Nigeria’s ‘rebranding’ – an interesting way of bringing change (but will it work?)

Nigeria re-brands to shed chaotic image

Published on March 19th on Reuters

ABUJA (Reuters) – Nigeria is hoping a new patriotic slogan emblazoned on T-shirts and baseball caps can restore self-confidence and overturn its battered reputation.

Africa’s most populous nation is known for corruption, is poor despite decades of oil production and is increasingly used as a drug transit route and for e-mail scams and online fraud.

Under the slogan “Nigeria: Good People, Great Nation,” Nigeria hopes to eschew that image and “entrench a culture of moral re-armament,” President Umaru Yar’Adua said in a speech.

Read the rest of the article here.

Potted plants and a little thing called NORAD

As family, friends and coworkers come home from their Christmas vacations – or, in some cases, come out of their homes from their Christmas vacations – the stories are now pouring in. This particular story was so adorable, I just had to share it.

NORAD has been tracking Santa’s progress on the night from Christmas eve to Christmas day on a specially set up website. My friend’s two sons decided to track Santa on Christmas Eve; always grabbing any opportunity to educate her children and elevate the conversation (no wonder we are friends…), she took the opportunity to teach them a little bit more about the world.

So as they watched Santa make their way through Asia, Europe and Africa (they fell asleep while Santa was crossing the Atlantic Ocean), they also checked out the pictures NORAD posted on each location as they came along. Unable to answer all her sons’ questions, she then took out her World Atlas to see exactly where each city on the NORAD map was. Still insatiable, they turned to Wikipedia to read more about each country that piqued the boys’ interest. While they covered many aspects of each country, my friend made sure that they talked about the children in each and every country; she wanted her sons to realize just how lucky they were.

So they talked about the children in Asia who were sometimes forced to work in sweatshops in terrible conditions, about the children in Eastern Europe who didn’t always have enough wood during the winter and would freeze all winter, and they talked about the children in Africa who got sick because they were hungry.

Which prompted these adorable, pure little souls to ask their mother if it was possible to ask Santa to give their gifts to the hungry kids in Africa so that they could have a happier Christmas (something about the hunger got to them more than the sweatshops and the cold, I guess). My friend, ever so wise, told them that the children in Africa would rather have money for food, and guess what – a mere week after Christmas, they have an entire fund raising project going on. The children (with, of course, the help of their mother) are making little potted plants they are going to sell to their friends, neighbours and teachers to send the money to Africa (they are still in the process of choosing an organisation).

I think these two kids, who are 6 and 9, have understood the meaning of Christmas better than most of us, haven’t they?

If you want to read more about the tracking Santa project, you can read the post here.

Some attitude and brand new Supernaturally inspired insight

I had an interesting conversation today about choice. Someone (that I don’t know) was talking to their friend (whom I also don’t know) and said something to the extent of people in Africa are all corrupt, and we shouldn’t help them because the corruption that permeates their government is their own fault; they made the choice to be corrupt.

At which point, before I thought it through, I turned around and said (complete with attitude and all): “Excuuuuuuuuuse me?”

Ok, not quite as dramatic, but I did feel compelled to join the conversation. I thought perhaps these people were in political science and knew what they were talking about. I thought perhaps these two older gentlemen had served in some capacity or another in African governance or were part of the Canadian diplomatic corp living in Africa.

Believe it or not, neither of these gentlemen had set foot outside of Africa, and neither had read any book on the subject. They were basing their judgment on the news they had been hearing in the last couple of years.

Needless to say, I was very distraught by the fact, and both gentlemen saw it. I had a friend in the store with me and he – thankfully – was well travelled and well versed in global history. I asked him to join in on the conversation.

The point of this post isn’t to tell you about our brilliant comeback and how both gentlemen realised the harshness of their earlier claims (please hold on a second while I pat myself on the back). It’s to share with you a simple truth: while we do have a choice, and we should do everything we can to make the right choice, we shouldn’t forget where we come from. We shouldn’t forget what our limitations or, and strive to figure out ways of dealing with it.

