Among, a member of the Ugandan Parliament.
Since the signing of Uganda’s harsh anti-LGBTQ bill into law, Anita Among has been one of the prominent politicians advocating for its enforcement. However, she’s also been taking advantage of Uganda’s homophobia to avoid scrutiny for recent corruption allegations.
In an expose released February 2024, Among was one of the Parliament members accused of diverting billions of Ugandan shillings in public funds to personal accounts despite the nation’s escalating debt and rising poverty rate. When confronted, Among, using a slur, dismissed the allegations and accused the “homosexuals” of spreading rumors and distorting evidence. However, this glaring attempt to avoid accountability and victimize the LGBTQ community sparked a wave of social media criticism.
Ronald Agaba has been one of the leading voices speaking against the victimization of gay Ugandans and abuse of office by Anita Among on social media. He set out for a peaceful protest at the Ugandan Parliament on Thursday, March 14, to demand for her resignation, but mysteriously disappeared. On March 18, it was revealed that he has been charged with incitement of violence and is currently being detained in Luzira Prison until April 4, 2024.
Presently, there’s an ongoing campaign with the hashtag #FreeRonnieAgaba to demand for his release, and to have the charges dropped. Peaceful protests are a fundamental human right, and it’s beyond alarming to see Uganda abuse this while overlooking the cases of corruption and embezzlement of public funds.
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“Living in constant fear”: PWDs are paying a hefty price in Nigeria’s raging war with bandits
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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