Most importantly, we need to remember that others make choices that are also influenced by their education, upbringing and environment; we shouldn’t rush to make a judgement on their decision, but, if we want to lend a helping hand, should strive to understand where their choice comes from and how they got there. While we can’t hope to fully understand everyone’s choices, the simple fact that we are trying will allow us to better help.

This experience is all the more interesting in that a couple of weeks ago, I was watching – what else – an episode of Supernatural (Season 2, Episode 5: Simon said) and Sam Winchester said something that touches this subject, something I had scribbled down on a Post-it and stuck in my agenda: “Right circumstances, everyone is capable of murder. Everyone. You know maybe that’s what the demon is doing us. Pushing us. Finding ways to break us.”

Oh, how I love watching shows that are entertaining but that also allow for easy elevation of conversation.

Women in Congo

The subject in this video is quite depressing, and even without it being graphic, it’s still horrifying, almost chillingly so in its simplicity. It gives a little tiny ray of hope to see these women who have suffered so much rally around each other and make the most of it.

These stories need to be shared; please take a moment to learn more about the plight of women being raped in the Congo, and then take a moment more to think about what you can do about it. You’d be surprised how much you can do if you put your mind to it. And we don’t, just like we are told in the video, this generation of children just might become the next generation of rebels.

Helen Epstein’s take on Africa’s hidden war

A little over a week ago, I reviewed Helen Epstein’s The Invisible Cure; I then posted part of an essay she wrote, and just because I admire her so much, I just had to post part of yet another one of her essays.

AIDS and Africa’s Hidden War

By: Helen Epstein

One October evening in 2001, in an impoverished shantytown in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa, David Potse entered the house of a former girlfriend, and raped her 9-month-old daughter. The child was later taken to a nearby hospital, where her internal injuries were found to be so severe that she nearly died. The nurses nicknamed her “Baby Tshepang” which means “have hope.” After a series of operations, she miraculously survived. Potse was apprehended soon afterwards. At his trial, he said that he was out drinking on the night of the assault. However, DNA tests showed his semen was present in the child’s rectum, and his current girlfriend testified that she walked in on him during the rape. Potse was sentenced to life in prison in 2002.

News reports about Baby Tshepang, along with a small number of similar cases that came to light at around the same time, ignited moral horror across the nation. “South Africa has been shamed,” declared the proceedings of a Parliamentary committee on child abuse; addressing a group called the “Moral Regeneration Movement,” Deputy President Jacob Zuma—himself soon to be implicated in a major corruption scandal—said the baby rape cases displayed “barbarism and moral decay of the worst kind.” The Sowetan newspaper called for a state of emergency and one columnist asked whether South African men were becoming “sex cannibals.”

All of this came during a period of national soul searching. The euphoria that followed the end of apartheid in 1994 was giving way to the morning – after recognition of the challenge of developing a society wracked by poverty, crime, and a new deadly disease. Roughly a quarter of adults in the country were HIV-positive and everyone was trying to understand why. Gothic rumors swirled in townships and rural areas: AIDS was caused by witchcraft, germ warfare against blacks, or something in the food. President Thabo Mbeki declared that Africans were prone to AIDS because of poverty and malnutrition—in other words, AIDS was one of the many legacies of past oppression by whites. But other observers—including UN officials and journalists—had another theory. They attributed the AIDS epidemic to the subjugation of women in South African society, of which the nation’s high rates of child abuse and rape were symptoms. The baby rape cases bolstered their claims and came to symbolize just how dire the situation was.

Until the furor over Baby Tshepang, rape was not a crime that had aroused much public concern. The vast majority of rape victims in South Africa are not infants, but mature women or teenagers, and most incidents are treated with remarkable indifference. Few cases are reported to the police; if the assault is committed by a boyfriend or husband, it is usually not even considered a crime, and a victim’s screams are usually ignored. Studies show that a large proportion of both men and women in South Africa blame women—not men—for rape. Asked for suggestions about how to reduce the incidence of rape, respondents in another study said that women should be taught how to “dress and behave” and should not be allowed out after seven o’clock at night. One of the reasons rape is so seldom reported is that many women internalize this logic, and fear that if the incident becomes widely known others will wonder what they did to deserve it.

When cases are reported, the authorities often fail to take them seriously. In her 2001 book Proud of Me: Speaking out about Sexual Violence and HIV, South African journalist and activist Charlene Smith describes a scene that defies comment. An eight-year-old girl had been raped in a township near Durban, a large port city on the Indian Ocean. She was taken to a hospital where she lay on a trolley in a corridor for four hours, waiting for someone to examine her. Meanwhile, the rapist, who had been beaten up by a vigilante crowd, was being treated by the district surgeon. Smith was alerted to the case, and after she screamed at the district surgeon over the phone, he agreed to go see the girl. What he did not tell Smith was that he planned to bring the rapist with him to the hospital. The rapist was placed in a wheelchair, and wheeled down the same corridor where the girl was lying. When she saw him, she became so hysterical that any examination became impossible.

In 2000, the Johannesburg police department’s sexual offenses unit had only three officers and they were saddled with 200 new cases a month. As dockets pile up in police stations around the country, many victims are advised to privately negotiate restitution with the alleged rapist’s family. Sometimes the accused make their own arrangements with the police, who will typically “lose” a docket for the equivalent of three American dollars. The conviction rate for reported rapes is about 7%, and most of these cases involve children. Among cases of adult rape, the conviction rate is 1%. “It’s a logic problem,” says Rachel Jewkes, head of the South African Medical Research Council’s Gender and Health Unit. “There is legislation that says rape is illegal, but it is at odds with what a great many people believe to be true.”

But when confronted with the baby rape cases, South Africans could no longer look the other way. Rape is a horrible crime, but the horror of baby rape is naturally of a different order. In early 2002, several journalists—most from Europe and the US—reported that the epidemic of sexual violence was being fueled by a desperate myth: African men believed that raping a virgin would cure them of HIV. One BBC journalist described the Baby Tshepang incident as a typical example of such a “virgin rape myth” case. This is almost certainly false. Before Potse was apprehended, six other men were charged with the crime but were soon released for lack of evidence. One of them said he had heard about the “virgin rape cure” on the radio and the girlfriend of another died, probably of AIDS, shortly after the men were arrested. The BBC journalist put these loose facts together to draw his erroneous conclusion. In fact, these men were absolved of the crime, and there is no evidence that the true assailant—David Potse—raped Baby Tshepang because he thought doing so would cure him of HIV. Indeed, there is no evidence that he was himself HIV-positive, or that if he was, that he knew he was.

The idea that “virgin rape myths” are a significant cause of either child abuse or the spread of AIDS in Africa is itself a myth, perpetuated by stigmatizing attitudes towards people with HIV and racist fears of black sexuality. A similar “myth about a myth” was prevalent in the US during the nineteenth century, when there was widespread panic that the hoards of newly arrived southern and eastern European immigrants were raping virgins to cure themselves of syphilis.

Although some surveys suggest that belief in the “virgin rape” myth is common in South Africa, in only a tiny number of child abuse cases has the accused himself claimed that it was a motivating factor in his crime. A study of child rape cases in Johannesburg found that infection rates among the victims were far lower than would be expected if the children had been targeted by HIV positive men. Very few South African men know their HIV status in any case. The same researchers found that most people who knew about the “virgin rape myth” had read about it in newspapers or heard about it on the radio; none of the respondents in the study knew of a single case in which a child had been raped for that reason. In many traditional African belief systems, sex is held to have a ritualistic, purifying function. “So, if people hear of the myth they may think it sounds as if it could be true,” Jewkes told a reporter in 2002. But this does not mean that people act on it.

Why did David Potse rape Baby Tshepang, if not to cure himself of AIDS? And why is rape so common—and so widely tolerated—in South Africa in general? Outsiders are inclined to see the African men who beat and rape women as out-of-control brutes who heedlessly spread HIV. But studies are finding that violent men are actually enacting a cultural drama that is hundreds, and perhaps thousands of years old. These men are driven by myths, all right, but these are not myths about “virgin rape cures” for HIV. They are far more powerful than that and much harder to dispel. The roots of these myths extend deep in the African past and are finding new life in the upheavals and inequalities of contemporary South African society.

Copyright © by Helen Epstein

Read the rest of this great article here.

Helen Epstein’s insight into the Underground Economy of AIDS

A couple of days ago, I posted a review of a fantastic book by Helen Epstein, The Invisible Cure. I have been following Mrs. Epstein’s work and have found a great essay she wrote for the Virginia Quarterly Review. The theme of this essay was taken up in The Invisible Cure, so this post is more for those of you who haven’t read the book (yet).

The Underground Economy of AIDS

By Helen Epstein

In 2001, a group of scholars at University of California, San Francisco came up with a scheme that they hoped would protect African women from HIV. They had been working in Zimbabwe, a poor, politically troubled nation in Southern Africa, where the epidemic had killed more than a million people over two decades. Virtually everyone in Zimbabwe was aware of AIDS. The country had been exposed to anti-AIDS media campaigns since the 1980s and a school-based AIDS education program since 1994. Nevertheless, by 2001, around a quarter of all Zimbabwean adults were infected with HIV, and the virus was spreading rapidly, especially among teenage girls. It was urgent for researchers like them to come up with a solution.

Their idea seemed simple. For years, UCSF graduate student Megan Dunbar had been interviewing teenage girls living in the slums around Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, and like many AIDS experts, she had come to recognize how the spread of HIV was driven by poverty and by unequal power relations between men and women. Many of the girls told her that they relied on boyfriends for material support. Although few of the girls were truly destitute, Dunbar came to see how their bleak, impoverished lives led them to place great value on the smallest gifts of cash, jewelry, make-up, and clothes. Most of the girls said they had only one sexual partner and were not prostitutes. But the transactional nature of their relationships placed them at very high risk of HIV, because some of their boyfriends were supporting other girlfriends at the same time, and they were thus at high risk of HIV themselves. Some of the girls said they used condoms, but since several of them had been pregnant, they cannot have used them all the time. When Dunbar asked them about the risks they were taking, they said that their economic difficulties were a far greater concern for them than AIDS was.

Dunbar reasoned that helping these young women earn enough money to meet their material needs would protect them from AIDS. Boys could always find odd jobs like running errands or helping out in the bus park, the girls said, but people didn’t hire girls. So Dunbar decided to set up a small loan—or microfinance-program to enable the girls to start their own small businesses. Since the 1970s, similar “microenterprise” programs had helped many poor women around the world gain a degree of financial independence. In some cases researchers had found that women who participate in such programs have fewer children than other women, and those children are healthier. Dunbar wanted to see whether such a program could also help protect young African women from HIV by giving them more personal autonomy and control over their sexual lives so they could assert their rights within relationships and decide for themselves whether to have sex or not, and insist on condom use if they did.

Admittedly, this was not an auspicious time for anyone to start a business in Zimbabwe. The economy was in a dire state, due to a combination of disastrous leadership by the country’s president Robert Mugabe and ruinous advice from foreign creditors such as the IMF and World Bank. The 1990s had seen the closing of numerous factories and the firing of thousands of public sector teachers and health care workers. The poor young women Dunbar wanted to help had few skills; some could barely read. Even in better days, Zimbabwe’s formal economy would have offered them few opportunities. However, the slums around Harare, like those surrounding cities and towns across Africa, were home to a bustling informal economy in which cheap food, clothes, and household products were traded at makeshift markets and among neighbors, relatives, and friends. Millions of poor, unskilled Africans, including women, earn their living in the informal economy, even in relatively wealthy countries like South Africa and Botswana. Dunbar reasoned that with a small amount of capital, girls in the slums of Zimbabwe could do so too.

During the past twenty years, public health and population experts have come to recognize the fundamental links between women’s health and women’s empowerment. Strengthening women’s economic independence has been declared an important HIV prevention strategy by the UN Commission on the Status of Women and by UN Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis. “Finally the world seems to understand that [in Africa] this is a gender-based pandemic,” he said in 2001. “Unless there is recognition that women are most vulnerable . . . and you do something about social and cultural equality for women, you’re never going to defeat this pandemic. This is the fundamental centerpiece of the whole blessed crisis! Men haven’t changed their behavior, so women somehow have to be strengthened to be able to ward off the men.” If Dunbar’s scheme worked, it would provide further confirmation of the strong links between women’s empowerment and AIDS, and provide a remedy as well.

Dunbar’s study was funded by the US National Institutes of Health, a vast organization that spends some $3 billion a year on AIDS research and has a powerful influence on global health policy. It is not surprising that NIH would have looked favorably on Dunbar’s proposal. US foreign policy experts increasingly recognize that gender inequality is not only an injustice in its own right, it also hinders economic development. Women’s labor generates most of the wealth in developing countries, but most of it is unpaid. Microfinance programs bring women into the cash economy, which could help spur economic growth, instill the poor with entrepreneurial habits, and encourage greater understanding of the benefits of free markets.

During the summer of 2004, Dunbar’s program, which was called Shaping the Health of Adolescents in Zimbabwe, or SHAZ, recruited fifty young women aged 16 to 20 from Chitungwiza and Epworth, two slum neighborhoods near Harare. The women were given training in entrepreneurial skills such as making a business plan, identifying markets, and managing finances. The young women also attended a series of workshops in the subject of AIDS prevention that included sessions on sexual relationships, gender inequality, and the use of condoms. In September, each woman chose a business to go into and received a loan of about $150, to be repaid in monthly installments with their profits.

When I arrived in Harare six months later, only 5% of the girls had met their loan repayment targets, one of the worst records of any microfinance project, anywhere in the world. Zambuko Trust, the microfinance agency that administered the loans for SHAZ had actually lost track of nearly half the girls in the program. More worrisome still was that SHAZ seemed to be having the opposite of its intended effect on the young women’s sexual behavior. The researchers had not anticipated that their program to “empower” these poor women was actually placing them right in the path of HIV.

Copyright © by Helen Epstein

Read the rest of this great essay here.

Review: Helen Epstein’s The Invisible Cure

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a review of Stephanie Nolen’s book “28 Stories of AIDS in Africa”. Although no one posted comments on the blog (WHAT am I going to do with y’all?), I did receive a good dozen emails. Some of you had already read the book; many of you went and bought it after reading my review. All of you had questions, some of them entertaining, some quite challenging.

Two of your questions I’d like to address in public.

First of all, I don’t get a cut from Chapters for every book sold because of my reviews. At least, not yet… So please, do feel free to send Chapters an email suggesting they give me a cut or something.

The second question I also often got was what book should one purchase to find out more about the HIV/AIDS pandemic? Well, while there are many great books out there, the one I’d particularly recommend is Helen Epstein’s The Invisible Cure: Why we are losing the fight against AIDS in Africa.

While the title would lead us to believe that the book covers only the African epidemic, Mrs. Epstein leads into the topic by first going over the entire history of HIV/AIDS: what initially made the medical community sit up and take notice, what happened in the gay communities of America and Europe, how and when the virus was identified, the discovery of antiretrovirals and the subsequent decline of AIDS related deaths in rich countries.

Mrs. Epstein then explains why conditions in Africa prevented the successful containment of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and how the virus has spread through the entire population. She also explains some cutting edge public health theories as to why the epidemic is still rampant and current public health interventions aren’t going to resolve the situation.

I didn’t think that a scientifically rigorous book containing this much information about HIV/AIDS could be read so easily – yet this book was just that. Eloquent, rigorously scientific and qui thorough, Mrs. Epstein has managed to write a book that will appeal to both the uninitiated and those already working on the field. While you won’t read much about the current epidemic in the Americas, Europe and in Asia, there are hints that are posted throughout the book; also, the basic knowledge you will gain about HIV/AIDS will help you read other books on the subject.

For those of you who are currently swamped with readings for school or end of year reports for work, you could make do for now with an interview Helen Epstein did about her book. It pretty much is a detailed synopsis of her book. I personally found it a great overview of the book after I read it, but it can also be a great way to introduce yourself to the book before you read it.